Month: July 2013

Orcas As Slaves For Entertainment, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

… but, in my view, the captivity and use of any intelligent animal for entertainment will one day be seen as barbaric. It is a violation of the animals’ dignity. While that may not ascend quite to the level of human dignity, it demands that we cease treating our fellow inhabitants of earth as captive slaves.

This is why I have never been comfortable visiting a zoo. No matter how interesting I may find it to see the variety of animal life from diverse locations over the globe, I can’t get past the fact that these animals are imprisoned and forced to live a life in captivity that bears little resemblance to the life they would experience in their natural habitat. Perhaps their lives are easier not having to navigate the world of predators and other threats to life, but who are we to decide what is better for them? It just seems incredibly selfish of the human race to snatch these innocent animals from their normal lives and dump them into one we see fit to create for them, all to give families something to do on weekends.

Another reader:

The NYT’s Dot Earth blog offered a contribution this weekend from animal law Professor David Cassuto, who pretty much nailed the concept of animal personhood and rights. The whole post is worth reading in light of the orcas discussion, but here is the key passage:

Different traits demand different entitlements. Clustering them all beneath the term “personhood” invites imprecision. By contrast, separating the term into components allows the legal system to treat difference differently while still enabling access to the moral community. For example, acknowledging that animals have the right to be free from the grotesque exploitation of the industrial food apparatus does not require that we also grant them the right to vote. “Human” rights are just that. “Animal” rights should be something altogether different. Recognizing species differences need not mean asserting superiority but rather acknowledging and respecting otherness. Thus, replacing personhood with a cluster concept of rights offers a point of embarkation to a more coherent and egalitarian approach to our relationships with the nonhuman world.

Another reader highlights a case in which the captivity of orcas was put to a legal test:

Last year, five orcas sued SeaWorld for holding them as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment ban on slavery. PETA filed the suit on the orcas behalf; the five orcas were the plaintiffs, claiming they “are held in slavery and involuntary servitude.” Unfortunately, it didn’t end well for the orcas:

Before the ruling, PETA’s attorney Jeffrey Kerr told HuffPost that the animal rights group’s argument was based on the belief that “slavery doesn’t depend upon the species of the slave, any more than it depends upon the race, gender or ethnicity of the slave. SeaWorld’s attempts to deny [orcas] the protection solely based on their species is the same kind of prejudice used to justify any enslavement. And prejudice should not be what determines constitutional rights in this country … Because they can suffer from the prohibitive conduct of being enslaved, the 13th Amendment protection against that conduct should be extended to them. …

[U.S. District Judge Jeffrey] Miller praised PETA attorneys for striving to protect orcas, but still found that the 13th Amendment “affords no relief.”

It certainly is unconscionable that 45 orcas are being held captive around the world. We should also keep in mind that tens of billions of other non-human animals are held as slaves in atrocious conditions by the egg, meat, and dairy industries – and we can all easily do something about that: simply boycott those products.

Another reader dissents, questioning the character of orcas:

I understand the arguments against imprisoning intelligent animals for our entertainment and I think they make a lot of good points. However, if orcas do in fact possess an “emotional life” more complicated than humans and therefore we should consider them as essentially people, then they are the worst kind of people. The series Planet Earth has a sequence in which a gang of orcas separate a whale calf from its mother and murder it in front of her. They eat its jawbone and then let the massive corpse fall to the ocean. Their rationale? It was fun. They are violent, psychotic murderers. If we are imprisoning them by keeping them in aquariums, then maybe they deserve it.

Benedict, Francis, And Gays

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI Pays A State Visit To The UK - Day 2

Ross contributes to the debate today, making roughly the same argument as I have but stressing more firmly that there is no actual doctrinal change (and even, according to Ross, no change in the blanket discrimination against gay seminarians). Juan Cole is even more dismissive:

[I]t seems to me that Pope Francis is just saying what many evangelicals say– hate the sin, love the sinner, celibate gays are welcome in the congregation, etc. And he’s putting a further precondition on acceptance, that gays not band together as a pressure group. So they have to be celibate and seen but not heard, sort of like children.

