Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ramesh Ponnuru is concerned that Orrin Hatch is going to produce a new and tough-as-nails hate crimes statute to appease the Congressional Black Caucus. Ramesh is right to be dismayed. The idiot-right actually believes that the way to win over minorities is not to rid itself of prejudice and promote good conservative principles for all Americans. It believes that you have to adopt left-liberal panaceas to brandish as innoculation against the charge of bigotry. This was Lott’s farewell gambit. Now it’s Hatch’s. But this particular ploy won’t even achieve the results Hatch wants. Why? Because Hatch’s proposal will go out of its way to exclude gays from federal hate crimes protection. Here’s a simple question to those conservatives who support hate-crime laws for blacks but not for gays. (That includes the president.) What’s your rationale? Let’s say you’re an orthodox fundamentalist who believes that gay sex is immoral. I don’t agree with you (gay sex can be moral and immoral, like all sex), but let’s concede that this can be a sincere moral position. How do you get from that to saying that gays – uniquely – should be excluded from protection from hate crimes? Isn’t your official position that you hate the sin, not the sinner? Isn’t it wrong – on Christian grounds – to say that somehow violence against one group is less worrisome than against another? Isn’t it a violation of Biblical principles to condone any bigotry accompanied by violence – bigotry not based on a position on a sexual act but on a person’s simple identity? Gays, after all, are one of the social groups most vulnerable to hate-filled physical attacks in our society. By saying that every other group deserves protection, except this one, is, to my mind, prima facie evidence of anti-gay animus. Again, this has nothing to do with the morality of gay sex. The average thug doesn’t walk down the street, see a lonely homo and think, “I need to reassert the importance of procreation as essential to an ordered society.” He thinks: “Fucking faggot. Let’s kick some pansy-ass.” Hatch wants to say that someone motivated in this fashion is somehow less reprehensible than someone who wants to attack someone because he’s Jewish or black or white. I want to say: is Hatch kidding? How low does he think gay people are in the social order that it’s okay to send a signal that demonizing and loathing them is somehow less problematic than demonizing and loathing other groups?

PRINCIPLES, INDEED: It seems to me there are two defensible positions on hate crimes laws. One is that they are all pernicious, illiberal, incoherent and should be abolished (that would be mine). The other is that they have merit and should protect any minority from being physically attacked. (A third is to oppose them all in principle, but if they’re are practically unavoidable, to make sure they are fairly applied. That’s my default position.) The one stance that makes no sense – a stance that can only be explained by pure prejudice – is that some beleaguered groups deserve protection but that others – gays – somehow don’t. Hatch’s proposal – and president Bush’s current position – is therefore text-book prejudice. You can’t be a compassionate conservative and send a public message that you think gay-bashing is not as big a deal as black-bashing or Jew-bashing. Or you can – and show yourself to be barely indistinguishable from a man, Trent Lott, you just spent a great deal of effort condemning.

Can you imagine the fuss if an art exhibit removed a controversial work because it offended Christians? But if it might offend Muslims, they pull the plug. The threat of violence works, you see. And some liberal art-curators are only too keen to buckle under.

ANOTHER BLOGGER GETS THE BOOT: Awful news from England’s Sword, Iain Murray. He just got fired from his day job for blogging. And that’s his sole source of income. (All I got was an entry on the Raines blacklist.) You can give him moral or other support here.

“ANTI-CHOICE”: “You complain about the “constant use of the term ‘anti-choice'” by the pro-choice left. Well, you are anti-choice when you take choice away from people, that’s just basic English. That you have a moral (or legal) basis for taking those choices away doesn’t get you out from under that basic description; that’s part of where the rhetorical power of the term comes from, i.e., truth. In contrast, the left is correct to chafe against the term “pro-abortion” assigned to them by the right, because the left’s efforts do not have an increasing abortion rate as their goal, but rather the widest possible protection of an person’s autonomy as embodied in law. We can all disagree about how broad those protections should be, but the pro-choice movement is quite improperly labeled “pro-abortion.” – more dissent on the Letters Page.

