I’ve linked to these pieces before, but here they are on the site: on staying alive with HIV (to the chagrin of some in the AIDS establishment); life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and why, however chastened, I’m still in favor of the Bush-Blair Iraq war.
IRSHAD PROFILED: The “lipstick lesbian” challenging the mullahs.
An emailer defends the Jesuits:
“As I recollect (from reading John O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits, a book well worth reading), the Jesuit ban on Jews was because to begin with, unlike other religious orders (and, indeed, all Christian society) they did not ban conversos, and therefore included a rather high percentage of them in the first generation or two of the Jesuits’ existence. (Note, for example, St. Teresa of Avila, in the loosely-Jesuit-affiliated Carmelite order, herself of converso descent.) The ban was in some ways forced on them: their rival orders (Dominicans, etc.) were making hay about “the Jesuits are all a bunch of Jews,” so the Jesuits conformed with the rest of Christian society. It’s also specifically in line with the Spanish limpieza de sangre laws, barring conversos from a variety of occupations–with which the Church in general at first fought and then generally compromised. Of course, by the time the compromises were done, and the Jesuits had forbidden conversos from the order, a rather large number of conversos and part-conversos in the middle and upper classes had forged sufficient genealogies to get into any order they wanted. The limpieza de sangre laws were in some ways more a tool in intra-Castilian factional fights–your great-grandmother was a Jew, so you can’t get this lucrative job, Don Miguel–than an expression of simple bigotry. But the point being that to identify the Jesuits as particularly guilty of anti-Semitism avant la lettre is 1) counterfactual; and 2) buying into the old tropes of anti-Catholicism, where it’s always the Jesuits, the Jesuits, the Jesuits who are evil, evil, evil. At the time they’re disliked from being too philosemitic; now they’re accused of the reverse.”
I don’t think any reader of this blog would remember me having anything but respect for the Jesuits. In this country, they are becoming the underground resistance that will keep the decent church alive while Benedict spreads his brittle reactionaryism. My point is simply that the Church hierarchy has acquiesced in and found theological justifications for the stigmatization of minorities in the past – and their chief objects of loathing were Jews. Like gays, Jews’ very existence seemed to violate the abstract notions of natural law that the Church had constructed to qualify the message of universal love in the Gospels. The Church hierarchy is human. It has perpetrated bigotry against the marginalized in the past. It is doing so again today. Merely the objects of dehumanization have changed. And one day, it will be as ashamed of its treatment of gays as it now officially is of its persecution of the Jewish people. It just may take a couple of millennia for the point to be conceded.
The obit. The first medical marijuana martyr?
The usually reliable Catholic Reporter’s John Allen reports that a long-awaited (and long-feared) document is now in Pope Benedict’s hands. The document would put the Vatican’s full authority behind banning all gay men from seminaries and the priesthood, regardless of their commitment to celibacy or faithfulness to Church teachings. Their very existence as involuntary homosexuals would make them ineligible for the priesthood. Money quote:
[T]he document will reject a solution that some seminaries, religious communities and bishops have tended to adopt in recent years – that it doesn’t matter if a candidate is gay, as long as he’s capable of remaining celibate. “I suspect some people, in good will, have gravitated to this idea,” one bishop said. “But that’s not what the church is saying, and this document will make that clear.” To date, there’s been no indication of what the pope intends to do.
Just ponder what this might mean. The Church concedes that gay people are involuntarily gay; the Church asks them to commit to a life without sex or physical or emotional intimacy; if they are priests, the conundrum is resolved anyway: celibacy is mandatory for gays and straights alike, and, so the very distinction becomes moot.