But both Cole and Douthat note a very different change in tone from Benedict’s stern strictures about “objective disorders” to Francis’ expansive “They are our brothers.” So the question becomes: does this tone mean something substantive in the life of the church? Or is it just brilliant spin, decontaminating the brand while upholding its Ratzingerian substance?

Here’s what I would argue: the tone is intimately related to the substance, and the one cannot logically be changed without the other. Which is why this recent statement reveals the incoherent tension at the heart of the church’s teaching about homosexuality – a tension that at some point has to be resolved.

Here’s why. Recall Ratzinger’s central innovation in the argument in 1986:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

What Ratzinger was saying is precisely that, in the case of homosexuals, hating the sin but loving the sinner is not a Catholic option. Because in the case of homosexuals, their sin is integrally related to their very nature, which they cannot change. The part of their nature that is objectively disordered and they cannot change is, moreover, that pertaining to love and sex and family, arguably the very things that make most of us happy. So gay people truly are deformed in the most profound way possible – morally crippled and constrained by their very nature.

Why would Ratzinger have taken that huge and painful leap that is so anathema to the spirit of inclusion in the Gospels? Because in Catholic teaching, acts flow from being. It is absurd in Catholic thought to talk of something in nature that is entirely neutral and yet always leads to an intrinsic moral evil if expressed.

The Inauguration Mass For Pope FrancisTo see why, try and come up with a serious analogy within Catholic theology for the argument that homosexuality as not sinful in itself but is always sinful when expressed. I’ve been trying for twenty years.

Take the sin of envy, for example, which is part of our common human nature and is always a sin when expressed in an act. But it is not a neutral condition, as the 1975 Letter said of homosexuality; it is a sign of our fallen nature. It does not occupy some neutral ground before being expressed. It is part of original sin for all of us.

Or take alcoholism. Some people are alcoholics by nature or genetics, which is why it is hard to describe being an alcoholic as sinful, since it isn’t a choice, like homosexuality. But the choice to drink, like the choice to express love sexually for gay people, is nonetheless a sin for alcoholics. I think this is the best analogy I’ve heard in this long debate. But it falls apart on one obvious ground. Unlike sodomy, drinking itself is not sinful for everyone, according to the Church. For most people, it’s fine. Jesus himself turned water into wine to keep the wedding party going.

But sodomy is barred as sinful for all people, straights as well as gays. The Church does not say, as it does for alcoholism, that it’s fine for lazarusstraight people to have non-procreative sex, but not for gays. It says it’s a sin whether committed by a heterosexual or a homosexual. So again, the teaching on homosexuality appears unique, as if it were an argument designed to buttress a pre-existing prejudice, rather than an argument from the center of the church’s teaching.

So maybe being gay is a form of disability for Benedict. But the church’s teachings about the disabled bear no relation to its teachings about homosexuals. The former are embraced, brought to the front of the church, cared for, defended, championed, as any Christian organization must and should. The latter are silenced, pathologized and told not to be all they can be, and specifically to avoid any expression of love, passion, family or relationship with a partner or spouse, i.e. to live a life of unique isolation and suffering, simply because of who they are. Tim Padgett gets the problem:

How can the Catholic church declare homosexuals “disordered” and their lifestyle an “intrinsic moral evil,” yet expect us to applaud its “love” for gays somewhere beneath all that homophobic bigotry? My mother was born in Mississippi and has often told me of Southern whites in the mid-20th century insisting they could love a black person even if they hated the black race. No, you can’t have it both ways. So it makes no more sense to me in the early 21st century to hear Pope Francis claim to love gays while I know that when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires he called Argentina’s legalization of gay marriage a “grave anthropological regression.” Or to hear celebrity evangelical pastor Rick Warren profess admiration for gay friends but then keep saying that it “might be a sin” for them to sleep with each other.

