Category: Old Dish

“You seem to think we, as a society, are well on our way to a utopia where homosexuality is a non-issue. You are quite wrong. The proof is the way the Right jumps on the pedophilia issue and tries to smear the entire gay community at every opportunity. It is insulting, unfair, and painful and I hate them for it.” This and a pro-war liberal poo-poos Kuttner on the Letters Page.

“Whatever Bruni’s style and political predilections, he is an honest and perceptive reporter.” That’s Ann Coulter’s rave review of Frank Bruni’s book on FrontPage magazine. Coulter plugging a New York Times reporter’s book? Doesn’t that make you curious? There’s still time to get the book in time for next Wednesday’s discussion. What are you waiting for?

Jonathan Last thinks of blogs as a way to prevent the Internet delivering the equivalent of network news. He may be onto something.

NOTHING UNHEALTHY ABOUT POT: That’s the British government’s official judgment. Amazing when bureaucrats discover something everyone else has known for decades.

Cheney chugs along; Bush ratchets up warning on Iraq; Congress backs gas-guzzlers; Mugabe says Mugabe won; the “Virgil of TV Guides” – he dead.

BUSH VERSUS ISRAEL: So Arafat wins, after all. He quit Camp David because he believed he could get a better deal by ramping up the violence. He is now one of many terrorist leaders waging a sustained war on Israel, a war that Israel, even unhindered, would have a hard time winning. He has now spectacularly proven his point that terrorism works, that a small democracy like Israel has no right to defend itself adequately, and that eventually a great power like the United States will intervene to rein in the Israelis when Arafat wants. It has worked like magic. The only desperately depressing news is that president George W. Bush has enabled Arafat to do this. It’s okay for us to fight terror, apparently. It isn’t okay for Israel. The difference, according to the president, is that there is a structure for peace in Israel (a structure Bush kept referring to as Tenet or Mitchell in his press conference yesterday, a beltway abbreviation that made me immediately think of his dad). Here’s W’s quote: “Unlike our war against al Qaeda, there is a series of agreements in place that will lead to peace. And, therefore, we’re going to work hard to see if we can’t, as they say, get into Tenet and eventually Mitchell.” What on earth does that mean? Agreements mean nothing when you are dealing with terrorists. The best interpretation is that Bush is being tactical. In order to deal with Iraq, we need to say these things to keep the Arab world (however duplicitously) part of the coalition. Once we have dealt with Iraq, we can let the Israelis deal more firmly with Arafat, Hamas, and Hezbollah. But I don’t buy it. What we need to be saying now more than ever is that terrorism will not be tolerated – anywhere, by anyone. There’s a whiff of James Baker about all this wobbling. If I were an Israeli fighting for my country, I’d be truly afraid of what lies ahead.

REBELS?: “Listening to NPR this morning, I was struck how they kept referring to the Al Qaeda troops hiding out in the caves as “Al Qaeda rebels.” Just what are they rebelling against?” Continued on today’s Letters Page, along with Oscar reminiscences and a candid homily at mass.

STOP SEXISM NOW!: It would take a dozen books, endless studies and mounds of arguments to even make a dent on some of the silliness that now passes, alas, for feminism in some quarters. But the Onion makes its case against denying nature in one inspired little article.

THE PURGE CONTINUES: The reactionaries want to hound gays out of the priesthood. Perhaps their model should be the army. Gay soldiers are being harassed and thrown out at record rates. At the camp where one gay soldier was recently held down and beaten to death by his comrades with a baseball bat, harassment, far from declining, has soared and discharges have gone through the roof. It’s essentially a camp where gay-bashing is a sport. Here’s the money-quote:

Kanellis and Col. Tom Begines, chief of Army media relations, attributed the large number of gay discharges at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division, to a policy decision made after Winchell’s murder to expedite the processing of gay discharges for the safety of gay service members. “The increase should be viewed as preventative rather than punitive,” Begines said. “All of that, I think, is to the Army’s credit.”

