Month: December 2008

Chris Crain sees reason for hope at the Human Rights Campaign. I don’t.

Coronado Island, California, 3.15 pm.

There was a certain amount of unnecessary condescension toward fundamentalists in Lisa Miller’s essay on the Christian case for marriage equality. But the spluttering anger of the responses struck me as excessive. Larison oozes contempt for Jon Meacham in ways that seem intended to miss Meacham’s point. The essence of fundamentalism is not, it seems to me, the assertion that Christ is the same “yesterday, today and forever” (I believe the same and my faith is anti-fundamentalist); it is the assertion that every single aspect in the bewilderingly expansive and contradictory and over-determined texts we call the Bible are literally true in every particular and every injunction should be applied today as literally as possible. This crude recourse to Biblical authority, without any larger theological argument, is what Meacham is rightly complaining about. Larison agrees, in fact, when you read his full post. He notes that it is simply impossible to deduce one simple meaning from the Bible on most complicated current issues. The texts have

a richness and depth that cannot be exhausted by one kind of interpretation alone.

So a vast document that has only a handful of opaque references to sex between two heterosexuals of the same gender and no concept of homosexuality as such requires interpretation. We cannot resolve this issue by the plain meaning of the text alone. The minute we do this reduction – with, say, the Leviticus proscriptions – we are required to explain further why the prohibition of eating shell-fish is no longer operable. And an attempt to insist on the eternal, literal authority of Scripture with respect to marriage in churches that accept divorce – plainly and clearly ruled illicit by Jesus himself – reveals the deep intellectual confusion among the fundamentalists.

Larison knows all this, which is why he, in fact, does not resort to Scripture, but smuggles in natural law, to make his case:

In a fallen world, everyone has a predisposition to act contrary to our true nature, but in no other case that I can think of do we pretend that indulging such a predisposition is inevitable, much less something to be embraced and approved.

My italics. The root of Larison’s argument here is a Thomist assertion that homosexuality is actually an "objective disorder" contrary to our "true nature." By marrying the man I love, I am, according to Larison, violating my true nature. We are all defined as heterosexuals in this universe, and heterosexuality is defined primarily by sex acts that cannot ever be divorced from reproduction.

This concept of nature is, however, itself divorced from modern science – which finds that same-sex orientation is close to universal among all natural species and that sexual orientation is far deeper and broader than sex acts – and rests on medieval conceptions of the teleology of sex. I deal with these natural law arguments at great length on homosexuality in Virtually Normal, and on abortion and end-of-life issues in The Conservative Soul. From a Catholic perspective, I am forced to respond that these neo-Thomist assertions about "our true nature" are philosophically circular, incompatible with the vast increase in our knowledge of human psychology and sexuality and evolution over the last two centuries, and have ended up marginalizing a small minority of humans as the one true symbol of moral righteousness.

None of this advances caritas or veritas. And in the end, a Christianity resistant to truth and terrified of love is the real objective disorder.

I tried to avoid too much news last week but should say I found the Blagoyevich story as rich as most people seemed to. I will not, however, express shock, for that would be silly. And frankly, I don’t see the connection to Obama or the inevitable "distraction" not being guilty of anything requires in media-land. Meanwhile, Christopher Buckley captures the core truth:

Thank heavens Mr. Fitzgerald has given us another juicy political crisis to keep our mind off bailouts, the greatest economic crisis since the depression, and our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For a minute there, it looked we were might have to concentrate on The Big Picture. How much more diverting to focus on the villainy of a potty-mouthed Illinois pol. He manages to make Rahm Emmanuel sound like an altar boy.

Gates puts the world on notice as the transition approaches:

Mr. Gates, who was speaking at a conference on regional security, said that Mr. Obama and his advisers had done more extensive planning across the government for the transition than at any time he could remember and asserted that they would therefore be prepared from their first day in office. Mr. Gates, who is staying on as defense secretary, has worked for seven presidents; Mr. Obama will be his eighth. “So anyone who thought that the upcoming months might present opportunities to ‘test’ the new president would be sorely mistaken,” Mr. Gates said at the conference. “President Obama and his national security team, myself included, will be ready to defend the interests of the United States and our friends and allies from the moment he takes office on Jan. 20.”

My thanks to Patrick and Chris for their work this past week. As the Dish has evolved at the Atlantic, I’ve been lucky to nurture a team who know what this blog is about as deeply as you and I do, and being able to leave it in their hands and know it will probably be better in my absence is what my shrink would call "a gain." After eight years of Dishing, I know my work is done when my Number Two tears me a new asshole while I’m away. It’s the way we roll. Speaking of which …

By Patrick Appel

Andrew is due back tomorrow. As always, I’ve had a fabulous time guest-blogging for him. Chris is right that the Dish’s catbird seat makes one feel like a kitten running on a slide, but it’s a great gig and I thank Andrew for trusting me with the reins. Blogging this week wouldn’t have been nearly as enjoyable without readers’ e-mails and tips. Many thanks to everyone who wrote in. Even greater thanks to Chris, who managed to do a remarkable amount of posting while also working his regular job at the Hotline and battling a cold.

Lastly – for the record – my natural blogging environment is much closer to this than this.

by Chris Bodenner
Alvaro Vargas Llosa reviews "Slumdog Millionaire" (already getting Oscar buzz):

Latin American soap operas and oldish Indian melodramas have many things in common. One of them is a fascination with victimhood and a redistributionist idea of wealth…. By contrast, the hero of "Slumdog Millionaire" never complains, never suggests that others owe him something, never envies what he sees. And he is relentless in his determination to go on, and on. Every little victory–and the final prize, which is not the money–is the result of ingenuity meeting opportunity.

Unlike so many tales of the developing world in which a character’s identity is often expressed through groups–social, political, religious–that find themselves at the losing end of society, this one reminds us … that every identity is profoundly individual and that destiny is what you aim for, not what you wait for.

Coates joins the debate:

As Hayes, reminds us, we should be skeptical of those who make a fetish of pragmatism. The scariest thing, to me, about Barack Obama’s cabinet is that many of the people who are saluting him, the ones celebrating his "pragmatism" and alleged rejection of the nutty left, are the same people who were dead wrong about the greatest foreign policy question of our era. That’s just a feeling, but it’s the reason why I get so vexed over reporters parroting the talking points of any administration. Our job is to think, to question–not to babble on about the latest cute handle Obama has awarded to his cabinet.

Larison is also sees the false promise of pragmatism:

Professing pragmatism is to say that you do not intend to attempt significant change in the structures or practices of government. In the context of this so-called pragmatic “center,” what we might call left and right-leaning instincts are usually a matter of emphasis and style. The “center” defines itself as non-ideological, and insists on identifying anything outside of the narrow band of the consensus as ideological, when this is not the case. This is how “centrists” can wink and nod at torture and support illegal surveillance and aggressive warfare while successfully defining opponents of the same as an ideological “fringe,” and it is how violating other states’ sovereignty and trashing constitutional protections are the serious, responsible positions that only “extremists” would question: whichever positions are taken up by “centrists” (i.e., those who enforce the consensus) are automatically defined as the pragmatic, non-ideological, problem-solving positions.