Month: November 2009

Conor Friedersdorf recoils from a blogger who views gay unions as "a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment." Rod Dreher agrees with Conor on this point. (It's a garbled version of Robert P. George's and Benedict's attempt to dehumanize and delegitimize sex without reproduction). But Rod's deeper point – and the point of his favored blogger – is not against gays but against Christianists. He finds the Christianist politicization of deep moral questions inconsistent. 

What Rod wants to recover, I think, is the pre-modern notion of obedience to religious authority and its interpretation of "nature" as a basis for modern civil society. It's a version of Alasdair Macintyre's hositility to modernity's philosophical incoherence. But Macintyre was smart enough to recognize that modernity was here to stay and to adopt a Benedictine option in response – of retreat from the world rather than an attempt to mold it in ways that simply will not work without coercion and cruelty and excessive government power.

And the difficulty of both embracing some parts of the modern world, while eschewing others, is evident in our current climate. That's why I favor a religious stance of distance from the world, rather than enmeshment in it and an attempt to control it. One critical thing Jesus taught was that controlling the world is not just impossible but inherently sinful. Our task as Christians is to control no one but ourselves and to love all. Our main weapon must always be example, not control.

Moreover, Christianists cannot both assert a fundamental right to economic and personal freedom and yet also oppose that freedom when it means that women can choose if and when to have children, when it means that gay couples can choose to form build strong and admirable relationships and have children, when it means that straight couples can buy and use contraception, etc. The Christianists are engaging in cafeteria theocracy here. Which is why their obsession with gays and avoidance of so much else does indeed bespeak a form of prejudice against a group of people they barely know or understand but nonetheless scapegoat for much broader social ills.

In other words, Christianists cannot both be pathological consumers of debt and materialism while condemning gay people as a class for the same thing. I see no real distinction between gays and straights on the consumerist, materialist front. And it remains true to my mind that until Christians start condemning the greed and debt and consumerism of the past two decades as morally wrong, they have no standing on other moral questions that are now in play.

On this, Benedict is more consistent than his Protestant and evangelical fellow-travelers in the culture war. But he too is deeply wrong about gay relationships. And he too has wrongly singled them out as emblems of something they are no guiltier of than many of those in Benedict's own ranks.

Dueling encounters:

Close Encounters of the Redneck Kind from Marc Bullard on Vimeo.

A reader writes:

Another viable comparison for Obama is with JFK, and not just for the obvious reasons of youth, attractiveness, charming young family, etc. I think a great reference for reviewing JFK’s performance in office is Robert Dallek’s book, “An Unfinished Life.” He showed that Kennedy had a great capacity for learning, for encouraging if not demanding honest and open debate and more than enough self-confidence to change his mind. Kennedy was also very pragmatic, which made him slow to act in areas such as civil rights. But once Kennedy moved, he moved with confidence and usually with an effective, coherent and convincing message.

Consider the Cuban missile crisis. Yet Kennedy was also somewhat cool and aloof, as I believe is Obama.

But Kennedy found a way to show his humor, often self-deprecating, usually in press conferences. He also presented himself as a father in a way that made him human and attractive to Americans (who, of course, had no clue as to his marital, erm, practices).

I think Obama is much closer to achieving that level of warmth and personable nature than for which he’s given credit. I think his problem is that he can’t find a tool in the mass media that he can use as effectively as Kennedy used press conferences (or FDR used his fireside chats). Things are too diverse and there are too many other avenues through which your opponents can continue to criticize you. I think this will delay his success in “warming up the country” to him but it won’t eliminate it.

I believe in the end, the country will appreciate his seriousness, thoughtfulness and decision making process. If he can show some signs of success (especially in the economy), I think he will easily win a second term and lead the Democratic Party in a successful direction.

Andrew Sprung notes a doctor's bloggy must-read assessment:

Overall, it's promising — as a start. I don't think this will be the end, not by a long shot. A large number of critics claim that the health reform bills do "nothing" to control costs. This is not nothing — not by a long shot. Whether it will work at all, or whether it will do enough are open questions. I also find it interesting that the providers who have been most concerned about the escalation of health care costs (I'm looking at you, Kevin) have not weighed in on this element of reform. As a provider, I have really mixed feelings about the potential for cost containment to (further) erode physician autonomy and to (further) reduce physician income. However, no sane person can look at the rate of medical inflation and not see the burning need for cost containment. I just worry that too much of it will fall on our shoulders, since reining in costs any other way is tricky and politically unpopular.