Get that? In order to prevent another murder by its own soldiers, the army brass don’t discipline or train the potential culprits, they throw out the potential victims. And they want credit for their actions! I was once hopeful that some kind of modus vivendi could be achieved on this issue, as in almost every other civilized military in the world, from Britain to Israel. No longer. I always knew that the U.S. military was designed to threaten people with violence. I never realized the rationale applied to its own soldiers as well.

SPARING ROD: How to respond to Rod Dreher’s latest attempt to blame all the Church’s current troubles on homosexuals? I should begin by saying I think bringing my sexual life – or Rod’s sexual life – into this discussion is highly unhelpful. I have no desire to know whether Rod is “sexually active” in ways the church doesn’t approve – whether he uses contraception, for example, or has ever masturbated or had pre-marital sex. It’s none of my business and is irrelevant to the discussion. So is my sex life. That said, he homes in on a couple of difficult issues. The first is whether the Church has a single unchanging doctrine on every matter of morals which every Catholic is obliged to assent to and practice at all times. This is a common view among pre-Vatican II Catholics, ex-Catholics and non-Catholics. It’s wrong. The Church is not a democracy, but neither is it a Vatican dictatorship. The Second Vatican Council specifically carved out a larger area for the laity to discuss, reflect upon and debate matters of morals, of the application of broad principles to particular issues, and so on. We – not just the Pope – are also the Church. For example, most Catholics find the complete bar on any birth control to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bizarre. When the Church imposes something by diktat that the faithful cannot square with their own moral sense, experience and prayerful reflection, two things happen. The laity ignores it; and the hierarchy loses credibility. To a lesser extent, the Church’s teachings on re-marriage, the role of women, celibacy, and homosexuality are also so theologically muddled and troubling upon inspection that they have generated considerable debate. Bottom line: I don’t think such debate is faithless or un-Catholic. In fact, I think we have a duty to question our faith in order to understand and fully believe it. Those of us who have stayed in the Church despite finding its teachings about our lives incoherent, cruel and unpersuasive are no less faithful than others. And that goes for the many, good, pastoral priests who when faced with real human beings make accommodations that no distant prelate in Rome can or should second-guess.

ONE SWISH TOO FAR: I’m as troubled as Rod by the notion that there may be some cliques of gay priests acting out or up or whatever. They need to be reined in, but also to get real – not phony – help, from a hierarchy that can barely manage to acknowledge their existence let alone find ways to understand their unique challenges and difficulties. Unfortunately, the closet that Rod supports makes such help extremely difficult and intensifies the problem. That’s why I want more gay priests to come out – not just for their sakes but
for the Church’s. You cannot deal with a problem until you have faced it. And in order for these priests to come out, the Church must stop its systematic discrimination and institutional panic around them. It really is a two-way street. My objection to Rod’s tirades is that they conflate all these issues into one easy demon – gay/pedophile/ephebophile/liberal/faithless priests. There are, in fact, three separate issues here: sex abuse in the clergy, which has far more to do with abuse of power than anyone’s sexual orientation; heterodox priests; and gay priests. I’m for firm treatment of the first; mild tolerance of the second, as long as they don’t openly disrespect Church authority; and acceptance of the third, as long as celibacy is both enforced and enabled by greater counseling and support. The reason I take umbrage at some of Rod’s tone is that the conflation of homosexuality and child or minor abuse is so deeply rooted in the public consciousness and so false that it constitutes a permanent libel against which gay men and women have to contend with every day. Guess what? I object to having my sexual and emotional orientation reduced to child-abuse. Wouldn’t you?