“Our Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law. Yet we know that our society has not fully achieved that ideal. Racial prejudice is a reality in America. It hurts many of our citizens. As a nation, as a government, as individuals, we must be vigilant in responding to prejudice wherever we find it. Yet, as we work to address the wrong of racial prejudice, we must not use means that create another wrong, and thus perpetuate our divisions.” – president Bush today. Another defining moment separating his conservatism from his father’s. Now to find a way to improve high-school education to make real diversity, based on true merit, a possibility.

A terrific pro-war liberal blog.

FROM THE ID OF THE LEFT: Just a selection from the dozens of emails I’ve gotten outraged at my criticism of Sheryl Crow. Here’s one:

Who the hell are you? NOBODY!!!!! Never heard of you. And I am sure the only way you can get any attention is by insulting someone who stands up for what she believes in. She, on the other hand, has everything on the line by speaking up for what she believes. I admire her so much for her courage and was a fan before, but now I am an enormous fan and you can go back to the rock you crawled out from, probably never to be heard from again (hopefully) and look for someone else to attack. Bye Bye!!! – A Proud Democrat who is Ashamed of the United States of America.

There you have it. Ashamed of the U.S.A. And proudly a Democrat! Then there’s:

Stop using your paleolithic brain dead labels to attempt a smear job on everybody who doesn’t adhere to your own knee jerk, fascist, fanatical vision of a Jew World Order.

Jew World Order. From the progressive movement, no less. And it’s a meme:

The people you are supporting don’t fight for the American way. Your republican party has been hijacked by extreme Zionists and Oil murderers. If your writing copy for murders then you have no soul. Have fun in hell.

Proof that homophobia is also alive and well on the left is one of my daily lessons (you should read the intray on a regular basis). But here are a couple of missives in the last few hours:

You sound like an elitist old queen gossiping in a tea circle.

And my favorite:

Keep up the good work, you are disgracing and discrediting yourself, no need for anyone else to, it’s as obvious as the stretchmarks on your anus as you’re bent over in a bathhouse, dumbass.

And then, of course:

AIDS dementia striking again??

Yep, the internet is full of nutcases and hatemongers. And I’m not saying these emails tell you anything that significant about the left in general. But its pretense at being morally superior – while it harbors anti-Semites, homophobes and hate-mongers who would be just as at home on the far right – is wearing a little thin, don’t you think?

From Berkeley no less:

Here’s how some liberals reason: The US has no right to defend itself, because the Republicans, and most Americans, are just so tacky and vulgar, not at all like us. I got news for Joan Didion. In politics irony is the first principle. Those tacky middle Americans are right on subjects like welfare and education and national defense, and the hip and the chic and the stylish are utterly clueless. For years I, like the Didiot, assumed that being a liberal just comes with being a cultured and educated person. It took the deaths of 4 thousand Americans for me to see just how wrong that assumption was. Liberals? Hello? Those bastards are trying to kill us! Andrew, the whole dance of white guilt and victimologist whining that dominates liberal politics just makes me physically ill. I live in the world capital of that syndrome and I grow more angry and disgusted every day.

Don’t worry, bud. They’re sinking.

To Pete Townshend’s pre-arrest anguish over pedophilia. Or this one.

Tony Blair’s defiant and inspiring refusal to appease Saddam or to minimize the risk of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction is beginning to have an effect. Check out this classic Guardian piece by Martin Kettle. It basically concedes the argument:

Most serious people will probably accept, separately, these three grim propositions: first, that we face an undefeated terrorist force which will take any opportunity to kill as many of us as possible at any time; second, that Saddam’s Iraq will develop any lethal weapons that it can and will use, or threaten to use, them if it possesses them; and, third, that our future security depends, among other things, on doing everything we sensibly can to prevent terrorists from acquiring lethal weapons of the kind which Iraq and others possess or would like to possess.

