Month: June 2011

“They are twisting [Obama's] words. They want to move Jewish votes from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party,” – billionaire pro-Israel fundraiser, Haim Saban, on neocon attempts to promote lies about Obama's support for Israel.

He had no issue with the substance of Obama's speech, used by the Netanyahu government and its media representatives in the US, to stigmatize the US president as anti-Israel. He had some questions about form and timing. Money quote:

“I don’t have a problem with that statement,” Saban said. “Obama didn’t call for the return to 1967 borders. He said on the basis of 1967 with land swaps, which by definition means not 1967 borders.”

Douthat pushes back against Kevin Drum:

If Drum had, let’s say, a middle-aged friend confined to a wheelchair by an accident who had spent a few years battling waves of entirely-understandable despair over his condition, and a “merciful” Swiss clinician then prescribed that friend a fatal dose of sodium pentobarbital (after subjecting him to a battery of “common sense” psychological evaluations, of course), would he see no non-religious grounds on which to describe that doctor as a murderer?

Jacob Sullum goes further than Drum and defends the $60 suicide kits Sharlotte Hydorn was selling online. Sullum argues that suicide "is not a medical procedure, and doctors have no special expertise to determine when it is the right choice."

Timothy Kincaid recommends "Raising my Rainbow", a blog about "raising a slightly effeminate, possibly gay, totally fabulous son.” From a recent post:

Do you think that it is possible for a homosexual person to not have to come out of the closet.  I don’t mean stay closeted for always and ever.  I mean never even enter the closet.  For instance, I’ve asked my oldest son if he thinks anybody in his class is cute.  I’m careful how I phrase it.  I don’t ask if he thinks any of the girls are cute.  I leave it open so that he can answer honestly.  Do you think an LGBT youth could grow up and never step foot in the closet (at least with immediate family), thus making the coming out process (with the immediate family) obsolete?  Can a family be so okay with homosexuality that, say, a fifth grade boy could tell his mom very comfortably that the boy in class in a Chargers jersey and still outgrowing his baby fat (or Baby Phat, who knows) is totes amazeballs?

My response: yes, it's possible. It's happening in more cases than in the past and parents aren't always panicking. It's important to remember though that not all gay men begin as effeminate boys, and that all effeminate boys do not become gay men. It seems to me that the point of the gay rights movement should not be to posit the need to be gay, or straight, or trans, or to hoist one model of how to be gay.

The point of the gay rights movement is to allow more people to be themselves. Which also makes it a liberation movement for straight people too.

Yes, kids need to be taught manners and ethics and virtues and vices. But they should never, in my view, be corralled into being a different personality or character than the one they were born with. In some ways, this is a core freedom. And, to my mind, allowing uniqueness to flourish reflects a true reverence for the mystery and pied beauty of God's creation.

A reader writes:

Palinization is all well and good, but it's made up! And there's no need to go that route when there's a real "Palin-" word that gets pretty close to the former half-term governor's media presence:

palinopsia [pal?in-op´se-ah] visual perseveration; the pathologic continuance or recurrence of a visual sensation after the stimulus is gone.

Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. Or as my neuroscience professor puts it: A condition in which a "previously viewed object reappears sporadically."

Another reader follows up:

Your reader wrote: "In Ancient Greek, 'palin' means 'again,' or 'once more.'" They're correct, but there's more. When used to refer to place, it means "back" or "backwards".  More charitably for the image Palin is trying to sell, it was often used with the verb "dounai" (Ancient Greek for "to give"), meaning "to restore".

Another:

"Palin" literally means something closer to "backwards" (as in "palindrome" or "palinode").  I've always found that deliciously apt.

Todi, Italy, 6.33 am

A reader writes:

So far I've followed every single post on this issue and have yet to read the word "hospice." My wife is a hospice social worker, and has been one for over ten years. Most people in hospice are against assisted suicide because they know death doesn't have to be bad. The whole point of hospice is to make sure people die not only with dignity but also with a minimum of pain and discomfort, even though they die naturally, rather than through assisted suicide.