SMEAR-JOB: But let’s say most of the priest sex abuse cases are same-sex. Doesn’t that imply some homosexual connection? Well, try another analogy. At Tailhook, all the sexual abuse was opposite sex. Does that mean that heterosexual soldiers are the problem? Or try another. Much incest is committed by fathers against daughters. Does that make fatherhood suspect? Or another. The vast majority of sexual harassment cases in the workplace are of subordinate women by superior men. Does that make male heterosexuality the real problem? In these cases, the answer is obvious: of course not. We distinguish between individuals who do evil things and individuals who do not. The attempt to conflate the two, especially with regard to a tiny and long-persecuted minority, is simply wrong. And the Church’s authentic teaching with regard to same-sex sexual abuse is equally emphatic: of course there is no intrinsic connection between it and homosexual orientation. And the attempt to say so – to target homosexuality as the key problem behind the recent scandals – is an appalling smear-job, designed to deflect attention from the real problem. It works because it manages to press certain buttons in the public mind, buttons that have led to the persecution of gays for centuries. But smearing a whole group of people, peddling stereotypes like “swishy priests” or “lavender mafias” or “effete” clerics is not only unworthy of Rod. It is far more immoral than any non-abusive sexual failing could ever be.

I’ve just read Matt Drudge’s scoop on the Rosie O’Donnell interview. This strikes me as a big story. O’Donnell has gone the whole way – explaining in moving, honest, accessible ways how gay people exist, how they threaten no-one, how they want to live lives of dignity and respect, care for their loved ones, bring up their kids with security, and be a full and equal part of society. It’s a big story because she insists, as she should, that being gay isn’t all that she is, but is a central part of who she is. And it’s big because her audience – of middle and lower-middle class women and men – love her and respect her. They will now see a gay person as someone normal, sane, funny, and occasionally dumb. That’s way better than a scary abstraction. I must say I feel bad for having prodded O’Donnell to do this before she was ready. She picked her time and made her case. Perhaps some of the irrational fear and loathing that so many have to deal with even before they get to the starting line in life will now dissipate a little further. I certainly hope so. Now all we need are a few more openly gay men to add to the ranks. It’s lonely out here, guys. How about it?

“Whether it is an ill-specified axis of evil, or a decision to make tactical nuclear war thinkable, or a domestic ”shadow government,” or deliberately leaked plans to attack Iraq, George W. Bush in his own way is as frightening as Al Qaeda… There is only so much we can do about the risk of random assault, but we can at least reclaim our own democracy. Terrorism, unfortunately, is all too real. But so is one’s terror of the Bush presidency. Every reckless scheme will have to be challenged with the only means we have: democratic opposition. Right after Sept. 11, there was no place for a popular movement against the Afghan War. But there must now be one against the administration’s ill-considered sequels. Otherwise, the daily risk will only increase, not just because of Them but because of Us.” – Robert Kuttner, equating president Bush with al Qaeda and calling for a Vietnam-like resistance to the war on terror.

INSIDE THE JESUITS: A balanced and helpful review by Garry Wills in the latest New York Review is definitely worth reading. It deals with what some have called “the gaying and graying” of the Society of Jesus in non-hysterical, non-homophobic terms. It’s of a book, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits that also looks like well worth a perusal.

Kofi Annan fails to scare anyone; Mike Tyson succeeds in scaring Washingtonians; Texas mom found sane, guilty, evil; Blair re-launches re-branded party; Roger Clinton deeply implicated in brother’s pardon scam; BBC chairman accuses his critics of being white and middle-class.

THE ANTI-WAR DEMOCRATS: They’re not exactly shouting from the rooftops. But they sure have their wetted fingers hoisted in the air. Janet Reno says in Florida that “I have trouble with a war that has no endgame and I have trouble with a war that generates so many concerns about individual liberties.” Notice she doesn’t say that the war has violated individual liberties, or that she believes that, but merely that there are “so many concerns” about it. Has there been any war in which such concerns have not been raised? The Richmond Times-Dispatch also reports that “the former U.S. attorney general said she thinks the government would be hard-pressed to find a legal basis to prosecute many of the Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners being detained at Guantanamo Bay.” Oh, let them go, then. Back to Sandy Berger and letting bin Laden escape from Sudan to Afghanistan. Do these people ever learn? And then there’s Senator John Kerry. As a Vietnam vet, he’ll be the front man for those Democrats desperate to dispel the war atmosphere that could realign American politics away from dovish liberals for decades. Senator Hillary Clinton spelled out the formula in Boston at a Kerry fund-raiser: “John’s leadership is critical to where we plan to go in this world. We need people of the stature and the experience of John Kerry … asking the hard questions. We are having the debate Congress is required to have – where to go, what to do.” Like most things Senator Clinton says, this is unobjectionable on its face. But its intent is clear. Some Democrats are simply uncomfortable about America having a strong and unapologetic role in the world. This isn’t treason; it’s weakness. And weakness in the dangerous world we face is an invitation for more terror. Be warned.

