Category: Old Dish

“My Islamic History class spent 45 minutes discussing Iraq and the atrocities tonight (my course ends with Napoleon in 1798, but this is one class where I let the kids talk – what they learn impacts directly on current events.)
Here is something no one has noted, but my kids did. Commentators keep seeing a link between Shia states (Iran) and wider Islamists movements such as Al-Queda.”. There is no way that the bombers in Iraq could justify what they did without defining the Shia as “kaffir” (unbelievers). For the past two decades a kind of “ecumenical” Muslim movement has tried to get beyond this. This is now shattered.
I am not sure how this will play out. For a Catholic like me, Shi’ite Islam is much more emotionally similar to Catholicism than Sunni Islam. Shi’ism also has the potentiality to be more progressive. Defining the Shia as a sort of “Muslim extreme” has been as major mistake in the West.
What happened yesterday would be comparable to the Ulster Volunteer Force (or whatever) exploding a bomb at Lourdes. The emotional impact on the Shia is almost unimaginable. I repeat: this is a massive massive event.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

I’ve been thinking and reading some more about the Sunni/al Qaeda massacres at Shiite mosques in Iraq. It’s undoubtedly true that these mass murders are designed to bring civil war and chaos to Iraq. But they are thereby also designed to thwart Shiite majority rule in a future democratic Iraq. Such a democratic experiment could obviously lead to potential Shiite uprisings all over the Arab world, as this persecuted sect seeks their long-lost right to self-government. What we could be seeing, in fact, is the beginning of a broader Shiite uprising, that would, in part, be a result of American intervention and would pit the Shi’a against al Qaeda. What would be the future ramifications of that? For policy toward Shiite Iran, for example? And for policy toward Saudi Arabia, a Wahhabist dictatorship with a large Shi’a population? For al Qaeda’s ability to focus on the West as a target? Just asking.

LETTING ZARQAWI GO: I’m at a loss to understand how the Bush administration failed to act decisively to take out Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi when it had several opportunities to do so. This report is deeply disturbing. I wonder how killing Zarqawi could have conceivably impeded our bid to topple Saddam; and why the White House aborted the military operations. Money quote:

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

The administration flubbed several subsequent opportunities subsequently – and hundreds are now dead as a result. Maybe there is some explanation here that I don’t yet know. But it seems to me that if we blame Clinton for not getting Osama when he could have (and we should), then the blame on the Bush team for letting Zarqawi through the net should be just as intense. What exactly is the real excuse?

I am moved beyond words by the sight of gay couples taking their lives and rights into their own hands and getting civil marriage licenses. I believe they will be vindicated in the light of history. But I also believe in the rule of law. That law will protect civil marriage for gays as it does now for straights; and disrespecting it undermines it for all of us, now and in the future. Where such civil marriages can legitimately take place under the law (as appears to be the case in Oregon), there’s no problem. Where they are being used to dramatize current oppression, they are justifiable only so long as the officials responsible are prepared to face all the legal consequences (as in New Paltz, with the remarkable young mayor). That is called legitimate civil disobedience: violating the law in order to be arrested. And if they are a means to challenge discrimination and are performed with the full intent of abiding by the final legal and constitutional judgment, then that too seems to me to be legitimate, (as in San Francisco). It is how change happens. If a state decides to recognize civil marriages for gays performed in another state, then that too is perfectly within the law (as yesterday’s momentous ruling by Eliot Spitzer revealed.) But it is vital in our struggle for legal equality that we do not, as gay people, show contempt for the rule of law itself. It is our only recourse and our only respite. Legitimate civil disobedience is one thing. Blatant disrespect for the law is another. We are on the verge of a real and solid victory for equality in Massachusetts. It has been achieved through years of legal and political argument and civil demonstrations. We need patience now as well as anger, calm as well as determination. Above all, we must respect the law itself. It is the fabric of our democracy. If we trivialize or violate its importance, civil rights are meaningless. For gay people and for everyone.

