Month: February 2007

A reader eloquently described his own faith in a humanist Jesus here. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whose magazine I now work, wrote something similar. Money quote:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

A challenging thought for Ash Wednesday.

A reader writes:

AAARHG! That snake picture needs to disappear. That’s the most provocative thing I’ve seen on your weblog since the beginning, and I don’t like it one bit. Intellectual challenges are fine, but…snakes in the nose cross the boundaries. I had never even HEARD of or imagined such a thing…and now, for the rest of my life, I will have to deal with the nightmares!

And I was on your side…

They’re worthy blog-fodder:

I broke my six-year-old’s favorite egg cup. This was not good. I was trying really hard at breakfast. I had scrambled some eggs for one of them, boiled an egg for another, made porridge on request, fed the baby, spread three different flavour jams (pear and raspberry, raspberry and strawberry) in stripes on one piece of bread. I had not laid down silent on the crumb-strewn floor. I remained upright and mobile at all times. Then I broke the egg cup.

Technically, the baby broke it, but really it was me because I said to my eldest: "She’ll be fine with it, don’t be silly" when she grabbed it and he wanted to take it back from her. She looked straight into my eyes to thank me for my trust in her, slowly opened her porridgy fingers and dropped it. The cup, last year’s gift from the Easter Bunny, smashed leaving a yellow spotted cheetah holding nothing but disappointment in his arms. My six-year-old gulped, he folded his arms together, laid them on the table and buried his head in them. The despair I think was half because of the egg-cup and half because of me. My four-year-old came over. He laid a consoling little hand on his brother’s heaving back. "Never mind," he said, "you can share my lion."

If you have not made "Wife In The North" a favorite of yours, you really should. And on the subject of infants, here’s another personal post on the subject from a blog well worth checking out, Liberal Catholic News.

Alicia Colon writes in the New York Sun:

The total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133. This is tragic, as are all deaths due to war, and we are facing a cowardly enemy unlike any other in our past that hides behind innocent citizens. Each death is blazoned in the headlines of newspapers and Internet sites. What is never compared is the number of military deaths during the Clinton administration: 1,245 in 1993; 1,109 in 1994; 1,055 in 1995; 1,008 in 1996. That’s 4,417 deaths in peacetime but, of course, who’s counting?

Were these deaths because of natural causes? Or accidents? Is there an intellectually honest defense of this paragraph? Or has the New York Sun lost its mind?

A reader writes:

I think you left out an important clause in your statement today about the gay rights movement pre-Stonewall. Perhaps it would be most complete if you had said:  "…there was a vital gay rights movement not coopted by the far left or by the Democratic Party fundraising machine, and one not yet driven by torch and pickfork from the ranks of Republicans."

I don’t pretend to believe that the Republican party ever welcomed or even exhibited ambivalence toward gays and lesbians being among them. However, from my experience, I believe many more gay Americans today would be Republican if the party were not antagonistic toward them and returned to its core conservative philosophy (as opposed to the religious dogma it follow currently).  I likely would, if Republicans made effort to earn my trust.

There are so many reasons why gay people might vote Republican if the GOP were a conservative party and not a religious one. Small government, individual freedom, low taxes, strong defense: these are values shared by many gay Americans. Personal responsibility is also one of them. When I think of a gay person who lives responsibly, saves his or her money, goes to church, contributes to charity and settles down in a stable relationship, I think: conservative. When such a couple wants to get married, I think: conservative. When such a person decides to serve his country in the military, I think: conservative. But the new Republican base sees all this and thinks: evil. It didn’t have to end this way. But it has. The GOP won a couple of elections with the help of it. They have won a generation’s contempt as well.

A reader writes:

I know you don’t consider yourself a PC liberal. But you sound more and more like one.

The word "bigotry" is bandied about your blog so much and so inconsistently that I have no idea what it means anymore. I know it is at the heart of who you are as a homosexual activist (and you clearly are one, though you do, to your credit, disagree with the more shrill activists out there) and therefore the first arrow in your rhetorical quiver, but you are seriously overusing the term and seeing the sickness of bigotry in far too many places.

Mitt Romney is an "anti-atheist bigot"? So a person of faith can’t state that he or she thinks that a person of faith is best suited for office? Really? It’s just plain silly to even get upset over this and it is a sign of neurosis IMO to call it bigotry.

But that seems to be your plan these days. Steyn’s an anti-Muslim genocidal bigot.  Romney’s a bigot. Practically every Christian that does not share your mushy Christian views is a anti-homosexual bigot. And on and on. It is getting to be too much. You can’t seem to disagree with anyone without eventually calling them a bigot. Right out of the old liberal/leftie playbook. That’s disappointing because you are way better than that.

Let me respond. Romney first. He said "We need to have a person of faith lead the country." That’s a clear view that only someone of religious faith should become president. If he had said "we need a Protestant to lead the country," would it have been bigotry? Surely it would be. Ask a few Catholics and Jews if you need confirmation. So what’s the difference? Using someone’s personal religious convictions as a criterion for public office, and disqualifying those who do not share certain convictions, is indeed bigotry. Just because a certain form of bigotry is popular doesn’t make it right. Atheism is no more and no less an existential decision than faith. America is dedicated to religious freedom, which means and must mean the right not to believe in anything. Romney has shown he does not share this view of America. His view is that atheists should not be president. He played that card as a way to ingratiate himself with Christians who do not share his Mormon faith. It was a card from the bottom of the deck.

Steyn? Well, I didn’t call him a bigot. So the point is silly. But he did write somewhat breezily of the option of "culling" large numbers of people solely on the basis of their faith. I dunno. What do you think? 

He was against them before he was for them. Or did I get that wrong? It’s hard to keep track.

Not 1994 – 2002. He’s pro-choice. Five years ago. I repeat: five years ago. Money quote:

I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose.

Listen to him refuse to acknowledge that he even accepted an endorsement from a pro-life group:

(Hat tip: Hotline.) Notice that Romney talks warmly of the "courage" of a woman to have an abortion.

Oxford-style debate comes to America. Yay! And this one you can listen to online, with luminaries such as Alan Wolfe, Bill Galston, Barry Lynn, Susan Jacoby and Jean Bethke Elshtain who gets tghe money quote:

"One should not, from any direction, separate America’s citizens who accept a secular world from those, the religious, who alleged do not. Citizens of religious commitment are among the most enthusiastic supporters of a secular government. They don’t want established religion, but they also understand that to support a secular government and state does not commit us to a thoroughly secularized society, shorn of religious voices, symbols, activities and commitments. We would be a greatly impoverished country were this to come to pass. So too damned religious? Nope. Just pretty damned American…."

There she is, at the front of the picket line in front of the White House way back in 1965. Before Stonewall, there was a vital gay rights movement not coopted by the far left or by the Democratic Party fundraising machine. Frank Kameny, another of the key founders of the movement, remembers Gittings (AP obit here) who died Sunday thus:

I will miss Barbara keenly She was a truly valued and cherished colleague, associate, and friend — one of a kind in my own life. We were in close, continuing, and cooperative contact, mutully supportively and enormously productively for both of us individually and for the world around us, from the early 1960s until the very present. She was my co-council at Pentagon security clearance cases, worked closely and extensively with me in the psychiatric effort, cooperated in writing published articles and chapters and in joint speaking engagements where we complimented and supplemented each other nicely — and a fellow picketer and demonstrator.

When I look at Gittings’ successors, in particular the waste of time, money and space that is the Human Rights Campaign, I remember a time when gay activism had integrity and courage.