Keepers – Page 35

Over

We spent the morning on the beach, Dusty and I. These last few days, this usually aloof and independent mischief-maker leaned into me. She sat on the sand, her body pressed against my leg, then allowing me to hold her longer than usual in my arms before she’d squirm and wriggle away. Aaron took her to their favorite breakfast take-out spot and ordered the egg-and-bacon burger she had lusted after but never eaten before. Today, it was all hers. But something she would have swallowed in one breath not so long ago, she looked at, nibbled, and let drop. Only strands of bacon tempted her and then, a chocolate chip cookie. No hesitation there.

Our usual vet was on vacation so we took Dusty to another animal hospital, where they were extremely kind. We waited a little outside, which is when Aaron took the above photo. Dusty was shivering a little and panting, but much less agitated than she usually is near a vet. Inside she was given a sedative as I cradled her in my arms. She relaxed as I petted and held her to my face, her tongue suddenly lolling out as the muscles all sagged. There was no reluctance any more. She gave up her fiercely guarded independence to me, in the end, and it touched me so deeply. She was ornery and feisty and selfish usually – only rarely letting her guard down. But now it was fully down; and she let me take care of her one last time.

This was not like waiting for someone to die; it was a positive act to end a life – out of mercy and kindness, to be sure – but nonetheless a positive act to end a life so intensely dear to me for a decade and a half. That’s still sinking in. The power of it. But as we laid her on the table for the final injection, she appeared as serene as she has ever been. I crouched down to look in her cloudy eyes and talk to her, and suddenly, her little head jolted a little, and it was over.

I couldn’t leave her. But equally the sight of her inert and lifeless – for some reason the tongue hanging far out of her mouth disfigured her for me – was too much to bear. I kissed her and stroked her, buried my face in her shoulders, and Aaron wept over her. And then we walked home, hand in hand. As we reached the front door, we could hear Eddy howling inside.

I don’t know how to thank all of you for your emails over the last 24 hours – as well as the thread that helped me understand this whole thing better, as this loomed in the future. Her bed is still there; and the bowl; and the diapers – pointless now. I hung her collar up on the wall and looked out at the bay. The room is strange. She has been in it every day for fifteen and a half years, waiting for me.

Now, I wait, emptied, for her.

Since When Was Free-Loading A Conservative Value?

There are several ways to see the campaign of FreedomWorks and others to persuade young adults to forswear getting health insurance through Obamacare. Perhaps it’s a publicity stunt, a way to vent against what the protestors see as the creeping leftist collectivism of our time. Or it can be seen as sabotage – a spiteful bid to undermine the effectiveness of a law, duly voted on by Congress and backed by a twice-elected president. But what it cannot be seen as, it seems to me, is a principled conservative defense of individual freedom.

For conservatives, freedom is always coupled with personal responsibility. Your right to be free from government interference is also an implicit statement that you can take care of yourself – and won’t at some point suddenly change your mind. This is the core of conservative libertarianism: an assertion of radical independence, responsibility and self-sufficiency.

In many areas, this makes perfect sense – but healthcare isn’t one of them. Disease and accident make no distinctions among us. And since 1986, hospitals have been legally required to treat anyone seriously ill who presents himself at an emergency room, with clear medical needs. In the most fundamental way, that was the moment the US socialized medicine – and Ronald Reagan signed the bill. Alas, like so many Reagan domestic initiatives, there was no federal money provided to pay for this. And we all know what happened next: all those extra costs for the uninsured drove up premiums for everyone else, drove up hospital costs, giving them a reason to raise prices even further, and played a role in rendering healthcare unaffordable for many others.

What Obamacare does, like Romneycare before it, is end this free-loading.

The law is telling these young adults that if you want to go without insurance, you are not going to make everyone else pay for it if your risk-analysis ends up faulty. You have to exercise a minimum of personal responsibility to pay for your own potential healthcare. In other words, rights come with responsibilities in a liberal democracy. At least that is what I always understood the conservative position to be.

