Category: Old Dish

The front-page story on a modern seminary in the Times today struck me as an important one. It echoes what others are telling me – that, in fact, today’s screening process is far better than it used to be, that more openness is slowly ending the celibacy and sexuality closet, and that better – if far fewer – priests are the result. I hope this trend gathers pace – but it suggests that, in an odd way, the current crisis is less about today than about the seminaries of a generation or so ago. It took time for the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s to be assimilated into the Church’s pastoral training of priests. While priests were living in a world where celibacy was increasingly seen as morbidly weird, the Church forgot that it needed to aggressively reach out to men for exactly those reasons. So it left them to cope on their own – with occasionally disastrous results. Now the Church beginning to deal with this issues – candidly and forthrightly. Far better than simply ratcheting back the clock fifty years, assuming celibacy is a given and needn’t be discussed at length, and pretending the world is as it was in the era some Church conservatives so admire.

THE OSCARS: Who cares?

“Being Dutch, living in the city where Pim Fortuyn has caused a landslide in the city council after the last local elections, having been on the university where Fortuyn was forced to give back his professor title at the time I was studying there, I have to say you emphasize a very small and rather unimportant aspect of his victory march through Holland. The man is unable to set up any government at all. Period. He’s not hijacking the postmodern left, he’s a populist – he’s postmodern in a sense he’s got no direction at all but just the opposite direction of wherever the winds blows.” – from a Dutch reader. This – and your take on Alterman on the Letters Page.

“Here’s a little blurb from Bruni that caught my eye: ‘McCain’s hyper-activist foreign policy and rogue state rollback program, under which the United States would dramatically ramp up efforts to arm and finance rebel forces in any country with a leader we found noxious, could be more than a little scary, but few reporters sounded any alarms.’ In other words, McCain was the only candidate talking proactively about the war on terrorism in the 2000 campaign? Amble into that.” – from a Book Club reader. More thoughts on Bruni on the Book Club Page today.

In the last couple of days, two things have been revealed in the Middle East. The first is that the Iranian-Palestinian link is now incontrovertible. Iran is using the Intifada to wage an unofficial and undeclared war on Israel. I wrote about such a connection immediately after the recovery of the Iran-sponsored boat ferrying serious weapons to Palestinian terrorists was seized by the Israelis a couple of months ago. When such reports appear on the front page of the New York Times, as they did Sunday, you know there’s not much doubt of their veracity. The second fact is that, despite a major climb-down by the United States, Palestinian terrorist violence continues unabated while negotiations continue. If Arafat is allowed to travel to the Arab summit, he will have proved that his Arab terrorist alliances will not be used against him, that terrorist violence, far from making his life more difficult, works in getting the attention of the United States, and that the U.S. is so rattled by Arab opinion, that the Palestinians now have a near-veto over the timing of our confrontation with Iraq. Game, set and match to Arafat. And president William Jefferson Bush keeps helping him.

Mickey Kaus is worried that, inspired by the example of a buzz-cut conservative homo intellectual in Holland, I might jump into politics. Fear not, Mickster. But I have to say that the example of Pim Fortuyn is instructive. It has always seemed to me that the natural politics for homosexuals is conservative-libertarian. Homosexuals have historically never done well under repressive leftist or rightist regimes; they are far more likely to flourish under limited government, low taxes, and a robust foreign policy. What the current war has further done, I think, is reveal how those alleged allies (in leftist fantasies) of gay people in the developing world are nothing of the sort. The “oppressed” of the Islamic world, with whom the gay left identifies, would throw most actual homosexuals off tall buildings or bury them under rubble. Islamo-fascism is one of the most powerful and terrifying homophobic movements since Soviet and Cuban communism and Francoite or Nazi fascism. So how on earth have some gay leftists instinctively sided with the allegedly oppressed other? The first political principle for any gay movement worthy of the name is freedom. That’s what the left doesn’t understand; and that’s why their hold on the gay population is tenuous and eroding fast. Have you noticed how many freedom-loving intellectuals of our time are actually gay? Think Camille Paglia. Think Bjorn Lomborg of “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” Think Jonathan Rauch of “Kindly Inquisitors.” Or Bruce Bawer and Norah Vincent. Think Wally Olson of “Overlawyered.com.” Pim Fortuyn is just another sign of the natural political interests of homosexuals trumping the hijacking of their concerns and culture by the post-modern left. And if you want to examine the depth of the field, and see why it’s not just a few celebrity thinkers, click here.

LEN GARMENT’S SMARTS: You probably read Bill Keller’s attempt to understand Bush today. He writes about conservatives as if they were Martians he had to go talk to in order to find out how they might conceivably think of the president. One word: groan. (And the sole Bush reporter at the Times with real access and insight, Frank Bruni, is taken off the beat, and his book given condescending reviews by his own paper.) But then there’s this column by Len Garment. It takes guts for a Jew to say in public that the deeper problem of the Nixon-Graham tapes is the violation of privacy that they represent. Good for Garment. If we destroy, as we are doing, the ability of people to say things – outrageous, beautiful, bigoted, ugly – in private, without fearing they could easily be made public, we are essentially eroding a very basic pillar of liberal democracy. We’re all human – and much of it isn’t pretty. Liberalism’s genius is to allow a space for such unpretty things to be expressed without pinning them to our public identity. Liberalism at its core means that our political system does not demand that we live an identical life in public and private. It gives us a freedom to invent and reinvent ourselves without the whole world watching our every move. Skeptics will decry such privacy protection as a defense of hypocrisy. Every now and again, that’s true. But more generally, such privacy allows for the living of complex, rich, mature and sophisticated lives, for the necessary venting of feelings and emotions that are better vented than repressed. It allows for friendship, for the trust that discretion requires, for the construction of human character far richer than the two-dimensional cut-outs that totalitarian regimes – which abolish the public-private distinction – allow. That’s the kernel of Garment’s point. And he’s a good man for making it.