This is indeed the nub of it. A theologian reader explains why:

What was done by the author(s) of the 1986 document (let us call them Ratzinger, who at least signed it)  was to tie a logical knot that could now work greatly in gays’ favor, if only, as you suggest, some in the press were better able to understand it, and so face down spinning Archbishops such as your own. The knot was to point out that in order for it to be the case that all gay sex is sinful (which is what many Bishops would love to be able to maintain without any logical consequences) then you have to maintain that the condition itself is objectively disordered. This, of course, many Catholic spokespersons try to run away from doing, since many of them know it is false, and not all of them are fully accomplished liars.

But what this means is that if, as appears to be the case, being gay is not an objective disorder then according to the logic proper to Catholic faith, which recognizes that acts flow from being, it is also not the case that all gay sex is sinful. Ratzinger was logically correct that the absolute prohibition against loving same-sex acts cannot be maintained if it is accepted that the inclination is “neutral or positive” to use the language rejected by the 1975 document you refer to.

What the 1986 document bequeathed to us (apart from a huge amount of pain, anguish, and despair) was not only a mistaken characterization, but a logical recognition that if the characterization is mistaken, then so is the absolute prohibition. This is the double bind that most Bishops dance around, and are allowed to dance around by a press that imagines “Church teaching” in this area to be a special category, the rules of a private club, and not a matter which depends quite simply on what is true about the human beings in question.

I hope and pray that Papa Bergoglio knows where he’s taking this. Which means I hope and pray that he, unlike so many of his colleagues, is not stuck in the double-bind, and thus will be able to unbind us all into living the truth, which is what Popes are for.

I hope so too. The Catholic faith is one designed to be examined by reason. Yet reason reveals that its core teaching on homosexuality requires it to describe an entire class of people as inherent moral deviants, regardless of what they do or say or how they live their lives. That final assertion is simply incompatible with reason and with Christianity. At some point, it will collapse. And with it, the entire edifice of the tortured teachings on sex that the Catholic hierarchy is so desperate to maintain.

I doubt Pope Francis is doing this consciously or as a means to bring the Church to its senses on this question. But his expression of Christian love and charity toward gay people is a direct rebuke of the doctrines he says he still supports. And at some point, what cannot be logically sustained will fall.

(Photos: Pope Benedict XVI, Franciscans arriving for the inaugural mass for Pope Francis, and the Jacob Epstein’s statue of Lazarus in New College, Oxford. By Getty Images.)

Manning Dodges A Bullet, Ctd

John Judis isn’t celebrating the verdict, despite Manning’s acquittal for the most serious charge of “aiding the enemy”:

The trial itself should never have taken place.  The military should have accepted Manning’s admission of guilt last February. In my opinion, he had already served long enough, and suffered sufficiently under brutal conditions, to pay for violating his trust as a soldier in military intelligence. But the military might still have exacted a few more years of confinement in a plea bargain. Instead, they sought to stage a show trial. The case they made that Manning had aided the enemy—replete with doctored quotations from emails—would have made Roger Ailes blush. But perhaps they knew what they were doing all along. By focusing attention on the truly horrific charge, they convinced the judge to support a charge that was merely god awful.

Burt Likko predicts that if Manning was as justified as his supporters claim, he can expect a pardon:

Manning, along with his spiritual cohort Edward Snowden, almost certainly had sober and significant moral and legal concerns about things they saw the government was doing, about the reach of the security state in terms of both its intrusiveness and its lack of meaningful checks and controls. The public may very well benefit from their exposure of what the security state was doing in the form of the creation of some sort of meaningful controls and balancing of individual privacy rights against (or, as I prefer to say, “with”) the need to keep the nation secure and at peace.

So if the public has benefitted from these violation of the law, that is one of the reasons that executives have the power to grant clemency. If Bradley Manning can demonstrate that the nation has tangibly benefitted from his data dump to Wikileaks, then the place to argue that is not in a court-martial, which is charged with determining the truth of whether a particular law was violated. The place to argue that is in a request for a commutation of sentence or a pardon, addressed to the President of the United States.