So why is an allegedly conservative organization actively encouraging personal irresponsibility? Why are they encouraging one sector of society – the young and the fearless – to rely on everyone else’s sacrifice to get bailed out if they have an accident, or contract cancer, or need a hospital to deliver a baby? This is not freedom as the Founders understood it; it’s recklessness, irresponsibility and short-sighted selfishness. Now, if the twentysomethings cannot afford it, it’s one thing – and part of our healthcare cost crisis. But now that Obamacare has removed that excuse and demands that every citizen actually contribute to the insurance pool, that completely defensible excuse is over. No more free-loading, in other words.

So I ask again: why is free-loading now a conservative value?

It is not being independent; it’s being potentially dependent on others while giving nothing in return. And insurance is an inherently collective endeavor. That’s how it works. It’s one area where going it alone makes very little sense. And, of course, the bigger the insurance pool, the lower the premiums. This is not socialism. It’s a simple insurance principle, used by free countries for centuries. It certainly passed muster with Friedrich Hayek, a man you would think would be an influence on the Tea Party’s political program. I’ve cited this before but it’s worth citing again:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong … Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.

That’s from The Road To Serfdom, one book of the libertarian and conservative Bible. And it’s common sense. It’s leveraging a simple principle – pooling risk – and extending it as far as possible to guard against the “common hazards of life.” There is nothing leftist or socialist about it. And it demands that each of us be personally responsible for the costs our own encounters with illness or accident impose upon our neighbors, rich and poor, young and old. If FreedomWorks were consistent, it would encourage twentysomethings to “burn their Obamacare card” while simultaneously pledging never to seek medical care under any circumstances. That would be coherent, if bonkers. What’s incoherent is claiming that refusing to contribute to a system you nonetheless intend to use is anything but a scam.

In fact, what FreedomWorks is encouraging is the real socialism. It’s using the 1986 law to force hard-working Americans to pay for free-loaders’ care. Since when did conservatives believe in that forced redistribution of wealth from the hard-working to the reckless? Since when did conservatives prefer socialism to personal responsibility?

Since Barack Obama proposed it, that’s when.

The Binary Mind Of Global Hegemonists

Charles Krauthammer gives us a worldview this morning unchanged for several centuries – and certainly unaffected by anything that has occurred since 2001. There is either one global hegemon in the world or there is chaos:

The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone. Which rests on the further assumption that international stability — open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquillity — comes naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion.

In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection the United States thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don’t get tranquillity. You get chaos.

I think that’s wildly simplistic. To note something that any actual observer of the last decade would note: the hegemon can itself create chaos if it uses its force reflexively and for neo-imperial or paranoid reasons. The deaths of tens of thousands and the splintering of any cohesion to the “state” of Iraq was a direct consequence of Krauthammer’s simplistic hegemonism and all the hubris that comes entangled with it. Ditto Afghanstan – where US intervention does not appear to have prompted any long-term stabilization of the region, and, in fact, seems to have accelerated Pakistan’s descent into nuclear-tipped Jihadism (a far, far greater threat than anything the Taliban could muster). The American hegemony that has allowed Israel to invade, bomb and expand with impunity for years has not been a force for tranquility at all. And Krauthammer’s and Netanyahu’s proposal for a third Middle East war – against Iran – would be equally destabilizing for both the region and the world. In recent history, global hegemony hasn’t maintained tranquility; it has obliterated it in favor of an unpredictable, global religious conflict.

And as a rising power emerges in the East, history teaches us that an attempt to maintain hegemony and restrain that giant from exercizing influence in its own part of the world can be disastrously destabilizing. What Krauthammer misses in his celebration of British imperialism – “Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves” – is that, in the end, its resistance to sharing global influence with a rising Germany caused untold destruction and chaos in the first half of the twentieth century. There’s also a reason Britannia, like Imperial Spain before it, stopped ruling the waves. Because the temptation to hegemony eventually bankrupted it. Have you checked the US balance sheet lately? I thought – foolish me – that the GOP cared about that.

This is not to support what Krauthammer caricatures as “isolationism”.