THEY STILL DON’T GET IT DEPT: On the anniversary of September 11, don’t you think a major newspaper might focus on the victims, the progress of the war, the remaining terrorist threats or some such confluence of stories? Not at the San Jose Mercury News. A reader points out that their Monday front page had two September 11 stories – one was titled: “BACKLASH ANXIETY”. The slug read: “Hate crimes against Arab Americans, Muslims and people simply mistaken as Middle Eastern have largely subsided. But six months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many Bay Area residents still carry a lingering anxiety that violence and discrimination could resurface at any moment.” The second story was called: “Failed council bid raises question of intolerance,” about a Sikh candidate for office who might have been subject to anti-Sikh prejudice fueled by 9/11. Liberal bias? Ludicrous.

HAVE BLOGS REACHED THE ‘TIPPING POINT’?: An interesting article from John Hiler – the guy who figured out how blogs have hijacked Google – showing how weblogs are beginning to be the online version of what Malcolm Gladwell called “connectors” and “mavens.” Weblogs may soon become one of the most effective ways of getting a new idea out not just to other blog sites, but beyond them to the wider world.

MEDIA NUKE SHOCK HORROR: You thought yesterday’s asinine “America-as-rogue-state” New York Times editorial was bad enough? Scott Shuger has an inventory of other dumb and knee-jerk coverage of the recent shift in U.S. defense policy.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Eugenics, as advocated by kindly figures such as its pioneer, Sir Francis Galton, or its most eloquent exponent, Dean Inge, was simply the notion that the useful and intelligent classes should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to breed, and the murderous morons, who are never going to contribute anything except misery to themselves and others should be discouraged. No one need be killed. The eugenic case is made simply by looking at the pedigrees of the criminals who appear in court, and contrasting them with those of the judges. The overwhelming number of judges (however idiotic we may pretend they are) come from intelligent, decent families, and the overwhelming number of criminals come from stock that is violent and stupid.” – A.N. Wilson, in an article titled, ‘Our Future Lies With Eugenics,” in the Daily Telegraph.

ROD DREHER’S GAY PROBLEM: There’s no question in my mind that National Review’s Rod Dreher is not a homophobe. He’s always been extremely civil to me; he has good gay friends; he’s a brave journalist. He’s also an intelligent Catholic who knows, for example, that Navarro-Valls’ recent statement that gays should be barred from the priesthood was an outrageous distortion of what Rod would call “authentic” Catholicism. To see why, you only have to remember that amazing footage of Father Judge praying in the World Trade Center, about to meet his death. If the Vatican has its way, Father Judge would never have been allowed to be ordained. But Rod doesn’t seem to see good men like Judge when he writes. All he sees is something he calls a “lavender mafia” allegedly running the Church, controlling seminaries, discriminating against good straight Irish-Catholic boys, and the rest of it. Yes, that’s right. Gays are not victims of this Church, they are a cliquish cabal secretly running it! The evidence? Hearsay, mainly. Dreher laments a “swishy priest” whose homily led a New York cop to walk out of mass, he recommends a book whose blurbs complain about “effete” homosexuals taking over seminaries, aka gay “brothels.” He reprints letters from priests who end by proclaiming, “Stop letting the homosexual bishops and their friends pick our new bishops!” and blames the appointment of child molesters on gay bishops and cardinals. He even goes after the Jesuits: “The vindictiveness of the faithless liberals who run the heavily gay Jesuit order is staggering.” Notice the casual attempt to equate faithlessness with homosexuality. Elsewhere, Dreher insists on calling the defrocked Bishop O’Connell “this homosexual ephebophile,” as if his homosexuality is relevant in such an instance. Imagine if he had spat out the phrase “this Jewish ephebophile.” Charming, isn’t it?

