Category: Old Dish

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“I haven’t written before, but I happened to land on your blog and want to make two points:
(1) I went to law school with Julie Myers, and she is an extremely capable, ethical person who would do credit to any agency or organization. I have not seen her in years, but hers is a face from my past that comes to mind when I — a classic gay liberal type — am tempted to stereotype Christian conservatives unfairly. It’s a true Washington coming-of-age experience to see a peer – and a damn good person – caught up in the tough politics of our day. I can’t speak to her experience since law school, but she’s never struck me as the type to court nepotism. I think the suggestion would mortify her – not that she would ever let us see it.
(2) I’m from Biloxi, MS, and my family is in Biloxi and Ocean Springs. They stayed for the hurricane, as they always do because they live on higher ground. They did not see a single state or federal relief worker, or national guard soldier, for four days after Katrina. They didn’t need relief help, but they were by far in the minority in that regard, and they sure would have appreciated some protection from possible looting. Haley Barbour was as much asleep at the switch as the New Orleans mayor and the President.”

YGLESIAS AWARD NOMINEE

“For the crime of noting that the president’s speech didn’t help his poll numbers, I’m getting battered by e-mailers who suggest, among other things, that I am somehow unmanly because I’m not “supporting” the president enough. I never thought a day would come when I — the author of a book entitled ‘Bush Country: How Dubya Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century While Driving Liberals Insane’ — would be accused of being a fair-weather supporter of GWB. Let me just try to explain something to my e-mailers. The president gave his speech Thursday night in an effort to reverse the decline in his political fortunes… It appears his effort was unsuccessful, in part (I think) because he sounded like a Big Spender and alienated more Republicans without winning over more Democrats… Bush supporters don’t help him or themselves any by pretending his troubles are all due to the MSM. He has, for the moment, lost the country’s confidence.” – John Podhoretz, National Review Online.

BENEDICT AND A WAR CRIMINAL

It just keeps getting better.

THANKS, WAPO: Welcome, Washington Post readers. Hang out and read as much as you feel like. If you find enough interesting stuff, why not bookmark the page and come back often? And thanks, WaPo, for this experiment. Ironic, isn’t it, that the day the NYT shuts its opinion pages off from free access, the WP actually opens its doors to independent bloggers? By the way, I subscribe to the NYT on deadwood. So I went to TimesSelect to be able to read the sequestered stuff online for free. But I don’t know my “Home Delivery User ID” and I have no idea what my password is. Can I be bothered to call the toll-free number for internet access to Paul Krugman? Nah. Screw ’em.

MY HUSBAND, THE CATHOLIC

An emailer writes:

“I’m biased of course, but I know my partner, Gustavo, is a truly wonderful person. He is one of those people who truly don’t have a malicious or bad bone in their body. He emanates a gentleness, a caring and a sweetness which is quite rare, and virtually everyone we know, even just simple acquaintances comment on this very soon after meeting him.

As such he is a truly wonderful doctor, with an overflowing practice. He practices psychiatry, and his patients come from every background in our lovely City of Angels – Jews and Catholics, Asians and WASPS, everybody. They all love my husband! From an immigrant Mexican family, with 2nd grade educations, he worked his butt off at school, managing to get 4.0 GPAs, won scholarships to UCLA, and eventually made it to medical school, against all odds.

He has told me many times that his faith got him through all of this. He was born in the US but spent the first few years of his life back in Mexico, where his grandmother took him to the small Catholic church in their village every single day. He treasures those memories.

He believes deeply, and he was in fact a priests’ assistant, and seriously considered the priesthood. His love for his religion is great, and so many of his beautiful qualities were supported and enhanced by the teaching of the Catholic Church. He is all good, my man, and I treasure him.

After the death of John Paul, we were at a dinner party with another gay couple, and he got very angry when they started making derogatory comments about the pope’s treatment of homosexuality. Now, with Benedict, he is going through a slow mourning as he realizes that he is slowly losing his religion, or rather I would say, his religion is losing him quite rapidly. What a terrible loss for Catholicism to lose people like Gustavo, who are so much children of God. Strangely, I have grown closer to my own Jewish faith in the eight years of our relationship, because faith was always such a beautiful, wonderful thing for Gustavo, and he helped me overcome my own cynicism.