THE BIOETHICS COUNCIL FLAP, ETC: The best wrap-up is, as so often, at Glenn’s. Don’t miss his post on the flagging “war-base” for Bush either. My own disillusionment with the president is not, despite appearances, all to do with marriage. I first worried with the aircraft carrier stunt, the post-war mess in Iraq, then the fiscal insouciance, and the more general bossiness that this unlibertarian president was exhibiting. The message chaos of the least few months, capped by that dreadful Meet the Press interview, was unnerving, to say the least. The solution? We need to hear what our future strategy is in the war: who we’re targeting next. We need to see more clarity on Iraq, more commitment on al Qaeda, more explanation of what we’re doing and where we’re going. I’m tired with hearing recitations of the president’s past conduct and want to hear more about the future. Churchill didn’t spend 1943 reminding people of what a great leader he had been in 1940. In contrast, the first Bush campaign ads are all retrospective, nostalgic even. If they’re the campaign, he’ll lose.

Here’s Tom DeLay criticizing John Kerry for fiscal irresponsibility:

“He’s not even trying to be fiscally responsible,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas.
“He is either insincere about his new spending, dishonest about his new taxes, uninterested in the new deficit, or they just didn’t teach him arithmetic at the European boarding school that he went to.”

I’m not going to tackle DeLay’s criticism of Kerry as such. But one has to ask: where has DeLay been these past few years? While his party has controlled the House, Senate and White House, we have seen a faster build-up of debt, a greater spending explosion and more entitlement spending than any administration since LBJ. And this man is attacking Kerry? DeLay adds whole universes of meaning to the word “shameless.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: “Here’s the dirty little secret. It will never get a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress.” – Senator John McCain, on the proposed religious right amendment to the Constitution.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “America is the symbol of freedom. Everybody wants to go live there, or just to go there and have fun. It’s a mixture of people from different backgrounds and its ruling system is not imposed on you. And people are more accepting there than they are in Europe, where we feel like strangers.” – a young Iranian called Noushin, from a recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique.

QUOTE OF THE DAY III: “I have been a Republican and a Christian my whole life. I believe that national security is the #1 most important issue in America – it is, to be blunt, the thing that makes any other issue possible in the first place. I do not buy the loss of jobs argument, I think tax cuts work, and I think abortion is wrong, I still support the Iraq war and feel that those 500 plus brave men and women saved untolled millions from horrible death, and I even agree that activist judges should simply be arrested and dismissed from office. I believe all this and right now, I don’t know if I’m voting for Bush.
I don’t know because this political ploy is so overtly mean-spirited and opportunistic it that my own sense of fairness and decency is far more offended by the attack than whatever defense could be made of it. I can’t believe I am the only one, even the only Christian to feel this way.” – blogger Ozymandias.

Here’s an astonishing result. The Christian Broadcasting Network has an unscientific online poll on the religious right amendment. The result? As of my checking in late last night, a 61 percent against amending the constitution, with 38 percent for. maybe I should stop referring to this amendment as one sponsored by the religious right. Even they don’t want it.

UGLY AND INTEMPERATE? James Taranto argues that the following passages from my blog are ugly and intemperate:

The religious fanatics of 9/11 despise the American Constitution exactly because it guarantees equality under the law, freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. The war I have supported is a war, ultimately, in defense of that Constitution. .-.-. The sanctity of the Constitution is what we are fighting for. We’re not fighting just to defend ourselves. We are fighting to defend a way of life: pluralism, freedom, equality under the law. You cannot defend the Constitution abroad while undermining it at home. .-.-.
It’s the president who has to answer to the charge that in wartime, he chose to divide this country over the most profound symbol there can be: the Constitution itself. I refuse, in short, to be put in a position where I have to pick between a vital war and fundamental civil equality. The two are inextricable. They are the same war. And this time, the president has picked the wrong side. He will live to be ashamed that he did.