Of course, the US has a real interest in projecting global force for the purpose of trade, a stable international economic system, and protection against the only foreign force that has even the slightest capacity to harm us: Jihadist terrorism. But in that endeavor, prudence – a concept alien to the former-leftists-turned-militarists like Krauthammer – matters. The Obama foreign policy, in not seeking to make every tension and conflict with any other country into a zero-sum endeavor, or a polarizing moment, has been far more prudent than Bush’s and Krauthammer’s. It has protected us from terrorism while withdrawing from two hopeless wars that Krauthammer backed – and still does. It has shown that you can actually project more power by doing less, and succeeding, than invading countries you have no understanding of and failing to occupy, reform or even govern them competently. And if you maintain a lighter footprint, using drones, surveillance and special forces, you can calm global tensions and increase the chance for global tranquility.

In other words, good, old-fashioned, intelligent realism is a critical central pillar of thinking about foreign policy, but it is one Krauthammer cannot countenance but that Reagan and the first Bush integrated into their interventionism. I cannot really see any solid reason why, except that a realist foreign policy that did not see war and violence as critical tools would lead any sane American president to reassess the fusion of the US and Israel in terms of global interests. And the regional hegemony of Israel is a core priority of the neoconservative mindset – and it is now wedded to the apocalyptic Zionism of the Christianist right. So realism must be tarnished so that the project of Greater Israel can continue with ever-increasing urgency and rigidity.

That’s why the debate between Paul and Christie is a vital one. Because it could expose the difference between realist global tranquility and neocon chaos, between some kind of domestic American revival, or one last act in the bankrupting temptations of late-empires. At some point, the neoconservatives will have to account for the sheer scale of chaos and disorder they have sown in the world, even as they claim, absurdly, to be the guardians of global peace. That reckoning has not fully occurred yet – just as the war crimes of that rogue administration have yet to be punished or accounted for.

But the time is coming. And Rand Paul may be its key precipitant.

(Photo: Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

The Meter vs Ads

The NYT has reported slowing subscription sales, but only from a truly remarkable increase from a low base. But the striking thing to me is that the meter is now bringing in $150 million a year to the NYT:

To put that $150 million in new revenue in perspective, consider that the Times Company as a whole will take in roughly $210 million in digital ads this year. And that $150 million doesn’t capture the paywall’s positive impact on print circulation revenue. Altogether, the company has roughly $360 million in digital revenue. Digital ads were again the weak spot (beyond print ads, which goes without saying). They declined 3 percent in the quarter—something that has to be turned around somehow.

The percentage increase in subscription revenue is exactly the same as the percentage drop in ad revenue:

Circulation revenues in the second quarter of 2013 rose 5.1 percent over the same period the year before, a company earnings report says. Advertising revenue fell 5.8 percent over the same period. Overall, revenue was down by .9 percent.

As for the Dish, only seven months into a subscription model, we’re seeing steady increases in subscriptions since the big bang of subscriptions that happened when we went independent in February. Here’s the graph for subscription revenue since the end of March:

We still have the tough problem of getting all our original January – March 2013 subscribers to renew next year, since we couldn’t put you on auto-renewal when we launched the new site because we were still on the Daily Beast platform, and we had yet to develop the full subscription system that is now in place for all new Dishheads. So the beginning of next year may be a little nerve-wracking – even though I’m pretty confident that our earliest strongest supporters are the most likely to renew of anyone.

As for total revenue, we’re now at $736k toward our original goal of $900k by next February 1 ($900k being the total budget we had at the last year at the Beast). If subscriptions keep coming in at the current rate, we look set to come close. Conversion rates (the percentage of total readers who choose to subscribe) look pretty steady too at around 2.3 percent, a smidgen higher than the industry average:

The total number of subscribers is now 28,271 as of 5.45 pm today. 11,000 more of you are now on expired meters – having used up all your read-ons. If you all decided to [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe today”], we’d be able to make some serious, solid plans for future investment in the site. So [tinypass_offer text=”please do”]. If you’ve clicked through to the max on all your devices, you really are a Dishhead. The cost is only $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year as a minimum. And if more of you [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”], we may even be able to avoid advertizing altogether – meaning more signal and less noise to your website.

Subscribe [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. It takes [tinypass_offer text=”two minutes max”]. And [tinypass_offer text=”help shift”] the direction of new media toward quality rather than ad-driven pageviews.