THE TURN TOWARD BIGOTRY: But now the policy could become something much, much different: even if gay priests live up to all their responsibilities, even if they embrace celibacy wholly, even if they faithfully serve the Church, they would still be deemed beneath being priests, serving God, or entering seminaries. Why? Because, in pope Benedict’s own words, they are “objectively disordered,” indelibly morally sick in some undefined way, and so unfit, regardless of their actions, to serve God or His people. It is no longer a matter of what they do or not do that qualifies or disqualifies them for the priesthood; it is who they are. Not since the Jesuits’ ban on ethnic Jews, regardless of their conversion or Christian faith, has the Church entertained such pure discrimination. The insult to gay Catholics is, of course, immeasurable. It is also an outrageous attack on the good, great and holy work so many gay men and lesbians have performed in the Church from its very beginnings. Father Mychal Judge, for example, the fire-fighters’ priest who died in the ruins of the World Trade Center ministering sacraments to fire-men, would retroactively be deemed unfit for the priesthood. So would literally thousands and thousands of gay priests, bishops, cardinals and popes over the centuries. The old doctrine, however cruel and inhumane, at least concentrated on moral acts and made no distinctions between who committed them. It laid out clear rules and insisted that gays and straights abide by them equally. The proposed policy would instead focus on a human being’s very core – and exclude him or her as a result. That kind of discrimination is the definition of bigotry. This is the Church? This is God’s voice for human dignity and equality in the world? This is an institution that says all are welcome at the Lord’s table? I can only hope and pray that pope Benedict doesn’t go there. And if he does, I hope that heterosexual Catholics will rise up and defend their gay priests and friends and family members against this unconscionable attack.
(P.S. I am leaving aside, of course, the long history of discrimination and subordination of heterosexual women in the Church. It is equally indefensible, in my view, but the arguments for and against women priests has a different lineage and history that, for now, is best discussed in a different context.)
Here’s the genuine item: tough, relentless but also, ultimately, merciful, and magnanimous.
THE WAR ON POT: Here’s a tragic story from the federal government’s campaign to prevent people with severe medical conditions from relieving their pain with marijuana. A San Diego man, Steve McWilliams,
who had to cease using medical marijuana after a 2002 arrest, suffered from chronic pain and was likely facing prison time after being charged by federal prosecutors three years ago with possessing 25 marijuana plants. A Supreme Court ruling handed down last month said that federal law prohibiting medicinal use of marijuana trumps California’s voter-approved Compassionate Use Act.
Facing time in pain and in prison, McWilliams killed himself. Another victory for the nanny state.
PTOWN MOMENT:
NADAGATE? John Tierney turns in his best column to date:
For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.
I agree with all that, but especially the first two words. For now. Someone somewhere initiated this Washington series of Chinese whispers. Who? This quote from Bob Novak in Newsday on July 21, 2003, still hangs in the air: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.” Who are “they”?
Five years and counting here at this blog. If you’ve enjoyed andrewsullivan.com for years and want to support this kind of forum, please consider throwing a donation into the tip-jar.
CHRISTIANISTS VS CATHOLICS? Here’s an interesting twist: a pro-life Protestant evangelical adoption group won’t consider Catholic parents.
A left-leaning Englishman in New York is in political and intellectual flux:
So, after 12 months of living in New York is it any surprise that Israel starts to look a little less evil? And that Europe starts to look a little more parochial? That the US starts to look a little more like it is trying to solve some of the world’s problems, and that it is doing so despite the sometimes unfair criticism of its allies? If in England it always looked like the US was the playground bully. Then from the US it looks a lot more like an embattled headteacher in a problem school.
It’s a very honest and eloquent posting. Read it.
In Al Jazeera no less:
Al-Qaida is also a revival of the radical currents that surfaced in Islamic history from time to time only to be defeated by moderate mainstream Islam led by the Ulama (scholars). In particular, they appear to be a continuation of Kharijite thought with its dualistic puritanical conception of the world and the community of Muslims and of Gnostic underground organisations like the Assassins and Qaramita, who sought to disrupt the stability of Muslim societies through acts of terrorism.
Al-Qaida would be best seen as a mixture of these political and ideological strands. Apart from the ideological justifications it takes recourse to, one would, indeed, be hard put to find much that distinguishes it from Latin American anarchist groups. Their acts share the same destructive ferocity, the same absurdity. The difference is that where one finds its ideological legitimacy in Marxism, the other seeks it in the Islamic religion.
(Hat tip: Don Surber.
