Category: Old Dish

Every now and again, I have referred to the James Dobson veto over social policy in the Bush administration. I usually get several emails afterwards, telling me that’s nonsense and that one religious outsider does not have that much clout in the White House. And then you read articles like the WaPo tick-tock on the Miers nomination, and you come across passages like this:

Recognizing that conservatives might not find Miers exciting, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove tried to lock up a few important figures who would back her, mainly James C. Dobson, head of the evangelical Focus on the Family. As Dobson later recalled it, Rove assured him “that Harriet Miers is an evangelical Christian [and] that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life.” That was enough for Dobson, and Dobson’s blessing was enough for Rove.

The person who gets that call is pretty powerful, don’t you think? It’s also clear that Rove used an explicitly religious test for a public office to get his most influential backer’s support. He did something that violates both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. We only know about it because it failed. Next time, when it succeeds, we should at least recognize what we have here: a toxic conflation of politics and religion, one that has also infected the judiciary. It seems to me that using explicitly religious criteria – rather than jurisprudential philosophy – for judicial nominations is yet another sign of how degenerate Bush’s brand of conservatism is. Much of it is not, in fact, conservative at all – but a profound betrayal of the entire tradition. I’m relieved that more and more people seem to be recognizing that.

For Kinsley.

If the New York Times’ version is correct (a big ‘if’ these days), then it seems to me to be a pretty horrible scenario for the president. You have Libby indicted and Cheney thereby under suspicion, with a raft of potential questions heading his way; and you have Rove still under threat from the Grand Jury, fighting for his legal and political life, but required to stay mum (and understandably distracted) if the prosecution continues. You don’t even get a clean break, and a chance to start over. I’ll ask something else: if Fitzgerald doesn’t have enough evidence to indict Rove after two years, is it fair to prolong the agony? Equally, is it fair for Rove to ask the president to keep him on when he is under such a cloud? I’m writing this with only the scantest of clues as to the full scope of what we’ll find out tomorrow. So allow me to revise these instant remarks in due course.

Some more nuances from National Journal’s Murray Waas:

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources…

[A]dministration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

I’m not sure what the salience of this new information is. But if Libby is indicted Friday, a critical question will be the role of the vice-president in the actions of his chief-of-staff. This may be a political rather than legal question. How credible is it that Libby would have done what he did without Cheney’s knowledge? They were joined at the hip in what was, to my mind, an understandable post-9/11 attempt to make sure that the CIA wasn’t being complacent about Saddam’s WMD program. But what if they over-reached in the process? Or unwittingly or wittingly set Colin Powell up at the U.N.? Or stupidly broke the law and lied about it? I don’t see Cheney escaping without damage.

“I’m an avid reader of your blog, but today I was a little upset that you gave a Moore award to Cole for pointing out what so many war supporters simply ignore, that we unleashed more violence in Iraq than was there previously, especially if you just consider the past 10 years of Saddam’s rule. That is obvious and proven. In a moral world, a nation and its leaders take responsibility for that. If Saddam were still in power, thousand upon thousands would still be alive who probably weren’t interested in dying for Saddam facing trial and a thrown together constitution. I’m fine with people arguing that things will be eventually better for the people of Iraq (even if I think that is wishful thinking) but you could at least have the decency to recognize the deaths of the Iraqis and the fact that our action has led to an increase in their collective suffering.”

“You are very civil and I read your blog a lot. I am not so civil but I am a fast learner and you’re a good teacher.
Take the discussion about gay marriage, for example. I love the Milton quote, the debate with the Blankenhorn dude, all the power of reason pointing towards a civil discussion with bright, but bigoted opponents. While I tore up the streets with the rest of them in the late ’80s in the most urgent days of gay/AIDS activism, I have a strong predilection for your approach in this matter. It was all about life and death then, now it’s about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
My only quibble is, actually, with Milton, who elevates companionship above the rest in his analysis of marriage. This is where my experience of gay civil union departs from his ideal and I suspect that it holds true for many gay men. My thoughts on this matter were formed at an impressionable age by reading crazy ass Paglia’s book ‘Sexual Personae’, wherein she identifies hardcore gay male sexuality as being primarily defined by libido unhindered by social constraint (marriage, female ‘civilizing’ influence). Of course, that presupposes that all gay men are hung, horny, masculine types like myself and my partner.
There are, of course, all shades of masculinity and femininity in all gay men, so the principle suffers in translation to the more various aspects of our identities. But I have spent 5 years with the same guy, no cheating on my part and I doubt on his, and staunchly believe that the solid core of our union is the intense fucking. Sorry, we do other things as well like travel, cooking, affection, music and AA meetings. If the sex was not fulfilling, I doubt we would be monogamous, which I define as a requirement for proper marriage.”

Not the best source, I’m afraid. A few academic readers take me to task:

Your use of Milton here is absurd. Milton was practically burned at the stake for his stance on marriage. The obvious corollary to what you quote, which Milton seemed to endorse – that when the ‘conversation’ wasn’t going so well, divorce was a legitimate option – was regarded by almost everyone at the time as radical to the point of heresy. Milton’s views were not ordinary ’17th century Christian’ views. Even in the 19th century, they would have been radical.

I stand corrected. Milton also had a strange personal history:

He marginalized the importance of sex in marriage partially because he felt it to be especially sinful – he was a Puritan early. He was a virgin at the time of his marriage – at 36, when he married a girl twenty years his junior, who left him within a month. While she eventually returned to him, and they had children, his writings on marriage and divorce predate that event.