The GOP Calls Its Own Fiscal Bluff

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the current GOP’s refusal to do anything but propose to slash spending is that “propose” is all they really want to do. They cannot actually stomach the actual cuts their abstract ideology demands. And so what happened yesterday, when the House leadership suddenly yanked a bill slashing transportation and housing spending, is of a piece with the growing incoherence on the right. Beutler has a must-read today, including this fantastic cri-de-coeur:

“With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago,” said an angry appropriations chair Hal Rogers (R-KY). “Thus I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration — and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts — must be brought to an end.”

Yep, that’s as long as the Ryan budget discipline lasted this year: three months. Which is still a longer time than it took for the Ryan budget’s details to evaporate last year, as soon as Ryan was put on an actual national ticket, and had to find an actual national majority. In other words: all of this talk-radio rubber is finally hitting the actual fiscal road. And the screech and smell are unmistakable.

Obama’s strategy has been to keep proposing actual things to improve the economy, all of which the GOP will turn down almost as soon as he’s uttered them. Presumably, he’s trying to entrench the general impression that he is the sane one able to compromise while his opponents are out of their fast-shrinking minds. The GOP strategy? Good luck finding one apart from sabotaging growth, but, whatever it is, it seems they cannot follow it. They are opposed to spending when they want to attack a Democratic president; but, in power, they’ve long spent like leftwing Democrats used to. Recently, they sent a huge, unnecessary check to Big Ag. Under the last Republican president, the completely bankrupted the country. And when they actually have to contemplate real cuts in programs that might affect their own constituents, they balk.

They are a slogan, not a party.

And in the end, you do actually have to leave the Fox News studios and actually do the minimal amount to keep the government actually functioning. When they get there, they fall apart. The solution? A huge effort to throw these nihilists out on their ears in 2014, or to forge some kind of alliance between the Senate and a sane bipartisan majority in the House. The latter won’t happen if Boehner wants to keep his job. The former is deemed unlikely or impossible. That logic needs to be challenged.

Cancel That Moscow Summit, Mr President

Vladimir Putin’s decision to poke the United States firmly in the eye over the Edward Snowden case requires a proportionate response. His belief that US-Russian relations can go on unmolested by this provocation needs to be disproven. No sincere partner in the world community would seize this opportunity to leverage world opinion against a flawed NSA spying program that looks in political danger in the Congress already. It’s preposterous to see this as anything but a piece of geo-political theater.

I cannot see how it benefits Snowden. He will be easily portrayed by his enemies, in classic fashion, as a defector to Russia after exposing secret information from the US government. A Communist “parliament” member who’s running for Moscow mayor just exclaimed:

Frankly speaking, he is a also like a balm to the hearts of all Russian patriots.

Why, unless the motive is pure anti-American animus. Snowden is not aiding the enemy, of course, any more than Manning was; he is just allowing himself to be used as a means of further humiliating and taunting his own government. And whatever the US government’s failings, it’s not a reasonable moral or political position to prefer Russia’s authoritarianism. Russia is not, to put it mildly, the model of transparent, accountable government Snowden says he believes in. Its own responses to Jihadist terrorism have been the pulverization of Chechnya and the arming of Bashir al-Assad – not exactly role models for liberaltarians.

It’s a no-win situation for president Obama, but he should not signal that this kind of mischief is no big deal for the US government. No summit meeting with Putin, then. And perhaps a wider review in the Congress of whether the US should attend the Winter Games in Sochi. Threats to arrest American athletes, if they are openly gay, is also something to be taken into account. The new Russian law – which could put an American athlete in jail for merely talking about his or her orientation in public – is a foul piece of work to which the US should not in any way acquiesce:

“An athlete of nontraditional sexual orientation isn’t banned from coming to Sochi,” Vitaly Mutko said in an interview with R-Sport, the sports newswire of state news agency RIA Novosti. “But if he goes out into the streets and starts to propagandize, then of course he will be held accountable.”

Would the US ever participate in an international sports event where the host country is threatening to arrest foreign athletes if they exercize what would, in the US, be their First Amendment rights?

