Month: March 2010

A reader writes:

As interesting as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic example is, a better one would be the primarily Lebanese Maronite Church.  This is an Eastern Rite member of the Roman Catholic family which has never had an Orthodox branch, and has always been doctrinally correct.  Of course, as you might expect, in the American Maronite Church, priests are not allowed to marry.  But in Lebanon, it is estimated that at least half of the priests are married.

Another writes:

Given the stance of the religious right to consider natural law when thinking through first principles, doesn't that mean that celibacy is equivalent to the "perverse" they're trying to argue against? Who can claim celibacy is natural? If we were just as craven as they, couldn't we start pushing the view that the Church has *caused* the child predators in their midst by enforcing an "unnatural" lifestyle?

Finally, the silence breaks – with a link to the Vatican press release on the NYT story. Yes, a Vatican press release. It's like reading Jackson Diehl on Israel.

Hmmm. I have no idea, do you? But here's a Nexis story from the WaPo in 1994 that helps provide some historical context:

On the map, Maale Adumim is a settlement built on West Bank land that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. But for Raanan, it is not. "It is Jerusalem," she said. Raanan is at the vanguard of a long-planned and ambitious drive by Israel to fortify the area around Jerusalem with expanded Jewish settlements. While the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has curbed settlement building elsewhere in the West Bank, the vision of a "Greater Jerusalem" – a buffer zone of Jewish habitation around the city – is coming closer to reality every day.

Nah that couldn't be it, could it? From another WaPo piece in 2004:

Israel is close to finishing a decades-long effort to surround Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, walls, fences and roads that will severely restrict Palestinian access to the city and could reduce the chance of its becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, according to documents, maps and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and foreign diplomats.

… Projects to cut off access to Jerusalem to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which borders the city on three sides, have accelerated since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Today, Jewish settlements outside the city have been integrated with the urban core, redrawing the map of Jerusalem and complicating any negotiations over its future and the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli and Palestinian experts say. 

The web of projects includes 13 settlements to the north of the city that are being linked with each other and with Jerusalem by access roads that act as physical barriers to Palestinian communities. To the east, Israel has approved expansion of the West Bank's largest settlement, Maleh Adumim, to absorb a swath of Palestinian land between the community and East Jerusalem. To the south, access and bypass roads and Jewish settlements have carved Palestinian lands into a checkerboard…

Avraham Duvdevani, head of the settlement unit of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), which implements the Israeli government's settlement program in the West Bank, said that the aim was to consolidate the capital of the Jewish state. "It's been the formal policy of all governments in Israel that Jerusalem will not be discussed or divided — Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, to stay undivided forever," Duvdevani said. "Because of that, it was very easy to get permission from the minister of defense and the governments to build settlements that strengthened Jerusalem as the capital and the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and that blocked the option of the Palestinians to build in and near Jerusalem."

Ivins, Utah, 7.28 am

In the wake of Google's decision to stop censoring their search engine in China, co-founder Sergey Brin both called on the US government to fight Chinese censorship and called out Microsoft for continuing to censor. Danny Sullivan cries hypocrisy:

I then asked Drummond about something that has always puzzled me. If the original occasion for the shift of policy was (as generally reported) a hacking episode, why did it lead to a change in the censorship policy? What's the logical connection? He explained the reasoning in a way I hadn't seen before.

His partial reply:

[The hacking] was almost singularly focused on getting into Gmail accounts specifically of human rights activists, inside China or outside. They tried to do that through Google systems that thwarted them. On top of that, there were separate attacks, many of them, on individual Gmail users who were political activists inside and outside China. There were political aspects to these hacking attacks that were quite unusual. ?That was distasteful to us. It seemed to us that this was all part of an overall system bent on suppressing expression, whether it was by controlling internet search results or trying to surveil activists.

“Yes, I am quite a conservative bloke. I do have a traditional background but it doesn’t mean I’m incapable of understanding the complexity of modern life," – Australian Opposition leader and devout Catholic Tony Abbott, voicing his support for same-sex unions.

Ambinder reports.

One litmus test of mine is to see whether a story on the front pages of every global newspaper is being discussed at National Review Online. Sure enough: not a word that I can find. When NRO cannot defend the Benedict hierarchy, it's totally serious. And I'm totally serial about that.

A reader writes:

You say you're tired of the kind of calculations that say Dan Choi chaining himself to the gates was a bad choice.  Andrew, aren't you the guy who advocates for gays to explain that they are "virtually normal" – that they deserve the same rights as everybody else, because outside the bedroom they're the same as everybody else?  The best way to advocate for the rights Dan Choi deserves is for him to stand up and speak to people, in Congress, in public – to show them he's just as good as anyone so that folks, no matter where they're from, can understand the depth of the injustice done to him.  Chaining yourself to a gate isn't relatable; it's a stunt.

Another writes:

You, HRC, Dan are already converts. He deserves to be treated as the competent soldier he always was, and to do less is to violate his dignity, the dignity of the military, the dignity of this country. Yet he presented the image of a soldier hanging on a fence. In uniform. It fed every argument made by the opposition to his argument – that gay soldiers don't uphold the dignity of the military. It was a bassackward move on his part. Well meant, done from understandable passion and it took guts. But all it did was let a gay guy hang the revered uniform of the US military on a fence like some rainbow flag. That's how it will play to the opposition. That's who you're trying to defeat. Right?

Another:

With DADT in its last year, Choi is young enough to wait it out and be welcomed back to his honorable service when it is gone. I would not and do not expect that to be the case now that he has used the uniform in this stunt. Our military’s tradition is to stay out of the streets and political passions, and Choi has to be very aware his actions last week would be frowned on as unprofessional in the eyes of the officers he professes to want to rejoin. Not long ago you had stories that conveyed the attitude of many gay service members who want to stay away from gay activism and politics and only want to serve quietly but free of the fear of a career ending incident such as the outing of the Air Force sergeant in Iowa. This stunt was the opposite of that desire.

I too am a gay veteran, one whose service spanned the time before and after DADT came into effect. The military was the career I had dreamed of growing up, but the service ironically instilled in me the maturity and self-confidence to embrace my sexual orientation and chose to voluntarily leave the service at the end of my commitment rather than serve in the closet. The impending repeal comes achingly close after I have become too old to return to the career I had wanted. It is incredibly frustrating to see Choi choose throw away the chance to return to a respected career for a little melodrama and personal fame that will not influence the outcome of this debate.

Well his "stunt" certainly isn't impeding progress on DADT.