Kribi, Cameroon, 3.02 pm

A reader writes:

Now that we have the benefit of almost a year of track record,

which you didn't have when you wrote in January, we can say that your headline, at least, was wrong.  Yes, Obama takes a liberal position on some issues.  But he also takes what is, on any reasonable definition of the term, a conservative approach on other issues.  He is, in short, a moderate.

And that, I suspect, is what really frightens the far-right.

Because a political realignment towards the center would be a far greater threat to them than a realignment which went all the way to the left.  After Reagan, the Democrats had to break down and nominate a fairly conservative candidate (Clinton) before they could win an election.  After Obama, the Republicans won't face nominating a liberal candidate, which would be unlikely any time soon.  But they would face having to nominate a moderate candidate — which would mean taking the party out of the control of the would-be theocrats and giving it back to the center-right which controlled it pretty much from 1952-1992. 

And that, in contrast, is a real possibility.

Legalizing medical marijuana is spreading globally as fast as marriage equality.

David Knowles investigates the use of marijuana to treat ADHD:

While [Lester] Grinspoon concedes that the evidence of marijuana’s effectiveness in treating conditions like ADHD is mostly anecdotal, he believes that practitioners would be wise to start listening to the everyday experiences of their patients. “It has been hard to collect hard data because the federal government has, for so long, said, no, marijuana is not a drug.”

[Stephen Hinshaw, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] is intrigued by success stories of patients treating ADHD with marijuana, but he cautions against euphoria in the absence of data. “People with ADHD are terrible at self-reporting, that’s one of the things that characterizes the condition. Still, this is worth looking into. Any hypothesis that adheres to the proper ethical limits is worth investigating.”

A reader notes another drug irony:

Nitro glycerin, the potent explosive, is a common anti-angina med. As Nobel worked on making dynamite, he noticed his chest pain diminished when he handled nitro. Thus one of the most lethal substances became one of the most life preserving.

All we are saying is give research a chance. If that makes me a goddamn hippie, pass the patchouli.

George Packer notices some Obama supporters are feeling down:

The most disappointed people I meet are under thirty, the generation that made the Obama campaign a movement in its early primary months. They spent their entire adult lives under the worst President of our lifetime, they loved Obama because he was new and inspiring, and they felt that replacing the former with the latter would be a national deliverance. They weren’t wrong about that, but the ebbing of grassroots energy once the Obama campaign turned to governing suggests that some of his most enthusiastic backers saw the election as an end in itself. The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because it began and ended with a person, not an issue. And it was unlike ordinary political coalitions because it didn’t have the organizational muscle of voting blocs. The difficulty in sustaining its intensity through the inevitable ups and downs of governing shows the vulnerability in this model of twenty-first-century, Internet-based politics.

Yes and no. The decision for change – deep, real change – is always going to be a different thing than implementing change in a deeply sclerotic system at a moment of simultaneous and paralyzing global crises. The former is inevitably more energizing than the latter. I don't think most under-30s saw the election as an end in itself (although it was more cathartic than most). I do think they are depressed and frustrated at how maddeningly difficult real change is.

But to my mind, the difficulty of the change is not a reason to abandon it.

In some ways, it's a sign that the proposed changes are real. If they weren't real, there would not be such resistance. For me, the critical areas for change were foreign policy, climate change, fiscal responsibility and torture. (Health insurance reform was not one of my top reasons for backing Obama.) In all of these areas, I can see a genuine effort at real change. And I think most Obama supporters see it too. The way Obama has handled Iran and Afghanistan could not be more different than the bravado and bullshit of his predecessor (especially before 2006). The Rove-Cheney mantra that "deficits don't matter" has been finally retired, even by the Republicans. The US government is no longer denying the reality of human-made climate change and, while still a laggard, is no longer a huge obstacle to solving the problem. The United States no longer tortures prisoners and is slowly dismantling the regime that allowed such things at the behest of one unaccountable, all-powerful executive branch. The one-size-fits-all rubric of freedom-or-tyranny is no longer the guiding principle of foreign policy. And next year – in the real test – we will see if Obama is serious about long term fiscal reform.

This is an ocean liner that was boarded by a bunch of insurgents in a dinghy. You can't captain the liner the way you did the dinghy. But if you wonder if the liner has changed direction, look at the apoplexy of the old regime. They're not fools. And they know they're losing.