I have mixed feelings about Snowden. In his defense, he has clearly exposed something to wider public view that has resulted in a healthy and overdue debate in the public and Congress. But he broke the law to do it; and Russia’s embrace of him is a provocation that requires a proportionate response. That’s the only language Putin understands anyway. Time to reverse the pressure.

(Photo: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin participates in the United Russia Party congress on September 23, 2011 in Moscow, Russia. The congress is meeting to approve the list for Russian State Duma elections scheduled on December 4. By Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images.)

What’s So Wrong About Virtual Sex?

I was glad to read Susan Jacoby’s op-ed today, pushing back against the Brown-Quinn thesis that women are somehow victims of sexting culture and not full, eager participants. She makes some of the points I did last week:

There is no force involved here; people of both sexes are able to block unwanted advances. Women are certainly safer on the Web than they would be going home with strangers they meet in bars.

But then she veers off into this diatribe:

The morality of virtual sex, as long as no one is cheating on a real partner, is not what bothers me. What’s truly troubling about the whole business is that it resembles the substitution of texting for extended, face-to-face time with friends. Virtual sex is to sex as virtual food is to food: you can’t taste, touch or smell it, and you don’t have to do any preparation or work. Sex with strangers online amounts to a diminution, close to an absolute negation, of the context that gives human interaction genuine content. Erotic play without context becomes just a form of one-on-one pornography.

Bingo: “one-on-one pornography”. That’s the most concise description of sexting at its best that I have yet read. And it prompts me to ask: what, pray, is so wrong with that? Sex has always been about fantasy and reality and the sometimes ridiculous and sometimes incredibly hot experiences that mix can engender. The most fundamental sexual organ is the brain, as my shrink often points out to me. And masturbation – which is solitary sex based on fantasy (sometimes from pornography, sometimes from real life, sometimes from an Old Spice commercial) – is as old as human beings’ brains.

That’s why virtual sex is not like virtual food. You can have an orgasm in your body as well as your mind without any actual “work” in a way you cannot eat or taste something virtually. In fact, your sexual experiences through masturbatory fantasy can be far more satisfying and intense than the actual thing – you know, when one of you has come and the other hasn’t, when the dog jumps on the bed in the middle of it, when one of you farts or queefs, when the word “ow” occasionally surfaces, or when your mind wanders for a bit and your already sated spouse has to look at the ceiling for a while and think of the skim milk that needs buying, as you plug away to get it over with.

Nothing is as over-rated as bad actual sex or as under-rated as good virtual sex. And, yes, it isn’t real in the way that a loving, physical fuck-fest with a loved partner is real. But so what? Since when is the ideal the enemy of the good? And the fact that it isn’t real – that it’s a fantasy deriving from a sexual avatar – means it’s less perilous. It’s a form of play, the kind of activity that marks intelligent beings from those with less developed frontal cortexes. It’s play between two fantasy partners; it victimizes no-one; it transmits no diseases; it risks no pregnancy; it renders both partners radically more equal than they would be in the actual sack; and, as long as it is kosher with your partner, if you have one, it is much more moral than actual adultery, precisely because it isn’t real.

And women would be the most likely to gain sexual pleasure from this without all the attendant headaches and dangers of an actual physical, real-life sexual encounter.

Men, for their part, love showing off their sexual prowess. There’s a reason why Chatroulette – remember that? – started as a free-wheeling chance for anyone to say anything, and ended up as a dizzying parade of jerking dick pics. Anthony Weiner may be a loser but he is not mentally ill; he is a classic high-testosteroned male of the species, maximizing his sexual pleasure while minimizing the chances of actually having sex with someone other than his wife. His fault was not telling his wife up-front and running for fricking mayor of New York. But single guys and women – or those whose entire sexual needs cannot be completely fulfilled by fucking one person for the rest of their lives (i.e. everyone) – rightly see virtual sex as the best of all possible worlds if you want to get off without getting it on.

All this is is personal, interactive porn. On the web, it’s everywhere. In our national discourse, especially among those who came of age before the web, it is somehow necessarily foul and disgusting. It isn’t. It’s just embarrassing if your sex talk and body pics end up being perused by the whole world (which is why a new sexting app can automatically cause your pics to evaporate after a fixed amount of time).

