Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ross Douthat argues that the Church's position on condoms is best explained in terms of a general moral argument about the fate of humankind. The core case of Humanae Vitae, he argues, is about confronting the eternal dilemmas of human sexual morality in non-technological ways, not a case-by-case condemnation of all uses of condoms. He quotes a previous interview with Benedict from 1996:

[T]he Church wants to keep man human … we cannot resolve great moral problems simply with techniques, with chemistry, but most solve them morally, with a life-style. It is, I think — independently now of contraception — one of our great perils that we want to master even the human condition with technology, that we have forgotten that there are primordial human problems that are not susceptible of technological solutions but that demand a certain life-style and life decisions … I would say that in the question of contraception we ought to look more at these basic options in which the Church is leading the struggle for man. The point of the Church’s objections is to underscore this battle. The way these objections are formulated is perhaps not always completely felicitous, but what is at stake are such major cardinal points of human existence.

So when the Vatican finds itself telling an HIV-positive man that he must not use condoms while having sex with his HIV-negative wife, it shudders a little and then tries to change the subject to the broader vision of sexuality as a reflection of humankind's humility toward God and life's mysteries. The vision is quite beautiful, but its application in the case at hand is, well, to quote the Pope, "perhaps not always completely felicitous."

There are two responses to recognizing that your broad principle fails in specific instances. One is to modify the broad principle so as to be less abstract and more in touch with the way human sexuality and morality interact; another is to restate the dogma with more eloquence and force, while insisting that this greater insight trumps any case-specific exception.

For a long time, the Vatican has insisted on the latter. And so an entire human minority – gays – are required never to have any sex or intimate coupling at all. And when a deadly epidemic strikes, and we know that condoms – and now pills – can prevent its spread, we must insist on the broader principle rather than the practical reality. So no condoms in Africa. And in the case of, say, a fertile married couple (one positive, one negative), the ban on condoms must remain. Because choosing to have sex without being open to procreation is a worse sin than knowingly infecting your wife with a virus that might kill her.

This doctrine simply offends the conscience of most human beings. How could it not? And so the Pope, essentially bowing to the reality that marital murder is not something that should be sanctioned by the church, has now affirmed both the general moral rule and the exception to it in any specific case. But surely the insight he has grasped – that murder is worse than contraception and that existing life is worth more than death – is so basic it should prompt a reflection on the dogma as a whole. It should place sexuality in a zone of complicated moral choices, contingent on specific circumstances, dealing with issues such as consent, equality, dignity, and responsibility, rather than the crude procreative/nonprocreative model.

It seems to me to be perfectly possible for the Church to do what the Pope is walking backwards into: affirming its rather beautiful understanding of human sexuality at its height, while allowing also for moral deviations from this ideal type to cope with the actual human reality we confront in the actual world we live in.

Which is to say: if you are wondering where Jesus would stand on perpetuating the infections and deaths of million or adjusting a technical religiously mandated rule, then you haven't read the Gospels in quite a while.

Kanye's latest ten-minute rant last night was about how victimized he is. He is the Sarah Palin of hip-hop.

Tunku:

Palin disconcerts us because she seems to have no mask at all, no change of gear. She’s utterly forthcoming, even regarding her family, which is normally a sacred preserve of privacy. Perhaps it’s frightening to meet such people for those of us who value propriety and discretion first of all. So we don’t like her because we are afraid of that level of openness. It just terrifies us. Could we endure a president who is mask-less?

But the truth is: she is all mask. I've been watching her "reality" series on TLC. It is as close to Palin's reality as most reality shows are to theirs'. Except on reality shows, the producers create the fiction by editing to concoct story lines, engineer conflicts and drama, select villains and heroines, sluts and virgins, braggards and ugly ducklings. On "Sarah Palin's Alaska", it is the subject of the "reality show" who has the final say over the editing: Sarah Palin herself. If she wanted reality, she would have allowed someone else to follow her around in her actual life, and edit the footage as he or she wished. But she didn't. She created a biography and an image in the very modern way: rigging a reality show about herself (just as she rigs interviews by restricting them to her own propaganda network, Fox.)

On the most recent episode, Palin did what any tourist can do in Alaska. She went on a halibut fishing boat; she went clamming; she went clay-shooting. The strained, fake personality segments – the "competition" with Todd racing in a canoe, the need for Bristol to get in touch with nature after all the publicity she has been seeking – were so obviously contrived it was painful to watch. But the imagery was indelible: this is a woman who can (just about) shoot a gun (even though her daughter has clearly never touched the thing); this is a woman who can bash fish over the head to stun and kill them; this is a woman prepared not just for a photo-op with fish-processors, but to join in for a few minutes and give the impression that this is how she actually lives. This is a woman who can see a giant clam dug out of the sands, and whose spontaneous response is "Delicious!"

If you think all this fakery is "forthcoming" or "open" or "real", then you probably thought Going Rogue was a work of auto-biography, rather than propaganda and fantasy. All we're seeing is a brilliantly conceived creation of an "authentic American" from the frontier, somehow more connected with the country than the alien president, eager to kill, poised for violence, wrapped in an always well-coiffed hair-do and relentlessly chirpy.

As with many delusional people, Palin demands, by sheer force of will, that we buy her story and her reality. If we do, we'll buy anything.

