Category: Old Dish

The bigoted decision to deny a gay bar owner Catholic funeral rites has been revoked. Sanity prevails. Good for the Archbishop.

From one of my favorite conservative-libertarians, Neal Boortz. His is the Christian position I hold. There are worse things for a Christian than death. Let Terri go. She has suffered and been used enough.

I’m beginning to wonder if the Republican party will soon oppose the whole concept of an independent judiciary. Just read William Bennett’s screed in National Review. It contains the sentence: “It is a mistake to believe that the courts have the ultimate say as to what a constitution means.” Bennett and his co-author argue that Jeb Bush should send in state troops to reinsert the feeding tube and break the law if necessary. Screw the science. Screw the court system. Screw the law. I disagree with Jonah that this is a minor spat with no long-term consequences. We are looking directly at the real face of contemporary Republicanism. Sane, moderate, thoughtful people are watching this circus and will not soon forget it.

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT VERSUS MARRIAGE: Dahlia Lithwick highlights yet another conservative inconsistency in the Schiavo case. What this case comes down to is the right of a spouse to determine his or her incapacitated spouse’s fate in the absence of a living will. Civil marriage is indeed a unique and special legal bond. The social right believes this. But they only believe it when it suits them. If it can be used to marginalize and stigmatize gay couples, they are insistent. If it is an obstacle to their absolutist views on feeding tubes for human beings who have ceased to be able to feel, think or emote, then they discard it. Here’s a Tom DeLay quote that says it all:

“I don’t know what transpired between Terri and her husband. All I know is Terri is alive. … Unless she has specifically written instructions in her hand, with her signature, I don’t care what her husband says.”

So much for the “sanctity of marriage.” With each passing month, the cynicism and power-lust of these people become clearer and clearer. Here’s a principle: the government should stay out of living rooms, bedrooms and marital bonds. That used to be called conservatism.

Wonkette, moi, Shafer, Jodi Allen, E.J. Dionne and Ellen Ratner talk about blogdom. Transcript available here.

THE THEOCON OVER-REACH: Glenn Reynolds seconds my worries about the conservative crack-up. But the point about the religious zealots who run the GOP is that they are immune to calls to restraint or moderation or limits on power. God is on their side.

“Here’s the question I ask of these right-to-lifers, including Vatican bishops: as we enter into Holy Week and we proclaim that death is not triumphant and that with the power of resurrection and the glory of Easter we have the triumph of Christ over death, what are they talking about by presenting death as an unmitigated evil? It doesn’t fit Christian context. Richard McCormick, who was the great Catholic moral theologian of the last 25 years, wrote a brilliant article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1974 called “To Save or Let Die.” He said there are two great heresies in our age (and heresy is a strong word in theology – these are false doctrines). One is that life is an absolute good and the other is that death is an absolute evil. We believe that life was created and is a good, but a limited good. Therefore the obligation to sustain it is a limited one. The parameters that mark off those limits are your capacities to function as a human.” – Jesuit theologian Rev John J. Paris, on how the religious right is deploying heresy in its absolutism in the Terri Schiavo case. I couldn’t agree more. What some of these people are about is not respect for life, but its fetishization.

Another calm and decent column from William F. Buckley Jr. When you read him – an unimpeachable source for what was once the conservative movement – you begin to realize what a crew of zealots and charlatans now occupy the conservative pedestal. But they will fall soon enough. And the hysteria they are now creating will only accelerate their collapse.

I just heard Terri Schiavo’s brother say on CNN that his sister is speaking to him. What did she say? Or is he lying?

The anti-American bigotry still manages to shock.

My take on all the emerging contradictions in the Sunday Times.

THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP II: It’s been a fascinating few days, watching today’s Republicans grapple with their own internal contradictions. It’s been clear now for a while that the religious right controls the base of the Republican party, and that fiscal left-liberals control its spending policy. That’s how you develop a platform that supports massive increases in debt and amending the Constitution for religious right social policy objectives. But the Schiavo case is breaking new ground. For the religious right, states’ rights are only valid if they do not contradict religious teaching. So a state court’s ruling on, say, marriage rights or the right to die, or medical marijuana, must be over-ruled – either by the intervention of the federal Congress or by removing the authority of judges to rule in such cases, or by a Constitutional amendment. Fred Barnes, a born-again Christian conservative makes the point succinctly here:

True, there is an arguable federalism issue: whether taking the issue out of a state’s jurisdiction is constitutional. But it pales in comparison with the moral issue.

You can’t have a clearer statement of the fact that religious right morality trumps constitutional due process. Of course it does. The religious right recognizes one ultimate authority: their view of God. The constitution is only valid in so far as it reflects His holy law. Robert George, the recent recipient of $250,000 from the Bradley Foundation, makes the point more subtly here:

I am not impressed by appeals to “federalism” to protect the decisions of state court judges who usurp the authority of democratically constituted state legislative bodies by interpreting statutes beyond recognition or by invalidating state laws or the actions of state officials in the absence of any remotely plausible argument rooted in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the state or federal constitution. The fact is that, under color of law, Michael Schiavo is seeking to deprive Terri of sustenance because of her disability. Under federal civil-rights statutes, this raises a substantial issue. It cannot be waved away by invoking states’ rights.

The first point seems to me to be blather. The Florida courts have clearly wrestled with this issue many, many times. I haven’t seen an argument that they are behaving outrageously beyond the bounds of their legitimate authority in a very complex case. And George’s appeal to “civil rights” depends, of course, on what you mean by “civil rights.” Where gays are concerned, George’s belief is that gays have no fundamental civil rights with respect to marriage or even private consensual sex. George even believes that the government has a legitimate interest in passing laws that affect masturbation. But when he can purloin the rhetoric of “civil rights” to advance his own big government moralism, he will. The case also highlights – in another wonderful irony – how religious right morality even trumps civil marriage. It is simply amazing to hear the advocates of the inviolability of the heterosexual civil marital bond deny Terri Schiavo’s legal husband the right to decide his wife’s fate, when she cannot decide it for herself. Again, the demands of the religious right pre-empt constitutionalism, federalism, and even the integrity of the family. When conservatism means breaking up the civil bond between a man and his wife, you know it has ceased to be conservative. But we have known that for a long time now. Conservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “We like to think faith is the Viagra of the people,” – British Baptist minister, Steve Chalk.

Just after St Patrick’s Day, we find that the Catholic diocese of San Diego has refused to bury a bar-owner for fear of public scandal. Back in the land of my grandmother, Ireland, bar-owners would be given more lavish funerals than others. What’s going on? The guy was gay. I know of no conceivable theological reason to deny someone a funeral on those grounds. Just bigotry. In a Church that knows better.