Like Judis, David Harriss Gershon believes Manning has already served enough prison time:

Seriously, I don’t want to hear any lectures about how Manning deserves this time because he “broke the law.” If he had illegally tortured Guantanamo detainees for the CIA, or even orchestrated such torture programs – illegal per U.S. and international law – he could very well have been promoted, if not left alone. The Manning verdict’s central message, aside from this obvious hypocrisy and the injustices underlying it, is this: if you are a whistleblower in this country, do what Edward Snowden did (and what Daniel Ellsberg suggests): flee America, and fast.

The sentencing for Manning begins today and Kevin Gosztola is live-blogging.

Are Movie Theaters Fading? Ctd

Hollywood screenwriter and director Paul Schrader revives a Dish thread:

Films were never communal just because people wanted a communal experience‒it just happened to be the economic model that made the most sense. You could sell a lot of tickets and show the film at the same time to everyone. On a nickelodeon, of course, which predated movie theaters, only one person could watch the movie at a time. Nobody said, ‘We want to sit in a hot room together!’ That’s just how it was. But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. You know, this myth that people will always want to go out to the movies, they’ll always want a communal experience‒I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. … I always prefer to go to an empty theater‒I’d rather go to an eleven o’clock matinee than an eight o’clock show, so I don’t have to be there with all those people. The seats are uncomfortable, when there’s lots of people there you can’t get up so easily, so I prefer to go with less people there.

Many readers know my thoughts on this:

I’ve effectively stopped “going to” the movies, because TVs are as good, if not as giant, and because I don’t like crowds, can stop the movie at home to take a pee or grab some munchies, and rewind parts I didn’t quite catch.

Tina And Sally vs Dicks, Ctd

Readers sound off on this post:

I hesitate to comment when you’re in such high dudgeon, but I’d like to point out that Tina cerneabbas.jpgBrown (who should be able to write more clearly) probably wasn’t referring to Weiner’s adulterywhen she called his behavior “dickmanship.” What she meant washis highly reckless behavior in continuing to send dick pix after his resignation and grand public mea culpa. And while it’s not equivalent by orders of magnitude, the recklessness of the banker, the ship captain and the train engineer was probably what led to those tragedies.

As for Brown tarring the entire gender, I don’t agree with that, either. I know many men who find Weiner’s behavior deeply dishonorable. But I am hard-pressed to come up with examples of “consequences be damned, the rules don’t apply to me” recklessness among women (except Sarah Palin, where it’s arguably part of her act). I guess what I’m saying is, not all men engage in “dickmanship,” but those who do are almost always men.  And when you’re a woman, it’s hard not to attribute it to the male sense of entitlement we deal with every day.

Another female reader differs:

The diatribes by these two (and I will admit that I enjoyed Tina’s) are a very stark example of why “feminism” is dying out. Young women see the entire picture, see the role of women in all these scandals (not as victims, but generally as willing partners) and don’t engage in general male-bashing. The old school paradigm of woman as victim and the man as complete dick just doesn’t work for most women under 45. And thank goodness for that.

I enjoyed Tina’s a lot too. I wish she’d write more. Another woman:

Waitwaitwait, just wait a minute. There’s a lot going on here, and you might be conflating some slightly related topics that might not all be totally related.

I’m with you on the whole “Clinton-people-throwing-stones-from-their-own-glass-houses” thing. It’s outrageous, and yes, another reason to pray that Hillary finds something else to do with her golden years, and take Bill with her. Yes, both Tina and Sally are overwrought and judgy and, maybe, shrill. Yes, really, it’s not our business.

But you, as a male (gay/straight, no matter), have stumbled upon a little truth nugget that gets laughs sometimes, but may be more true than you know: Women (even professional journalists) quite often think men are dumb – like, really stupid, led-around-by-their-peckers dumb. As in George Carlin’s “Women are crazy, men are stupid, and women are crazy because men are stupid.”