One question: how? The context of these remarks is my attempt to argue against the notion that I should support the president because the war on terror is more important than the president’s support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay citizens from civil marriage. My point is that I consider the fight for civil rights indistinguishable in my eyes from the fight for freedom abroad. And I consider the way in which the president has chosen to raise the stakes over civil marriage to a national, constitutional level – where it does not and need not belong – to be recklessly divisive while we are at war. How is that ugly? Dennis Prager equated gay couples seeking civil marriage with terrorists. I simply bemoan the fact that a president I have loyally supported during a vital war should decide to endorse profound discrimination against a group of Americans. I fail to see any comparison. And I fail to see the slightest ugliness or intemperance. Except in Taranto’s ugly and intemperate remarks.

I’ve been following same-sex marriage developments for fifteen years, and I keep getting surprised. The groundswell of support – in San Francisco, New Mexico, New Paltz, and now Portland, Oregon – has stunned me. What I didn’t anticipate is how empowering this issue has become for gay people and how energizing it has been for their heterosexual peers. We keep seeing straight poeple under a certain age seeing this as their generation’s civil rights movement. Now we see black legislators in Georgia putting aside religious objections to stop what they recognize as an attack on a small minority by forces of exclusion and intolerance they have been attacked by in the past. Bush’s religious right amendment has also united Democrats behind this issue in ways they never were before. Attacking the amendment is now an applause line in John Kerry’s election speech – and he will get every gay vote and every vote from their families and friends. Meanwhile, key Republicans, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, have come out and opposed this unnecessary meddling with the Constitution. Even the vice-president cannot manage to explicitly endorse such graffiti on the founding document of this country. What the religious right amendment is doing is splitting the Republican coalition and uniting the Democrats. What the religious right did to destroy the Republican party in a state like California, they are now trying to do across the country as a whole. They are not only on the wrong side of history; and on the wrong side of morality; they are putting the Republican party on the losing side of politics. They must and will be stopped.

We know from the released memo that may or may not have been written by Islamist mass murderer, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, what the strategy of the enemy now is in Iraq. It is to execute coordinated mass slaughters in order to divide Sunni and Shi’a even further and so precipitate a civil war to tear Iraq apart; and at the same time to direct public hostility and blame toward the coalition forces. It’s too soon to tell how successful they have been with their horrifyingly sacrilegious slaughter yesterday. But the attacks are text-book. I persist in regarding them as indications that we are in fact slowly winning the war for a transition to democracy in Iraq, or at least a polity which is constitutional and remarkably free by Middle Eastern standards. But it is equally hard not to be concerned at the impact such mass violence can have. After all, it was acomplished by only a handful of terrorists. But there is a sliver of hope. We are extremely fortunate to have been able to capture one of these Jihadists – possibly a Yemeni, according to John F. Burns. We have to do all we can to demonstrate who exactly is behind these murders and to explain to the Iraqi people that it is foreigners and ideologues completely alien to mainstream Islam who are responsible. A huge amount now rests on our ability to do so.

It struck me as a strong one on domestic issues. On energy independence, and protecting the Constitution, it was a winner. He looks like a potential president. But it was deeply worrying in one respect. The war on terror was barely mentioned. This on a day of appalling carnage in Iraq. I fear this man simply doesn’t get it. No one should support him for the highest office in the land until he proves he understands our enemy; and demonstrates that he will get up every day in the Oval Office to see how he can take the fight to the Islamists. I don’t see that fire right now. In fact, I don’t even see a flicker. It’s a deal-breaker for me. (Just as attacking civil rights and playing politics with the Constitution is a deal-breaker as far as Bush is concerned.) Kerry has several months to prove otherwise. But it wasn’t an auspicious start.

A LEGEND RETIRES: I grew up listening to Alistair Cooke’s peerless “Letter from America.” I had a ritual. On Friday nights after I got back from school (I had an hour and a half commute on public transportation every day), I’d have dinner and then slink upstairs to take a long bath. Cooke’s letter lasted the length of my bath: fifteen minutes. By then, the water was getting cold and my siblings were banging on the door. It was an oasis of calm, fascination, and piercing intelligence. How he sustained that quality for so long is awe-inspiring. He was still at it in his 90s, until he retired this week. He gave me my first understanding of America – that great, mysterious giant that loomed across an ocean. And I will always be grateful. He is irreplaceable. But his example of translating this wonderful and completely baffling place to the British has been an inspiration for me as I write each week for the Sunday Times in London. He made me understand what a privilege it is to convey something of this country’s diversity, paradox and exhilarating energy. And how impossible it is to come close to his wit, erudition and extraordinarily good judgment.