Instead of ranting about dickmanship, feminists should be cheering this avenue for female sexual liberation on. It isn’t what sex can be at its best. But it sure is victimless, non-coercive, often exciting sexual play. I’m sorry, but that does not equate either with the near-negation of sex, as Jacoby would have it, or with mental illness. As a culture, we’re just not ready to admit that. But soon enough, we will.

(Photo by Mathieu Grac, from a collection of “Amusing and Poignant Photos of Social Media Self-Portraits in Progress.”)

Benedict, Francis, And Gays

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.

To 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 straight 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.)

Tina And Sally vs Dicks

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Imagine the following argument being written in a mainstream magazine:

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-estrogen women to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.

It would probably only appear in the far-right press and be universally regarded as sexist bigotry. And yet my friend Tina Brown unapologetically unleashes it on an entire gender, which is fine, it appears, as long as the gender is male. The argument is not directed at all men at first, just high-testosterone men seeking public office. But then the mask slips … and a man’s sexting his dick to a woman is the equivalent of reckless mass-murder. This paragraph is so broad a brush it barely fits on the page:

And politics is not the only arena to require this test. The banker who killed a bride-to-be and her best man when he slammed his boat into a construction barge last weekend during a moonlight cruise down the Hudson had a history of dopey party-boy machismo. Francesco Schettino, the drunk captain of the shipwrecked Costa Concordia (death toll: 32 drowned passengers) and Francisco Jose Garzon Amo, the speed-freak driver in last week’s Spanish train crash (death toll: 79 passengers), were both crimes of dickmanship that ended in disaster.

So a man who has not committed adultery, and who has not been accused of harassment or abuse, who simply sent a dick pic to a woman he was flirting with online, is now the equivalent of men responsible for the deaths of scores of innocents? Because they all have dicks! And, er, that’s it. Sally Quinn, in high sexist mode as well, says this of Huma Abedin:

The only thing she can believe in for sure is that [Weiner] will continue his infidelity.

I had no idea that Weiner had committed adultery. Maybe Quinn’s sources are better than anyone else’s. Then this:

When the first scandal hit, I just thought Weiner was a grandiose, narcissistic, entitled creep. Now it is clear he must be mentally ill as well. That he has no respect for women, including his own wife, is also clear.

Really? If Weiner is mentally ill, what was Bill Clinton? Are the five million users of OKCupid also mentally ill? Was Tiger Woods mentally ill? Or Hugh Grant? Or Newt Gingrich? Or Mark Sanford? Or John F Kennedy? But Quinn combines this absurd claim that all men with sex drives they exploit for pleasure are mentally ill (rather than guilty of being online while male) with a vicious attack on Huma Abedin:

“I do very strongly believe that that is between us and our marriage,” [Abedin] said then. She says the marriage has taken a lot of hard work and a lot of therapy. I’m certainly not the first person to suggest that her therapist should be fired.

I think Sally Quinn’s moralizing, ignorant judgment as to what happens in another couple’s marital therapy sessions is more offensive than anything Anthony Weiner has put online. And there’s a logical loophole here which points to the Clinton panic:

The only possibly reason I can guess for Abedin’s embrace of her husband is that she wants the power as much as he does … She saw the Clintons get away with infidelity, and she fooled herself into thinking she and Weiner could also ride this one out.

Well, excuse me, but didn’t the Clintons successfully ride it out? Are they not precisely the role models that Abedin and Weiner are following? The difference is that what Bill Clinton did was exponentially more foul than what Weiner has done, and his lies were under oath, and he was the fricking president at the time – not running for a mayor’s race. And Clinton committed adultery while Weiner didn’t. Not that Quinn’s bigotry bothers to make such distinctions. Bigotry tends not to.

Here’s something Weiner could do that would really send the Clintonistas up the wall: hail Bill publicly as his role model. He’s following the Clinton script precisely in his latest interview – contrasting the media sex obsession with his view that he needs to get on with the business of the people. Please, Huma and Anthony, don’t flee the Clintons, embrace them as your fore-runners in this murky business of power-couples, sex, lies and power. Bill and Hillary paved the way. Follow them to the polling booths.