This is progress. It also means that one liberal writer in the Guardian has come to the conclusion that vast swathes of the anti-war left are simply not serious people. He’s right. Then the catch. Washington, according to Kettle, isn’t engaged in this strategy:

Washington’s attention is not on al-Qaida, as the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Richard Myers, admitted recently. On proliferation issues, the administration’s conscious rejection of multilateral approaches on everything from nuclear missiles to handguns is a given. The Middle East peace process is parked well off the highway, and America seems incapable of rational discussion of its own relationship with Israel. The drive against Iraq now has little context other than itself.

This strikes me as a very weak argument. What evidence is there that the U.S. is no longer serious about al Qaeda? Why would it even be in Bush’s interest to ignore it? On proliferation, the administration’s intent in North Korea (even if one disagrees about methods) couldn’t be clearer. And Israel? Why is that relevant here? The good news from this piece is that finally – finally! – some people on the left seem to have grasped that the Saddam-al Qaeda combination is simply something no sane Western government can tolerate. The mere possibility of it should be enough to stir action. But the loathing of Bush and American power then clouds the judgment. But why should it? If Blair is right, shouldn’t the Brits be begging the U.S. to wage war on their and Europe’s behalf? Shouldn’t the Germans and French as well? There comes a point at which anti-Americanism is also anti-Europeanism, in as much as it threatens the security and future of all of Europe. I hope it doesn’t take a calamity before the Europeans understand this.

Here’s a piece that surely deserves wider attention. It’s by Pete Townshend (although I have no independent corroboration, it seems convincingly by him to me) and seems genuinely concerned about child porn. I’m not sure it completely exonerates Townshend, but it certainly adds support for the notion that his case may be a complex one and his self-defense may be true. It ends thus:

The subconscious mind is deeply damaged and indelibly scarred by the sight of such images. I can assure everyone reading this that if they go off in pursuit of images of paedophilic rape they will find them. I urge them not to try. I pray too that they don’t happen upon such images as did I, by accident. If they do they may like me become so enraged and disturbed that their dreams are forever haunted.

Circumstantial evidence, paranoia, denial, and as so often before with Le Carre, pathological hatred of America.

Like many people, I’ve long since given up on reading most of the editorials in the New York Times. Unlike those in the Washington Post, they don’t seem designed to persuade anyone. They posture and preen and pronounce. But they don;t seem intended to engage. Last Sunday’s, however, stood out for its shrillness. I’m not the only one to notice this, but it’s been bugging me in an inchoate way all week. Entitled “The War Against Women,” the editorial is a hysterical attempt to assert that the Bush administration harbors contempt for women as a group of people, and wants to eviscerate their rights and standing before the law. Does anyone not on the far left think the administration’s motives are as simple and malevolent as that? Almost the entire thrust of the screed, however, is directed to the subject of abortion and the Bush administration’s modest moves to tighten government support for abortion and limit some of the more extreme examples of it. With the exception of the attempt to ban partial birth abortion, a barbaric practice that appears to be on the rise, I’m actually quite sympathetic to the Times’ substantive position. It’s dismaying to see the White House sign onto the far right’s propaganda campaign against condoms, and to favor ineffective abstinence programs at the expense of sensible sex education. But after a perusal of the Times’ rhetoric, it’s hard not to leap to the administration’s defense.

“ANTI-CHOICE”: On abortion itself, any objective view would find that women themselves are conflicted about the subject, as any human being should be. To frame this debate, then, as something as violent as a “war” against all women is simply boilerplate. Worse, it seems cribbed almost verbatim from Planned Parenthood’s activist hype. The notion that Roe vs Wade is on the brink of extinction is also, by any reasonable measure, hyperbole. It’s about as settled a part of constitutional law as you can imagine. Then there’s the constant use of the term “anti-choice.” Politics is strewn on all sides by this kind of sloganeering and you can see the rhetorical pleasure it must provide. But as a tool of persuasion, it couldn’t be weaker. I’m very reluctantly in favor of legal first trimester abortion, but I still find abortion horrifying, immoral, and wrong, and would seek to limit it in other circumstances. Does that make me “anti-choice”? Or engaged in a war against women? If the pro-choice movement wants to make friends rather than enemies, it should see how its rhetoric is seriously wounding its cause rather than helping it. And the Times should start treating its readers as engaged adults rather than as feckless and brainless children.