It was a fascinating CNN interview, in which the vice-president pointedly didn’t renounce his previous beliefs about letting civil marriage be dealt with by the states. When asked if he supported the president’s decision to ban gays from equal rights in the constitution itself, Cheney didn’t say he supported the amendment. He said he supported the president. It struck me as a very careful use of words. And after all, which father would want to explicitly consign his own daughter to second class citizenship? One thing that’s an unnoticed factor in this debate: the many Republicans who have gay kids or gay family members. There are many more of them than you might think – and I know plenty of them. But that’s what the religious right demands: that parents reject their own gay children by writing discrimination against them into the Constitution itself. And they call themselves “pro-family.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY: From the younger generation:

“So I’m doing my usual morning-shower think-time routine, and what’s occurred to me a thousand times before rises again out of the precaffeinated fog: the gay-marriage issue, the host of gay issues, will register as a blip on the historical radar in thirty years, maybe less. Then I think, I should bother Andrew Sullivan with this. Not that you haven’t considered it before – obviously you have, as it was right there on your blog this morning. But people my age (I’m way under forty), especially people younger than I (not so under thirty) are learning to cope with, and learn from, difference in a way our parents never did. It’s a simple fact of life in a relatively diverse, democratic culture and it was born out by my own college experience. Raised Catholic. Went to Catholic grade school. All-boys Catholic high school. Never knew – to my naxefve little mind – a gay person. Arrived at college (Catholic, no less), and suddenly there they were. Out. And, soon I realized, people. By the end of four years, more students came out. Homosexuality became an openly discussed issue on the campus. Old Jesuits wrote cranky, natural-law-ridden letters to the school paper (I sometimes rebutted them). A gay student group formed, and made noise about a lack of funding and space. The administration quivered and stayed put. And suddenly it seemed, well, like a mini-movement. Nothing on the order of what many early-middle-aged gay people experienced in their own situations, but for these kids, a lot of them Catholic, it was a seismic shift of self-understanding. And their friends, people like me, were taken along for the ride. We heteros learned with them, and from them. This isn’t relativism. It’s sociology.”

I couldn’t agree more, and was talking about this with Hitch yesterday in what turned into a five-hour lunch. When you visit college campuses as I do all the time, you realize that the gay issue is basically over for the younger generation. They take the presence of openly gay people for granted; it seems obvious that gays should have the right to marry. That’s another reason why this constitutional amendment is so toxic an idea. Within a few years, it will seem absurd that we even thought about it.

THE MAINE EVENTS: I’m doing a world tour of Maine today and tomorrow, speaking on marriage rights. I’ll be speaking at the Page Commons at Cotter Union at Colby College, Waterville, tonight at 8 pm, and at Chase Hall, Bates College, Lewiston, at 7.30 pm Thursday night. All are welcome.

“America is engaged in two wars for the survival of its civilization. The war over same-sex marriage and the war against Islamic totalitarianism are actually two fronts in the same war – a war for the preservation of the unique American creation known as Judeo-Christian civilization.
One enemy is religious extremism. The other is secular extremism.
One enemy is led from abroad. The other is directed from home.
The first war is against the Islamic attempt to crush whoever stands in the way of the spread of violent Islamic theocracies, such as al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and Hamas. The other war is against the secular nihilism that manifests itself in much of Western Europe, in parts of America such as San Francisco and in many of our universities… All this explains why the passions are so intense regarding same-sex marriage. Most of the activists in the movement to redefine marriage wish to overthrow the predominance of Judeo-Christian values in American life. Those who oppose same-sex marriage understand that redefining the central human institution marks the beginning of the end of Judeo-Christian civilization.” – Dennis Prager, TownHall.com. So now gay people – many of whom are conservative and people of faith and are fighting simply to commit to one another under the law – are the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden. This is Jerry Falwell territory.