Author: Andrew Sullivan

“Here’s the question I ask of these right-to-lifers, including Vatican bishops: as we enter into Holy Week and we proclaim that death is not triumphant and that with the power of resurrection and the glory of Easter we have the triumph of Christ over death, what are they talking about by presenting death as an unmitigated evil? It doesn’t fit Christian context. Richard McCormick, who was the great Catholic moral theologian of the last 25 years, wrote a brilliant article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1974 called “To Save or Let Die.” He said there are two great heresies in our age (and heresy is a strong word in theology – these are false doctrines). One is that life is an absolute good and the other is that death is an absolute evil. We believe that life was created and is a good, but a limited good. Therefore the obligation to sustain it is a limited one. The parameters that mark off those limits are your capacities to function as a human.” – Jesuit theologian Rev John J. Paris, on how the religious right is deploying heresy in its absolutism in the Terri Schiavo case. I couldn’t agree more. What some of these people are about is not respect for life, but its fetishization.

Another calm and decent column from William F. Buckley Jr. When you read him – an unimpeachable source for what was once the conservative movement – you begin to realize what a crew of zealots and charlatans now occupy the conservative pedestal. But they will fall soon enough. And the hysteria they are now creating will only accelerate their collapse.

I just heard Terri Schiavo’s brother say on CNN that his sister is speaking to him. What did she say? Or is he lying?

The anti-American bigotry still manages to shock.

My take on all the emerging contradictions in the Sunday Times.

THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP II: It’s been a fascinating few days, watching today’s Republicans grapple with their own internal contradictions. It’s been clear now for a while that the religious right controls the base of the Republican party, and that fiscal left-liberals control its spending policy. That’s how you develop a platform that supports massive increases in debt and amending the Constitution for religious right social policy objectives. But the Schiavo case is breaking new ground. For the religious right, states’ rights are only valid if they do not contradict religious teaching. So a state court’s ruling on, say, marriage rights or the right to die, or medical marijuana, must be over-ruled – either by the intervention of the federal Congress or by removing the authority of judges to rule in such cases, or by a Constitutional amendment. Fred Barnes, a born-again Christian conservative makes the point succinctly here:

True, there is an arguable federalism issue: whether taking the issue out of a state’s jurisdiction is constitutional. But it pales in comparison with the moral issue.

You can’t have a clearer statement of the fact that religious right morality trumps constitutional due process. Of course it does. The religious right recognizes one ultimate authority: their view of God. The constitution is only valid in so far as it reflects His holy law. Robert George, the recent recipient of $250,000 from the Bradley Foundation, makes the point more subtly here:

I am not impressed by appeals to “federalism” to protect the decisions of state court judges who usurp the authority of democratically constituted state legislative bodies by interpreting statutes beyond recognition or by invalidating state laws or the actions of state officials in the absence of any remotely plausible argument rooted in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the state or federal constitution. The fact is that, under color of law, Michael Schiavo is seeking to deprive Terri of sustenance because of her disability. Under federal civil-rights statutes, this raises a substantial issue. It cannot be waved away by invoking states’ rights.

The first point seems to me to be blather. The Florida courts have clearly wrestled with this issue many, many times. I haven’t seen an argument that they are behaving outrageously beyond the bounds of their legitimate authority in a very complex case. And George’s appeal to “civil rights” depends, of course, on what you mean by “civil rights.” Where gays are concerned, George’s belief is that gays have no fundamental civil rights with respect to marriage or even private consensual sex. George even believes that the government has a legitimate interest in passing laws that affect masturbation. But when he can purloin the rhetoric of “civil rights” to advance his own big government moralism, he will. The case also highlights – in another wonderful irony – how religious right morality even trumps civil marriage. It is simply amazing to hear the advocates of the inviolability of the heterosexual civil marital bond deny Terri Schiavo’s legal husband the right to decide his wife’s fate, when she cannot decide it for herself. Again, the demands of the religious right pre-empt constitutionalism, federalism, and even the integrity of the family. When conservatism means breaking up the civil bond between a man and his wife, you know it has ceased to be conservative. But we have known that for a long time now. Conservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “We like to think faith is the Viagra of the people,” – British Baptist minister, Steve Chalk.

Just after St Patrick’s Day, we find that the Catholic diocese of San Diego has refused to bury a bar-owner for fear of public scandal. Back in the land of my grandmother, Ireland, bar-owners would be given more lavish funerals than others. What’s going on? The guy was gay. I know of no conceivable theological reason to deny someone a funeral on those grounds. Just bigotry. In a Church that knows better.