And make them squirm in their own hypocritical juices.

The Clintons vs The Weiners!

In what can only be described as an extract from the annals of extreme chutzpah, the Clintons – yes, the Clintons! – are now weighing in, via surrogates, to force Anthony Weiner from the race for mayor of New York. Apparently, the Clintons believe that an embarrassing dick pic – along with lying in his apology – should be enough to force the horny narcissist from the race.

My jaw is hovering near the floor-boards.

So far as we know, Anthony Weiner has never committed adultery or sexually harassed or abused anyone. And Huma Abedin has not blamed a vast right-wing conspiracy for her husband’s libidinous indiscretions. None of that could be said about the Clintons. Bill lied and lied and lied again and again and again – until he was lying under oath, and lying to his own cabinet, telling them to go out and deny the very things he knew he had done. Bill didn’t send his dick pic to some activist paramour; he told state troopers to bring that hot woman he spied in the hotel lobby up to his room where he exposed himself to her and told her to “lick it.” And this creep has the gall to vent about Weiner.

The Clintons, via Sidney Blumenthal, orchestrated a whisper campaign to portray a young intern, Monica Lewinsky, as a deluded stalker who was lying about her affair with the president. If that dress had never emerged, both Clintons would still be smearing her today. As for recklessness, Bill Clinton, knowing full well that he was already being sued for sexual harassment by elements on the far right, went right ahead and had sex with an intern working for him at the White House – destroying the promise of his second term, and giving the hypocritical, extremist Republicans the political gift of a lifetime. Talk about betrayal of his supporters and everyone who had ever worked for him, including his cabinet. The Weiner affair is a trivial non-event compared with the Clintons’ reckless, mutual self-destruction.

Even now, the Clintons, through their various spokespeople, are lying:

“The Clintons are upset with the comparisons that the Weiners seem to be encouraging — that Huma is ‘standing by her man’ the way Hillary did with Bill, which is not what she in fact did,’’ said a top state Democrat.

Really? Let’s go to the tape:

Almost everything that man says in the video above is a lie. Hillary knew that and yet still stood by her man in that critical New Hampshire primary interview with Steve Croft, giving her husband crucial cover to stay in a race many were telling him to pull out of. Listen to her lies above – and Hillary’s assertion that the press created this story by paying Gennifer Flowers. She went much, much, much further than Huma’s dignified statement, knowing full well that she had been complicit for years in her husband’s sexual harassment and abuse. What has always mattered to Hillary Clinton is her path to power, not the abused women her husband left as media roadkill and Hillary stepped on afterward. Which makes this chutzpah all the more remarkable:

“The Clintons are pissed off that Weiner’s campaign is saying that Huma is just like Hillary,’’ said the source. “How dare they compare Huma with Hillary? Hillary was the first lady. Hillary was a senator. She was secretary of state.”

There you have not an argument, but a resort to authority. Huma Abedin, dealing with a political husband caught up in sexual embarrassment and lies, is not comparable with Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton … has held high office? You really do have to be neck-deep in Washington presumption to insinuate such a thing. But, staggeringly, that’s now the position of Maureen Dowd – that sexual harassment, abuse and perjury – were okay for the Clintons because Bill was so talented at politics, while Weiner is a loser. You really couldn’t make this up:

[Clintonistas] fear Huma learned the wrong lesson from Hillary, given that Bill was a roguish genius while Weiner’s a creepy loser. “Bill Clinton was the greatest political and policy mind of a generation,” said one. “Anthony is behaving similarly without the chops or résumé.” As often as Bill apologized, he didn’t promise he would “never, ever” do it again, as Weiner did. “What people won’t forgive is lying in the apology,” said the Clinton pal. “It has to be sincere, and it sure as hell has to be accurate.”

But lying under oath? Fine if you’re talented enough. The double standards here are so grotesque they remind you once again of who the Clintons are: liars who think that the rules should never apply to them.

They sicken me to my stomach. But they’ve given Anthony Weiner one more reason to stay in the race. He should let the voters decide his fate, not the Clinton machine. Now, it’s a matter of principle.