It would be nice to have hospice be a part of this thread, because surely other people will email once you mention hospice, and we could learn a lot more – as we always do when the Dish raises issues.

Another reader is already on the ball:

As a hospital chaplain, I can tell Douthat that every hospital, including Roman Catholic hospitals I have worked at, has programs in place that, while studiously avoiding any term that implies assisted suicide, are essentially just that.

In many places it is called "Comfort Care". Comfort Care patients are terminally ill and have DNRs [Do Not Resuscitate]. They are provided hydration, pain medication, O2 therapy, and given medications that they can tolerate taking. We do what we can to make them comfortable until they pass. There is no CPR, no intubation, no defibrillation, and no code medication. And frequently, almost invariably, morphine is administered in very large quantities. It can be argued that the morphine greatly, and mercifully, accelerates death.

I have been present at many deaths. Some people, because of religious views, or sadly because of the views of their families, choose to fight until the end. Some of these deaths have been blessed experiences for the patient, the family, and for me. Others have been horribly gut-wrenching and left everyone involved shaken and disturbed. I have experienced the same thing with people on Comfort Care (but with far less of the gut-wrenching).

Ross Douthat can comfortably conflate Jack Kevorkian and the merciful practices that hospitals practice to relieve indescribable agony. However, he does so from the perspective of a healthy person who reflexively falls back on his theological black-and-white view of reality. He needs to volunteer at a hospice, not to spread his views, but to see some of the gray areas that face people with terminal diseases.

Could the story be a hoax?

NPR’s Andy Carvin and the New York Times’ Lede blog raised questions over Ms. [Amina Abdallah] Araf’s circumstances, as nobody has been able to verify that they have in fact met Ms. Araf in person and that she is in fact behind the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus.”

And that photo we posted yesterday isn't Amina after all:

The photos are of Jelena Lecic, who lives in London, according to publicist, Julius Just. A press release he distributed includes a photo of a woman who he says is Ms. Lecic, who appears to be the same woman in the photos accompanying stories about Ms. Araf. Mr. Just said Ms. Lecic’s ex-husband contacted him when he saw that the photos circulating of Ms. Araf were in fact of his ex-wife.

"I don’t worry about [how my support for civil unions will hurt me in the GOP primary] at all, because I am who I am. I have certain beliefs and I don’t hide from those. … It is what it is, and I’m not going to change it. I believe in traditional marriage but I think, subordinate to that, we’ve done an inadequate job in the area of equality and reciprocal beneficiary rights. Some people will hold that against me, like maybe other issues. But I think some people will say, ‘That sounds right to me. That sounds fair,'" – Jon Huntsman.

This, by the way, was always one of my fears: that in the battle for marriage equality, some moderate Republican or conservative Democrat with clout would simply say – give them civil unions. If he or she had done that, the marriage movement might have been stopped dead. Instead, the GOP was so hostile to gay relationships – for fundamentalist reasons – that they had to ban any kind of legal protection and the Dems were so pathetic and cowardly they wouldn't back civil unions until marriage equality had gotten momentum. Huntsman was the pragmatic moderate that could have defused the issue – but also consigned gay people to second-class status, for a while at least.

But to Huntsman's credit, he is the only Republican able to talk about gay people as if we weren't inherently suspect, suspiciously immoral and a vague threat to society. He is not in thrall to fundamentalist panic. Which is why he gives me hope for a saner, calmer, more realistic conservatism, and why this time, I'm afraid, his prospects are rather grim.

It will get worse before it gets better.

One little aspect of Sarah Palin's let's say "instability" is her view that any questions asked of her or of any other Republican (and no, Greta van Susteren is not a member of the press when interviewing Palin, she is a p.r. consultant) are "gotcha questions." NYMag has assembled a slide-show of those questions. Here's a brief list:

1. "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

2. "So we do cross-border, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan, you think?"

3. "What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this, to stay informed and to understand the world?"

4. "What have you seen so far today, and what are you going to take away from your visit?"

Palin had answers to all these, but felt restrained to utter them. The true answers were

1. What?

2. Sure.

3. Just Alaskan stuff and blogs about me.

4. It's a great coach.