Month: April 2007

A domestic partnership bill passes – with more rights and responsibilities for gay couples. There are several models unfolding across America. We have one state with real marriage rights (but no federal recognition). We have several other states with full civil or spousal unions that are identical to civil marriage in all but name. We have several more states where weaker civil unions and domestic partnerships exist. Then we have many where gay couples have no rights at all. And we have Virginia, which has constitutionally declared gay people in relationships as second-class citizens (that’s where Mary Cheney and her wife and forthcoming child live). Within a few years, we’ll begin to see what all this means, whether civil marriage collapses or declines in gay-inclusive states or recovers in states where stigmatizing gays has been deemed an incentive for straight couples to stay together. I have a feeling the impact on the general population will be minimal in most cases. The point of persecuting minorities is very often the persecution of minorities. It has no other effect. And it really isn’t intended to.

It shouldn’t be an issue for him – and it seems very shrewd to tackle it early and head-on. I must say, though, that the unbridled enthusiasm for Thompson on the right strikes me as more of a sign of the inadequacies of the present field than of the actual merits of Thompson. Conservatives, moreover, should not be looking for saviors. They should be looking for prudence and competence, for a change.

… with a technical difficulty.

Gob-smackingly so, of late. Pious doesn’t quite capture the guy’s preening vacuousness. Dean Barnett has just dug up the latest gem by Williams about the blogosphere:

"You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years."

You looking at me? You looking at me? I wouldn’t mess with Vinny, would you?

I mentioned Rick Hertzberg’s dogged, Jack-Russell-like refusal to let go of the electoral college as an anachronism. Here are two pieces by him on that theme – here (go to final graf if the rest too boring) and here. I’ve never known someone as urbane and easy-going as Rick get so animated by something as dry as the electoral college. But that’s what makes him Rick: unlike me, he’s passionate about democracy. (I tend to get more passionate about liberty, and constitutional restraints, but all former TNR editors are weird in their own ways.)

A self-indulgence: a 1910 map from the Boston Public Library that allows you to navigate from street to street and wharf to wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I think I’ve made out the wharf I live on each summer. But a lot has changed since 1910. Except everything, of course.

The Bush administration doesn’t quite realize it yet, but the president and vice-president will, in the future, become moral pariahs to a lot of people. Not pariah in the sense of Clinton, whose sexual addiction evokes both pity and anger that he kept lying about it. And not pariah in the sense of Nixon, who committed a crime against his opponents, his office and the constitution. What the revulsion of Brigham Young students – yes, Brigham Young students – suggests is that for many of the next generation of natural Republican supporters, Bush and Cheney are moral pariahs. Their wartime deceptions, their skewing of intelligence to suit their preferences, their authorization of torture, their renditions policy, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a bungled war, their warrant-free wiretaping: all of it combines to give us quotes like this from a devout Mormon student:

"The problem is this is a morally dubious man," said Andrew Christensen, a 22-year-old Republican from Salt Lake City [of Dick Cheney]. "It’s challenging the morality and integrity of this institution."

As Dan Drezner points out, the Bush administration cannot get leading figures in the military to take over the job of a new war czar, and West Point is seeing a sharp spike in graduates leaving the military altogether. When a Republican administration has lost Mormons and the military, you know it’s entering the twilight zone of collapse. I wonder if Bush or Cheney are even capable of understanding that – or the reputation that will cling to them for the rest of their lives.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

"All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. "For who hath known the mind of the Lord?" asked Paul of the Romans. "How unsearchable are His judgments, and His was past finding out." "It is the glory of God," said Solomon, "to conceal a thing." "Clouds and darkness," said David, "are around Him." "No man," said the Preacher, "can find out the work of God." … The difference between religions is a difference in their relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all," – H. L. Mencken.

Another take.

A reader writes:

I’ve been catching glimpses of your conversation with Sam Harris. But what’s caught my eye have been the e-mails from your detractors like this one and this one and this one. The last one in particular, which asks,

"Do you think God knows that you won’t have very good answers to the points Sam Harris brings up at the end of his last reply?"

got me thinking that this obsession with "good answers" points to something close to the heart of this frustration with faith, something you touched on in your last post to Sam – the concept of mystery.  Not the Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-a-candlestick kind of mystery, but the awe-and-humility-before-truths-and-experiences-greater-than- we-are-and-deeper-than-we-can-grasp kind of mystery. Seekers like you and I aren’t afraid of it, and find our lives are invigorated by it. Some, however, seem allergic to it.

But why is it so hard to embrace mystery? It is so tightly woven into our human experience.  The search for answers to even the most basic questions about ourselves can take us to unplumbed depths of the unknown:  Who am I? Not my name, not what I do, but who am I? What do I want? Why do I love this person? What is the meaning of this experience? Try to really answer these questions, really answer them, and you inevitably run up against the unknown. And the unknown only grows and multiplies when we ask the even bigger questions that reach beyond ourselves: Where did I come from? Why am I here?

Maybe this is the fundamental disconnect between believers and non-believers – that the latter insist on answers, and if the answer appeals in any way to mystery, then the answer must be wrong. But practical human experience shows us that mystery is all around us, and that answers to even the simplest questions often cannot be found or must bow, at least somewhat, to mystery – not as a cop-out or a catch-all explanation, but as a humble acceptance of the limitations of human understanding and the possibility that the answers are more than we can know. 

Sometimes, instead of finding answers, we just have to live the questions. And we do. We all do. Every day. This is the real world and our experience of it: no matter how much we know, most of the important stuff is steeped in mystery. Strange that some athiests, who fashion themselves realists, cannot accept that simple reality.

This reality is, in my view, the core basis of all true religious faith and the only solid philosophical foundation for political conservatism. It’s also why I find agnosticism far more persuasive than atheism.