THE CHURCH’S FUTURE: Then prompted by the one calm contributor to the discussion, Romesh Ponnuru, Dreher backtracks to say that he has no problem with celibate orthodox gay priests, as long as they are struggling with their “homosexuality.” (I think he means desire to have gay sex. There’s no teaching that says gay or straight Catholics should struggle against their orientation.) But what about celibate, orthodox happily gay priests? Dreher ducks the question by defining gay priests as “those that reject Rome’s teaching on both celibacy and sexuality.” But what of all the others? What about those who are celibate and support the Church’s teaching on sexuality? What of those who are celibate and privately differ with the official teaching but do not publicly challenge it? What of those who are celibate but privately offer help and guidance to gays and straights struggling to deal with the Church’s teachings on sex? What about those who would like to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation but, faced with no middle way, are forced into the hands of radicals? And what about those who, like many straight priests, struggle to be celibate but occasionally fail? Should any priest who strays once or twice be expelled? These are the difficult practical questions that cannot be explained or discussed in the context of paranoid rants about “lavender mafias” and seminarian brothels. What we need is firm discipline of any priest – gay or straight – who violates the trust of minors, greater guidance and counseling for gay candidates for the priesthood, and a period of reflection about the meaning of priesthood itself – and how we can rescue what is obviously a deeply troubled vocation for the enormous challenges of the future. And less hysteria and paranoia. Please.

It’s a huge relief to find that the Long island priest shooting is not apparently related to the current controversy over pedophile priests. It isn’t such a relief to read the story in the Catholic News Service about the context for Joaquin Navarro-Valls’ outburst ten days ago against gay priests, celibate or otherwise. Unidentified “Church leaders,” whoever they are, are apparently “pressing harder so that people of permanent homosexual orientation are screened out as candidates for the priesthood. So far, this has been handled through prudent local decisions rather than explicit orders issued from the Vatican, they said.” In the United States, it’s a fair bet that the bishops will simply ignore this initiative. Ominously, though, some of the forces now running the Church in the pope’s senescence are considering a new letter to institutionalize the discrimination. They cite a 1961 document on selection of candidates for the priesthood, ignoring the critical 1976 and 1986 letters on homosexuality and Catholicism that significantly altered the Church’s teaching on such matters. But what’s more amazing is the justification for this new blanket zero-tolerance policy. Here’s the relevant passage:

In response to questions by Catholic News Service, Navarro-Valls declined to elaborate on his comments. He said he did not want to draw more attention to this topic, especially while U.S. church leaders were dealing with the more immediate problem of sex abuse by clergy. Yet many at the Vatican see the two issues as related — if not causally, then at least circumstantially. Most publicized cases of sex abuse by clergy against minors have involved homosexual acts.

That’s what it comes down to: gays, even celibate, orthodox ones, are guilty of pedophilia in advance thanks to mere “circumstantial” evidence. So much for basic notions of fairness and justice. It’s also true, of course, that all the instances of priestly sexual abuse have been committed by men. By the Vatican’s logic, that’s even more compelling “circumstantial evidence.” You think the Vatican will start questioning its policies with regard to exclusively male priests now? Yeah, right.

THE PRICE OF FREE TRADE: “How is the U.S. steel industry supposed to compete with steel industries that pay inhuman wages and poison the environment, and which have the government available to pay for medical needs of workers and retirees? Why should it?” This and other rejoinders to me – on Israel, for example – are now up on the letters page.

A priest and another person have been shot dead this morning at the altar in a church in Long Island. I hope to God this isn’t an outcrop of the latest crisis in the Church. I guess we will soon find out.

We’re smoking them out of their caves; Bush reaches out to the allies; Zimbabwe’s opposition leader fears for his life; Letterman stays at CBS; one of Anglo-America’s greatest actresses, Irene Worth, dies.