A while back there was some conversation about why much more Dish readers are male than female. This might be one of those times when having a better grasp of, not only the female psyche, but, maybe even female life experience could help you.

I saw it as soon as I started reading the piece – the underlying eye roll that ALL women have adopted after living life with fathers and husbands and pushy bosses and wolf-whistles on sidewalks. It’s not just powerful men seeking more power. Working in a blue-collar environment, I can tell you, there are eye rolls in abundance from the girls whenever certain men walk by (waaaay too much testosterone going on with that one). I remember seeing interviews of transsexuals who went from male to female, and didn’t realize how much more empowered they were as males, just by virtue of being male. There is a difference in how you experience the world, and how the world experiences you.

So when Anthony Weiner shows us who he is (again), all we girls can do is the eye roll and ask “Jesus, this shit, again?” So there is a backstory here that, you must remember, is most likely the backstory of a majority of women. Sorry, but the very fact that you have a dick can make you dumb. Sometimes your testosterone is charming. But not always. “Being guilty of being online while male.” Hello? Dumb.

A male reader:

I hope this post develops into a conversation. The demonization of heterosexual male sexuality is one of the larger taboos in our culture.

There is a great scene in Before Midnight where Ethan Hawke talks about hating a man for his sexual drive is like hating a frog for being green.  It is possible to say this while also saying that you value your own, and even other people’s, personal commitments. It is a matter of recognizing what is the case about common patterns of normal heterosexual male sexuality and simultaneously assessing one’s valuation of one’s own, and possibly other people’s, personal sexual commitments.  The degree to which you value those commitments seems to be better formed if it’s grounded in an honest  understanding of heterosexual male sexuality.   This doesn’t excuse anything; it places a proper degree of valuation on the matter.

(Photo: a view of a part of the chalk figure at Cerne Abbas in England.)

Weiner, Sharks, Balls, Jumping, Etc

At this point, I’m afraid, I am reduced to giggles. This is his campaign spokesperson’s idea of how to react to a former intern blowing smoke in a tabloid:

“And then like she had the fucking balls to like trash me in the paper. And be like, ‘His communications director was last the press secretary of the Department of Education in New Jersey. You know what? Fuck you, you little cunt. I’m not joking, I am going to sue her.”

I’m just trying to imagine TPM reporter Hunter Walker’s face as he heard this on the phone. Good times.

So, yes, regardless of any of the merits of the debate about sexting and adultery and double standards, we now have ourselves a fantastic shit-show on our media hands. Which requires that I note the top three comments from MrHippity on the Gawker page which features the unpixellated photos of the member from Brooklyn:

I didn’t look very hard at these pics. I just took a quick glans.

I thought these new dick pics would be like his earlier ones, but there’s a vas deferens.

I didn’t have to look at them, of course. Nobody was foreskin me to do it or anything.

Get your popcorn out front.

Reading Your Way Out Of The Closet

Gregory Wazowicz and Christopher Richards recently asked a number of gay writers “what books spoke to them when they were coming out, asserting their identities, or putting a name to their desires.” Jesse Bering’s choice:

George Santayana’s semi-autobiographical The Last Puritan played some role in my decision to kick the closet door off its hinges once and for all. I was about 21, and I’d already come out to my family and some close friends. But I was a sad case—I was living an ascetic scholarly lifestyle and throwing myself into my graduate studies to somehow cultivate the illusion that I was ‘above’ sex. I saw aspects of myself in the character of Oliver Alden (in fact, I even faintly resembled the black-and-white etching of him on the jacket cover). And it really wasn’t a flattering sight. I found it irritating how Oliver was sublimating his obvious homosexuality in lofty philosophical abstractions. Santayana would allude to Oliver’s same-sex desires repeatedly in the narrative, but he refused to come out and say it. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Oliver, just come out already and get some action!’ I found his sexual cowardice—which was in fact a reflection of Santayana’s own—so pathetic and disturbing that it made me reexamine my own erotic austerity.

Related Dish on Christopher Bram’s history of gay literature in America here.