Just when I was beginning to lose faith in my religious tradition, I have to come across a website like this. Enjoy.

Lucianne’s readers lay into Alterman. I’d correct the many factual errors, sly smears, half-truths and innuendo in his hatchet-job. But that would assume that reasonable readers believe Alterman could write an honest piece in the first place. Meanwhile, I’ve got a great new slogan for the site: “Dangerous – makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi.” It’s time to replace dear Professor Krugman at last. Stay tuned.

I’ve read and re-read Pope John-Paul II’s statement on the crisis in the Western Catholic Church. None of it is wrong; some of it reflects his obvious holiness; but it is clearly deeply worrying. He doesn’t get it. Nor do his officious and prickly representatives. Every serial sexual abuser in the priesthood and every hierarchical enabler must go. And then we must debate openly and bravely how to remake the priesthood in ways that reaffirm its core purpose. I want married priests, women priests, and openly gay priests – all upholding the sacred responsibility of the church to protect the young in its care. But what I fear is that the authorities are still playing defensive; that the Pope is incapable – for reasons of sheer illness, age and outlook – to do what is necessary. Peggy Noonan, in an impressive piece today, hopes it is the first of many statements by the Pope to address this issue. I fear he is simply not up to the task. I admire him greatly as a pope but I admire Ronald Reagan and I still don’t think he should be president today. Wojtila is a member the Reagan-Thatcher generation. Reagan and Thatcher are both sick and old – as, sadly, is the pope. Given the way we select pontiffs, we are leaderless at a time of profound crisis. Which is why we, the laity, must lead. For we are the church too.

O’REILLY FOR GAY ADOPTIONS: I don’t agree with everything Bill O’Reilly says here. But I do admire his ability to think clearly about mature, responsible gay people, to eschew the easy gay-baiting of some on the social right, and to argue for what are the genuine needs of children that can, in many cases, only be served by good, gay parents.

“I notice one reader finds me cynical. About politics, about the theater of presidential campaigns, I suppose I am, largely but not entirely. I would like to believe, as the reader does, that a politician’s core values and character and skills are visible beneath all the slogans and pageantry, and that the presidents that Americans elect take up residence in the White House because of voters’ accurate assessments about all of that. But –” Continued in the Book Club today.

SURPRISE!: The lefty poison-spreader, Eric Alterman, hates andrewsullivan.com! (This site is ‘dangerous.’ I make ‘Henry Kissinger look like St Francis of Assisi.’ He’s got such a gift for analogy, that Eric.) And Jim Romenesko – guardian of gay left media orthodoxy – links! My morning is complete. Can Michelangelo Signorile be far behind?

I don’t know why I took so long to read Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest piece from Kurdistan in the New Yorker. I started reading it coming back on the plane from Miami and I’m still reeling. It’s easily the most important piece of journalism produced this year: judiciously reported, pellucidly written, morally strict. It starts with Goldberg’s journey into the fledgling region of Kurdistan, the autonomous semi-state constructed by the Kurds betrayed and rejected by every major power for centuries. He reports on the horrors of what Saddam did in Halabja, and what, given a chance, Saddam and his proxies would do in this country and Israel if he is not stopped. What Goldberg shows is that Saddam’s chemical attacks on his own citizens were not merely exercises in genocidal evil. They were target practice:

“An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja, military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing in order to study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests, an experiment on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. ‘The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as ‘How far are the dead from the canisters?””

Even those who survived are hideously deformed, infertile, or sick. The children of the region die slow and awful deaths from lung cancer. No one can say we haven’t been warned.

THE AL QAEDA LINK: The first sign of real hope for those on the frontline of this maniac’s ambitions was president Bush’s state of the union speech, confirming its status in my mind as the Iron Curtain moment of the 21st Century. Bush’s address, according to Goldberg,

“had had an electric effect on every Kurd I met who heard [it] … General Simko Dizayee, the chief of staff of the peshmerga, told me, ‘Bush’s speech filled our hearts with hope.'”

But Goldberg’s key contribution is to show, convincingly to my mind, how logical and likely it is that Saddam is now in league with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to bring these awful weapons of mass destruction to the cities and towns where you and I live. The key linkage, Goldberg suggests, is a small fanatical Islamo-fascist terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam, operating in the hinterlands of Kurdistan. Goldberg writes:

“The allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.”

It also seems to me to mean something quite simple. Even if it is merely possible that these allegations are true, the consequences are obvious. This war has just begun. Afghanistan was a preliminary. Iraq is the issue. We must act – and quickly, and decisively and with no possibility for error. I trust this president to get that balance right, and was relieved to hear his renewed commitment yesterday. The phony war is nearing its end. The real and vital conflict will soon be here. And the sooner it comes, the less likelihood of the unthinkable occurring.

(For an online Q and A with Goldberg about his article, click here.)

NIXON AND NOW: Perusing former president Nixon’s deranged and taped harangues against Jews, gays and weed today, reminds me again of what a disgraceful president he was – catastrophic in domestic policy, mediocre abroad. But it says something, doesn’t it, that a website like this that routinely defends Jews, gays and weed would now be regarded by many as conservative. Progress, no?