Milton: way ahead of his time.

“The thing that impresses me most about our editors is that they understand that it’s not all about the book. It’s about the money you can make from that book.” – the publisher of a new book company. A new blogger laments here.

Thanks to all of you who listened to it and wrote me your responses. I was struck by two points. A reader makes one:

I enjoyed listening to your debate with David Blankenhorn. However, I was jarred by one, what appeared to me large, flaw in David’s logic. If marriage is “translegal” and exists as a social institution despite the governng law, how can changing the law to include more married couples have the catastrophic effect on marriage that David and his coterie suggest it will? I know you alluded to the fact briefly during a rebuttal, but it would appear to me a paradox that David will need to think long and hard about before engaging in similar debates in the future.

This is indeed a critical issue. It’s clear that opponents of marriage rights for gay couples have been frustrated in trying to show why those couples do not meet the current standard of what civil marriage is. If the legal standard is that Britney Spears gets to exercize a civil right for 55 hours but a committed 55-year long lesbian couple do not, then you have a hell of a case to make, without appearing to be, well, just prejudiced against the lesbians. So they switch to a “translegal” standard, which, of course, can mean anything they want it to mean. But if it’s trans-legal, why would changing the law, as in Massachusetts, affect it in any way?

THE SHIFTING DEFINITION: At the same time, the opponents of marriage rights for gay couples now argue that child-rearing is the central purpose of civil marriage, that such child-rearing must include a father and a mother, and that therefore the current exclusion of even committed gay couples with children is justified. (They do not fully explain why childless heterosexual marriages nevertheless qualify, except that they “symbolize” the ideal and so get a pass. In fact, of course, childless heterosexual marriages represent the exact opposite of the ideal. They represent a heterosexual couple fully capable of the ideal – but choosing to go against it. Gay couples have no such choice.) But as this blogger points out, making procreation and child-rearing the sine qua non of civil marriage has not, as Blankenhorn would have it, always been the main argument of the gay marriage foes. A few weeks ago, Blankenhorn argued that

Talking about heterosexual intercourse, child bearing, and child well-being is not something that some of us just thought up five minutes ago in response to a political controversy. Instead, you simply can’t talk accurately about marriage without talking about these very things …

Hmmm. Blankenhorn’s own Institute put out a “Statement of Principles,” only five years ago on what marriage is. It has “six important dimensions.” Five of them do not mention children at all. The one dimension in which children do appear – the sixth and last dimension listed – says the following:

Marriage takes two biological strangers and turns them into each other’s next-of-kin. As a procreative bond, marriage also includes a commitment to care for any children produced by the married couple.

Notice how children are optional, not essential. In the statement, the first definition is that “marriage is a legal contract.” Five years later, Blankenhorn is insisting that it is a “trans-legal” institution. Maybe this new argument is a product of five years of deeper thinking. Or maybe it is indeed “something that some of us just thought up five minutes ago in response to a political controversy.”

THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE: Blankenhorn was, of course, right in the first place. The notion that marriage isn’t marriage without procreation and children is far from being the traditional view. Here, for example, is John Milton, hardly a milque-toast Christian, on what marriage is fundamentally about. A reader sent me the passage from Milton’s “Doctrines and Disciplines of Divorce”:

“And what his [God’s] chiefe end was of creating woman to be joynd with man, his own instituting words declare, and are infallible to informe us what is mariage, and what is no mariage, unlesse we can think them set there to no purpose: It is not good, saith he, that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him. From which words so plain, lesse cannot be concluded, nor is by any learned Interpreter, then that in Gods intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of mariage: for we find here no expression so necessarily implying carnall knowledge, as this prevention of lonelines to the mind and spirit of man.”

Here, in the seventeenth century, is a Christian arguing that the divine, “trans-legal” meaning of marriage, its central meaning, is companionship. Sex is peripheral, let alone procreation. And Blankenhorn and Gallagher would have you believe that the idea of marriage as a form of lasting faithful friendship built out of romantic love, in which children are optional, is something invented in modern times. Hooey.

This is an interesting tidbit from Byron York, who has great sources in the White House:

According to informed sources, this is how the last day of the Miers nomination played out. Yesterday morning, President Bush met with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, and others at the White House, where they discussed the problems facing the nomination. There were staff conversations between the majority leader’s office and the White House throughout the day. There was a meeting in Dick Cheney’s office in the afternoon, with the vice president and nomination strategists taking part, in which the fading support for the nomination was discussed. And then in the early evening, Frist had a phone conversation with White House Chief of Staff Andy Card in which Frist gave what’s being called a frank assessment of the nomination’s prospects. Not long afterward, a final decision was made, and Miers called the president at 8:30 p.m. to say she would withdraw, and the formal announcement was set for this morning.

My italics. Who made the decision? Cheney? Bush? Doesn’t this strongly imply that the president or vice-president decided to pull the plug on Miers and then had Miers “decide on her own” to withdraw? Face-saving can be so elaborate sometimes, can’t it? Especially if you’re constitutively unable to concede error. This was probably a necessary move – in order to consolidate the base in response to the looming possibility of indictments. The fight is on. And whom Bush picks to replace Miers will be a very interesting insight into how he sees the remainder of his presidency.