So it is now the federal government’s role to micro-manage baseball and to prevent a single Florida woman who is trapped in a living hell from dying with dignity. We’re getting to the point when conservatism has become a political philosophy that believes that government – at the most distant level – has the right to intervene in almost anything to achieve the right solution. Today’s conservatism is becoming yesterday’s liberalism.

iPOD THEREFORE iAM: A smart retort to my little essay on iPod culture. Money quote:

[W]hat’s wrong with a little narrowcasting, anyway? Social life is a difficult thing — fraught with awkwardness, quirky taboos, the fear of rejection, and the discomfort of confrontation. The unfamiliar and the unexpected can stimulate but they can also exasperate — and exacerbate ill will. We surround ourselves with the familiar and unthreatening precisely because ordinary life is threatening enough, even within the confines of the familiar. To be sure, a select few will always strive to broaden their cultural horizons — but then, a belief in the value of broadened cultural horizons is itself a cultural position, and a surprisingly comfortable one at that.
The question is not whether we will narrowcast our lives. The question is how to create a broadcast society out of narrowcast people.

I don’t disagree with that. In my piece, I readily confessed to loving my iPod and to the pleasures of choosing rather than serendipity. My point is that we are gaining but also losing. I’m no Luddite. Far from it. But I think you can enjoy technology’s advances, which are often also advances of individual freedom, while having ambivalent feelings about what we also leave behind.

THE CONSCIENCE CAUCUS: I’m going to take a page from Josh Marshall and start citing prominent or even not prominent conservatives who are actually addressing the scandal of torture as government policy rather than acquiesce in or actively support it. Jeff Jacoby has another column worth reading. I see now that Porter Goss will not deny that the CIA has deployed illegal methods of torture in the last three years. I am relieved – but not reassured – that he says it’s no longer going on.

REPEAL THE MEDICARE ENTITLEMENT: It’s the only course for fiscal sanity, if we want to avoid tax hikes (and I do).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It takes one’s breath away to watch feminist women at work. At the same time that they denounce traditional stereotypes they conform to them. If at the back of your sexist mind you think that women are emotional, you listen agape as professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT comes out with the threat that she will be sick if she has to hear too much of what she doesn’t agree with. If you think women are suggestible, you hear it said that the mere suggestion of an innate inequality in women will keep them from stirring themselves to excel. While denouncing the feminine mystique, feminists behave as if they were devoted to it. They are women who assert their independence but still depend on men to keep women secure and comfortable while admiring their independence. Even in the gender-neutral society, men are expected by feminists to open doors for women. If men do not, they are intimidating women.” – the inimitable Harvey Mansfield, in the Weekly Standard.

Here’s a moving video of Brett Parson, a great D.C. cop who acts as a liaison to the gay and lesbian community, talking about the awful murder last night of one of his colleagues. Brett’s a good friend (we had lunch Monday). My heart goes out to him. When I think of the future of gay America, I think of people like Brett, working their hearts out, serving their community, standing up for their dignity and the rights of others like him. And may his colleague, Wanda Alston, who also represented that future, rest in peace.

“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.” – Ronald Reagan. Ah, those were the days. (Hat tip: Pejman).

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Too many Democrats portray the rest of the world as just a bunch of misunderstood bunny rabbits who misunderstand us.” – Les Gelb, Wall Street Journal, yesterday.

NRO’S ARGUMENT: Here’s an argument made against the logic of Judge Richard Kramer’s decision in California:

Under any set of marriage laws, the fit between the laws’ purpose and the eligibility criteria they establish will be somewhat loose. Are the laws there to promote loving relationships? Well, the law doesn’t require that the partners in a marriage love each other. Do they promote the formation of stable households where the partners look out for each other? Well, not every married couple lives together, and it is an “obvious social reality” that not every cohabiting couple is married. This kind of pseudo-rationalism would undermine any marriage law at all.

The reason this doesn’t persuade me is that no one is using any of these actual, not-always-present aspects of civil marriage to deny anyone’s right to marry. No one, so far as I know, is saying that we should bar couples from civil marriages because they are not in love or not cohabiting or any other criterion. But they are saying that couples who do not or cannot procreate should be barred from marriage – on those grounds alone. All Kramer is saying is that current marriage laws have no such exception, and that using that exception to exclude one group of non-procreative couples (the gay ones) rather than another non-procreative group (the straight ones) makes no logical sense. Especially when many lesbian (and some gay ones) marriages have biological children, and some strraight ones have adopted kids. How does NRO defend that distinction?

Anne Applebaum leaves the posturing pseudo-feminist in the dust.