We have new evidence that president Bush’s suspension of the ban on torture under the Geneva Conventions and under American law was ordered over the objections of the judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force and Marines. Money quote:
A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon working group’s 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that “in order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign … [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.” Haynes — through Daniel J. Dell’Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Defense Department — wrote a memo March 17 that rescinded the working group’s report, and Dell’Orto confirmed that withdrawal yesterday at the hearing. According to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post, the general counsel’s office determined that the report “does not reflect now-settled executive branch views of the relevant law.”
Notice how broad the original exception was. It legalized torture anywhere for any POWs – not just enemy combatants – if the president so ordered. And we now have a precedent that would permit even legitimate U.S. POWs to be tortured in retaliation. We had a president declaring himself above the law, and he got his legal lackey, Alberto Gonzales, to rubber-stamp it. Does any sane person really believe that president Bush’s personal suspension of the law against torture had nothing to do with the abuses that followed in every single theater of the war on terror? Or that his decision hasn’t put U.S. soldiers now and in the future at greater risk even in conventional combat? Notice also how the military’s legal representatives opposed it. The secretary of state opposed it. This was Bush’s choice. The line from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the White House is perfectly straight. And people are fixating on Karl Rove?
SPEAKING OF WHICH: Here’s an important quote from George Orwell, writing in the middle of the Second World War, on October 12, 1942. He was responding to a very similar argument to that proferred by today’s American right that the depravity of our enemies exempts us from our historic decency toward prisoners, that their barbarism makes maintaining Geneva standards “quaint.” Here’s Orwell’s reflection:
“May I be allowed to offer on or two reflections on the British Governments’ decision to retaliate against German prisoners, which seems so far to have aroused extraudinarily little protest?
By chaining up German prisoners in response to similar action by the Germans, we descend, at any rate in the eyes of the ordinary observer, to the level of our enemies. It is unquestionable when one thinks of the history of the past ten years that there is a deep moral difference between democracy and Fascism, but if we go on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth we simply cause that difference to be forgotten. Moreover, in the matter of ruthlessness we are unlikely to compete successfully with our enemies. As the Italian radio has just proclaimed, the Fascist principle is two eyes for an eye and a whole set of teeth for one tooth. At some point or another public opinion in England will flinch from the implications of this statement, and it is not very difficult to foresee what will happen.
As a result of our action the Germans will chain up more British prisoners, we shall have to follow suit by chaining up more Axis prisoners, and so it will continue till logically all the prisoners on either side will be in chains. In practice, of course, we shall become disgusted with the process first, and we shall announce that the chaining up will now cease, leaving, almost certainly, more British than Axis prisoners in fetters. We shall have thus acted both barbarously and weakly, damaging our own good name without succeeding in terrorising the enemy.
It seems to me that the civilised answer to the German action would be something like this: “You proclaim that you are putting thousands of British prisoners in chains because some half-dozen Germans or thereabouts were temporarily tied up during the Dieppe raid. This is disgusting hypocrisy, in the first place because of your own record during the past ten years, in the second place because troops who have taken prisoners have got to secure them somehow until they can get them to a place of safety, and to tie men’s hands in such circumstances is totally different from chaining up a helpless prisoner who is already in an internment camp. At this moment, we cannot stop you maltreating our prisoners, though we shall probably remember it at the peace settlement, but don’t fear that we shall retaliate in kind. You are Nazis, we are civilised men. This latest act of yours simply demonstrates the difference.”
At this moment this may not seem a very satisfying reply, but I suggest that to anyone who looks back in three months’ time, it will seem better than what we are doing at present and it is the duty of those who can keep their heads to protest before the inherently silly process of retaliation against the helpless is carried any further.”
Notice also that the practice Orwell was abhorring was merely the chaining of prisoners of war. Just the shackling! And his enemies were genocidal maniacs. Can you imagine what he would think of suspending legal bans on torture? Or forcing detainees into near-suffocation through drowning? If we kept our heads against the Nazis, why can we not remain sane and moral against today’s fascists?
The Dish 