TWO OFF-HAND COMMENTS: One from the proverbial administration official. He told me over the weekend, “On September 10, I believed that the terrorists probably had a nuclear capacity, but that they weren’t crazy enough to use it. Now, I believe the complete opposite. They probably don’t have any yet, but the minute they do, they’ll deploy it.” Another person involved in the administration told me that an attack on Iraq was inevitable – and that it would be much sooner than most of us expect.

RAY OF LIGHT: What a brilliant concept. When I first saw the New York Times Magazine cover of September 23, my breath was taken away with the idea. The towers reach to heaven, they dominate the sky-line, they are full of light. “Seeing those huge monoliths, as seemingly timeless as the pyramids, vanish taught us something about our buildings, our institutions, and ourselves,” one of the designers, Gustavo Bonevarti, writes in Slate. “We learned how ephemeral life really is. Light is ephemeral, but it is also universal-that’s what we wanted this project to be.” Whatever replaces this should never substitute it entirely. I hope that every September 11 from now on, those lights are re-lit. Every September 11 – a ritual and memorial of light.

BEAM ME UP, BLOGGER: Yep, William Shatner’s got one. Should the rest of us retire immediately?

DEPORTED TO HELL: A while back, I mentioned a story I’d read in the British press about a forced deportation of 27 Somali immigrants by the INS. The immigrants were picked up on minor charges, from years ago, some drug-related, but many had cleaned up their acts and were living productive lives. Many had no idea what Somalia was, had no family or friends there, and had been in the U.S. for close to twenty years. After reading my site, an editor at Canada’s National Post decided to check the story out. It’s true. One of the deportees, Fuad Ismail, was described as a model employee who recovered from a drug habit in a six-month rehabilitation program at the Salvation Army, and was working legally in the United States. “He was determined to get better and he did,” said one Salvation Army Major. “He is one of the most gentle, religious people I’ve ever met.” His reward? Dumped into a war-zone by the U.S. government, with no possible appeal or escape. Read this horrifying tale of the U.S. government’s brutality toward immigrants in the wake of the legislation passed in the 1990s. I hope Bush finds a way to moderate some of the cruelty of the Clinton-Gingrich immigration laws. It would do a lot to put the compassion into his conservatism.

CORRECTION: I described the Boston Herald’s columnist Joe Fitzgerald in an earlier post as a Catholic. It turns out he isn’t. I’m not sure whether to be appalled or relieved. I think I’m relieved.

AN INTERESTING POINT: From an emailer today:

The church I attend, Metropolitan Community Church, is a Christian church with a primary ministry to Gay people. Nearly all of our denomination’s religious leaders are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and/or Transgendered. Yet, to my knowledge, none of our religious leaders are under investigation for pedophilia, ephebophilia, or whatever you want to call it. Now, if the presence of Gays in religious leadership puts children at risk for sexual abuse, why doesn’t this problem affect our church, too?

Good question, huh?

THE GENERATION GAP: The Onion nails it. Perhaps I should support a budget-busting senior drug entitlement. They might just spread some wealth around.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Let’s say that Washington really was incinerated. As difficult and alarming as this sounds, we live in times when horrible realities confront us every day. It is time that we deal frankly and honestly with the ugly prospect. The first thing that would happen is that your personal income would rise equal to the 40 percent you currently pay Washington in taxes. Because there would be nowhere to actually send the checks – excise taxes, income taxes, and payroll taxes would be meaningless. Instead of having to wait for politicians to give us “private accounts” for some portion of Social Security, we’d get real privatization with no FICA at all. The country would be immediately vulnerable to attack by terrorists! On the other hand, there would be no one to enforce sanctions against Iraq, pay the troops in Saudi Arabia, or fund the settlements on the Gaza Strip, so the terrorists would lose their rationale for suicide bombings and the like. They might just choose to go home to their wives and kids.” – Lew Rockwell, looking on the bright side of the nuclear destruction of the capital. As sick as Ted Rall – but from the far right.