Month: April 2009

I posted on it yesterday here. But the full interview – by the indispensable Johann Hari – is here. In it, the new Catholic convert tackles the Pope's ancient bigotry toward gay people.

A reader writes:

My generation (I am 23) sees conservatives railing against homosexuality and we see stupid, shallow arguments like NR's thrown around with utter disregard for their cost in human lives and human deaths, and we want to distance ourselves with all deliberate speed from the people who make those sloppy arguments and the movements who smile upon them.

My generation does not view homosexuality as a condition to be confronted or thwarted or weakened–we view it as just a thing that people are. Like many other things people are, like being blonde or tall or selfish or fat or brilliant, homosexuality carries baggage and preconceived notions that people believe or reject, but at this point it probably wouldn't even matter to my generation if homosexuality were a choice. As a whole, we know that it is a waste of our collective breath to hold homosexuals in disdain in much the same way it is a waste to hold in disdain any demographic we live with. But we know that it is not a waste of our breath to confront those who, in the midst of their second or third marriages, speak with smug self-satisfaction about the meaninglessness of the committed relationships of our siblings and cousins and friends.

As someone who is young, and whose family is very religious, same-sex marriage is as much an issue of public respect for those I love as it is a moral or religious matter. The fact that it is good public policy is secondary to the reality that it is the right thing to embrace.

Steve Waldman defends himself.

A classic piece from Esquire – and a fore-runner of the Dish series on the cannabis closet.

John Hoblo whacks that NR editorial:

What do the editors, and Gallagher, really think? The ick argument, I’ll wager. They want to stop same-sex marriage as a way of sending a message of ‘ick’ to gays, and about gays. But they also don’t want to be labeled homophobes. That is, although saying ‘gay marriage shouldn’t be allowed because I believe gay sex is icky’ is actually a less terrible argument than anything they’ve got – hey, it’s not flagrantly internally incoherent, it’s basically honest (I’ll wager), and who doesn’t believe that on some level people steer, morally, by emotional attraction-repulsion drive? – it’s considered embarrassing. (Homophobia: the yuck that dare not speak its name.) And, even if it weren’t embarrassing, it’s obviously not strong enough in the current environment. So what do you do? You end up thoughtlessly backing into something that’s frankly orders of magnitude worse than just saying gay sex is icky. Namely, gays are un-persons, so far as the state is concerned.

My thoughts here and here.

Larison, making sense:

If the GOP is to have any chance of reviving anytime soon, it will be by peeling off disillusioned and dissatisfied Obama supporters. Even if Obama were driving people away (so far, there is little evidence for this), the GOP still has to be able to attract them. At present, the GOP’s powers of repulsion remain far greater. So far, everything the GOP has been doing in Congress and in the media has reinforced all the habits that have pushed so many people into Obama’s arms. Shouting fascism and tyranny in ever-louder voices is not going to change this pattern, but will probably ensure that it keeps getting worse for Republicans.

Ryan Sager's new neuroscience blog (an idea whose time has surely come) cites a fascinating study on how strongly we react to torture. A lot of it depends on who is being tortured – and people with brown skins, beards and funny names don't fare so well:

“Pursuing moral outrage: Anger at torture,” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (PDF here; HTML here), looked at people’s responses to fictional accounts of torture (presented as actual news reports of torture), one scenario featuring a U.S. Marine being tortured by Iraqi insurgents and the other featuring a Sri Lankan soldier being tortured by Tamil rebels. The results were stark, if not entirely unexpected given what we know about human nature.

While the participants in the study (48 psychology students at the University of Kansas) rated both the torture of the U.S. Marine and the Sri Lankan soldier as morally wrong (around a 7 in both cases, on a scale from 1-9, with nine being totally immoral), the level of anger they reported in response to the two scenarios was wildly divergent. Basically, the torture of the U.S. Marine made them angry (a 4 on a scale of 1-7), while the torture of a Sri Lankan soldier was of less concern (a 2 on a scale of 1-7).

You'd be amazed by what's actually in it.

The Heritage Foundation wants to you be completely terrified:

I'll wait for video.

(hat tip: Wonkette)

Hilzoy has a stellar post responding to William Galston over Rawls:

…there is nothing particularly odd about a political philosopher being concerned with the question: how can we construct a community within which all persons can flourish? That's (one way to take) one of the central questions of political philosophy. However, defining Christianity as centrally concerned with the construction of community is not, to my mind, an obvious move. (Love, yes; the nature of community, no.) What's striking about the thesis, besides the cast of Rawls' mind and the glimpses of his twenty-odd year old self, is not how Christian his later work was (it isn't), but how very Rawlsian his take on Christianity is.

Further thoughts from Ezra Klein.