(Photo: A chair waits for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to sign her new book 'America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag' November 23, 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona. Amid speculation about a 2012 White House bid, Palin kicked off a 16-stop tour for the book, which follows her bestselling memoir 'Going Rogue' last year and is billed as a tribute to veterans, hunting and the Tea Party. By Eric Thayer/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

Bonus points for the tight white pants, black knee boots, set “design” and ummm, choreography?

Yes, the walking dead in the background make this one more than usually hathetic. And the dude can’t sing.

"We call this "bear propaganda,"" – Sarah Palin.

Goldblog defends Smith:

Even if Ben Smith quoted only Likudniks for his piece about the way in which Israelis, and their government, view President Obama, this doesn't strike me as an enormous problem. If Ben were writing about the Hamas understanding of President Obama, I assume he would quote mainly Hamas officials. His story was meant to explain the way Israel's rulers see Obama and the peace process. He did a good job (though I do think that the prime minister has grown to have a more nuanced view of Obama than he had previously — and vice versa). Ben didn't endorse the views, or condemn them. All he did was report them. Reporting them, or not reporting them, doesn't change the underlying reality… Ben Smith was simply covering one aspect of this reality.

The headline of the piece was: "View from Middle East: President Obama is a problem." It was not: "View From Israel's Right: We Hate Obama." That would have been reality. His nut-graf was:

A visit here finds both Israelis and Palestinians blame him for the current stalemate — just as they blame one another.

My italics. A piece that says it is about the Middle East and both sides, and yet devotes almost its entire content to Likudnik and neocon apparatchiks regurgitating the same distortions they have relied on for years is not "just reporting". If the piece had been billed as about Israeli intransigence, hostility to giving up any part of the West Bank and contempt for the US president, it would have been reporting. But it sought to extrapolate from this a wider argument about the inherent failure of the peace process. But when you get to the sliver of reporting on the Palestinians, we get this:

Palestinian leaders say they, too — for different reasons — are losing faith in the political talks. “[Netanyahu] has a chance, and he’s wasting it,” said the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erakat. “Given the chance between settlements and peace, he’s always chosen settlements.” The advocacy director of the American Task Force on Palestine, Ghaith al-Omari, said the frustration in Ramallah isn’t only with Netanyahu. Abbas and other Palestinian leaders are “personally fed up with the whole thing,” he said, and “losing faith in the process, both with the Israeli willingness to deliver and the Americans’ ability to deliver the Israelis.”

So the only real frustration on the Palestinian side is that the Israelis are utterly unserious and that the Israel lobby is preventing Obama getting any leverage over Netanyahu, not that the peace process isn't worth pursuing. And this world-weariness is what the pro-Israel lobby wants. It wants permanent annexation of the West Bank, and war against Iran. And they use poorly presented journalism like the Smith piece to advance those dangerous dreams.

"My wife and I watched a sad documentary about AIDS a few years ago.  An emaciated man in his mid-30s or so, not long for this world, said that he’d spent a lot of his free time on Fire Island and estimated that he’d had sex with “about 3,000 men.”  My wife said, “I don’t think I’ve spoken to 3,000 people in my entire life.”  I replied: “I’ll bet he hasn’t, either.” The unrefuted 1978 study by Bell and Weinberg indicated that 43% of gays had sex with 500 or more partners, and 28% had 1,000 or more partners. What does all this have to do with force readiness and “Don’t-hint-don’t-wink” or whatever they’re calling it these days?  My answer should by now be as painfully obvious as a suppurating genital rash: gays spread disease at a rate out of all proportion to their numbers in our population and should be excluded from the military," – Joe Rehyansky, in the Daily Caller.

A reader writes:

"Dear Mr. President" is so cringe worthy.  Protest songs shouldn't be so specific about one person.

“To allow homosexual [TSA] agents to conduct same-gender pat-downs is tantamount to a new form of discrimination that must be recognized and prevented,” – Peter LaBarbera, with a new angle on the junk-touching fooferaw.

Matt Yglesias and Pete Wehner are debating at the Economist.com. I take the points of both but side with Wehner in the end. The system is not broken, but one of the parties is:

We have in the current GOP a truly disturbing and cynical view of politics: there is nothing but party and ideology and the former is a vehicle solely for power to enact the other. The zero GOP votes for a stimulus package in the middle of the fastest downturn since the 1930s (that was one-third tax cuts!) tells you all you need to know. And the Republican adoption of utopian, John Birch fantasies about rolling back the legacy of Woodrow Wilson makes any sane engagement with this party impossible. It is no longer run by anyone in Congress, but directed by talk radio, Fox News, Sarah Palin’s Twitter account and Manichean ranters like radio host Mike Levin. If any government action is regarded as tyranny, then there is never any way to compromise. The fundamental problem lies with a deranged, ideological and dangerous opposition in a system designed to forge pragmatic compromise.

Mr Obama’s difficult goal—to lead from the centre while keeping his base and his opponents appeased—is a work in progress.

But the system, it seems to me, is working fine in its reining in of a highly activist president after two years. He now has to prove his case. My sense is that, given the extremism of the opposition, he will win in the end—and, indeed, his entire presidency is only understood by thinking of strategy rather than tactics. But it is equally possible that the GOP will continue to radicalise, making its own future governance impossible, and the critical need to address long-term debt an after-thought. But if Republicans remain this way and somehow end up in the White House, they will come to regret it. For they have legitimised a kind of scorched-earth partisanship that will only weaken one day their own ability to get anything done at all.