Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

There is an American Catholic tradition that for decades has stood athwart dumb churchly authoritarianism, yelling "stop, and go forward!" The shorthand term for this tradition is "Commonweal Catholicism", and I was raised in it. 

My parents were devout enough to ensure that the family attended mass every Sunday, and had meatless Fridays. They made sure that the kids attended the parish schools, and grew into all of the sacraments in mandated order.  They took the Diocesan newspaper, but also subscribed to Commonweal, The Catholic Worker, and America.

When my father got a job teaching at NYU, we lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and went to church and school in the parish that Stephen Colbert now attends.

It gave my parents great pleasure to meet the father of my classmate John Skillin, since the father edited Commonweal.  You might say that Ed Skillin WAS the magazine.  He arrived a decade after its 1924 founding, and served as assistant editor, editor, publisher, part-owner, and I'm not sure what other capacities, until his death in 2000. 

Commonweal Catholicism is a great tradition, and it's been on the 'right' side of most social and political issues for as long as I can remember.  And it drives the current crop of John-Paul retrogrades nuts, because it beats with an original American pulse, and is deaf to authoritarian drums.  So if you take a slice in history and compare Commonweal's position and the Bishops' position, you'll find that the average modern American Catholic is way closer to what the Commonweal said than what the Bishops said, way back then.  Except for that (seems all too brief) period, in the afterglow of Vatican II. 

Do you know that the church filed an Amicus brief in Loving v. Virginia?  In support of the Lovings.

She strongly backed expanding it – at the expense of gay rights:

“I’m the biggest fan of [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] (now [the Religious Liberty Protection Act]) in this building, but you should not take this advice right now,” Kagan wrote in a May 20, 1999 memo to Ron Klain, then the chief of staff to Al Gore, the vice president. “You’ll have a gay/lesbian firestorm on your hands. (Alternatively, if you come out for a version of RFRA that has a civil rights carve-out, you’ll have a religious groups firestorm on your hands.)” …

Kagan, who worked in the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1999, urged the administration in a 1996 memo to join religious conservatives in asking the US Supreme Court to review and reverse a California Supreme Court ruling that found that a landlord’s religious objections to renting to an unmarried couple were trumped by that state’s anti-discrimination law noting “the danger this decision poses to RFRA’s guarantee of religious freedom in the State of California.”

Amsterdam considers employing "decoy Jews" to flush out anti-Semitism on the streets.

Chait argues that because Congress has repeatedly failed to move on climate change, the EPA should step in:

[W]hile EPA regulation would distance the issue from democratic accountability, it would not remove it entirely. If the public objected strongly enough, it could vote for a Congress to overturn the EPA regulation. In practice, we accept this kind of rule-by-expert routinely. Monetary policy, once the most political of issues—i.e., William Jennings Bryan denouncing the “cross of gold”—is now formulated with little regard for public opinion. Congress could overrule a decision by the Fed, but it never does. Likewise, few of us would like Congress to seize control of setting food and drug standards from the FDA.

But a real bill would be far preferable. It's funny how the essentially pro-market concept of cap-and-trade has, because of largely conservative opposition, made old school environmental regulation more likely.

Every star they featured in their World Cup preview ad has … sucked so far.

Erik Kain has a lively screed against the experts policing children's friends. Yes, friendship – the last target of the exert busybody.

A reader writes:

I live in Seattle, in the area known as West Seattle.  My local news and information is far better provided by westseattleblog than it ever was by the Seattle papers the Seattle Times and Seattle PI.

The papers duplicated national and international coverage I can find elsewhere, and provide almost no truly local news. Now the west seattle blog does not provide coverage of state level issues – I haven't found a blog for that yet, but I bet I will.

Riviera Beach, Florida, 12 pm

Ariel Levy places all his her chips on Huckabee for 2012:

Steve Schmidt told me, “Really, there’s three primaries within the Republican primary. There’s the primary that’s the evangelical wing of the Party, there’s the establishment primary, and there’s usually a maverick of an insurgent category. Whoever occupies two out of the three is the nominee.” It would not take a packaging genius to put Huckabee out as an evangelical insurgent. The next election will cost billions of dollars, and Huckabee is not much of a traditional fund-raiser. But raising money for the primaries in 2012 could have as much to do with getting people to click a button on their BlackBerry to contribute ten dollars as it does with working the corporate Washington cocktail circuit.

But doesn't Palin qualify on all three counts?