And so Benedict, supposedly a man of God, pushes away good people from this church. I have no doubt in my mind that what Benedict is doing now is a crime, a crime against God. If this were discrimination against Jews or blacks or any other group, it would be classed as fascist bigotry, and eventually the perpetrator would be brought to task by society in an appropriate way and exiled from their institution. Pope Benedict cannot get away from this crime against humanity. Whatever his or others’ personal views against homosexuality, to discrimate against a group in an institutional form is apartheid, is Nazism, is fascism, and nothing less.”

A pope dedicated to demonizing and excluding people from the unconditional love of God? It beggars belief.

YGLESIAS AWARD NOMINEE: “Both political parties are now willing and eager to spend tax dollars as if they were passing out goody-bags to grabby four-year-olds at a birthday party. The Democrats are already forging their 2006 and 2008 message: We will spend just as many trillions of dollars as Republicans, but we will spend them better than they do. After witnessing the first few Republican misappropriations for Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats may very well be right.” – Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, today.

(The Yglesias Award is given to individuals brave enough to tell their own political side some uncomfortable truths)

A “PERSONALITY DISORDER”

According to the latest Vatican leak – to a far-right news service called “Catholic World News” – the new Pope will issue an edict banning all gay men from entering seminaries and the priesthood some time next month. The edict applies to all gay men, even if they are celibate, even if they would make great priests, and even if they have been chaste for over a decade. Money quote:

It will take the form of an “Instruction,” signed by the prefect and secretary of the Congregation: Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski and Archbishop Michael Miller.
The text, which was approved by Pope Benedict at the end of August, says that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries even if they are celibate, because their condition suggests a serious personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers.
Priests who have already been ordained, if they suffer from homosexual impulses, are strongly urged to renew their dedication to chastity, and a manner of life appropriate to the priesthood.

To recap: the Church’s official position (as of 1986) is that homosexual persons are not sinful; they are “made in the image and likeness of God” and the notion that they cannot control their sex lives is, in the words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger, an “unfounded and demeaning assumption.” The new position is that this “unfounded and demeaning assumption” is now the truth. All gay men are suffering from a “serious personality disorder” and constitutively unable to maintain chastity and perform their duties as priests. What, one wonders, is the nature of this “serious personality disorder”? How does it prevent gay men from being productive members of society? If all gay priests “suffer” from this, then why are any of them still allowed to serve the Church? These are questions lay Catholics must demand of their leaders, as even some arch-conservatives already are. When a group of human beings are demonized not for what they do but for who they are, then we have a right to know exactly what the Pope means.

BIGOTRY SHARPENED: We don’t have the final document yet so we don’t know whether this blast from 1940s psychology will be enshrined in the document. Let’s hope it won’t. But I’m not hopeful. This is, after all, a clarification of the new Benedict XVI position on gays: they they are moral Untermenschen, somehow sick in their very souls, disordered to commit sin, people who must be cast out to cleanse the Church of evil. (The structure of the argument is very similar to that which for so long applied to Jews in Catholic teaching.) The conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia and the equation of celibate, faithful gay priests with compulsive child-molesters is integral to this new policy. In a word, it is inconsistent with previous teaching and morally appalling. And can you imagine what this does to the morale of the thousands of gay priests now serving the faithful? It will be up to the conscience of each, but I cannot see how any moral person can still work for an institution so wedded to the demonization of a whole class of people. Especially if you’re one of them. And what does it say to the gay laity? It says: you’re so sick in the head you cannot lead moral lives. God may be able to forgive you but our job is to protect every other Catholic from your disorder. To say that this is an attack on the core meaning of Christianity – that we are all equal before God – is superfluous. To say that it is a brutal, deep wound to the psyches and souls of millions is equally obvious. But somehow, like all evil, I have a feeling it will become accepted, as Benedict’s church continues its retreat from modernity into the superstitions and bigotries of earlier times. And like all policies of stigmatization and exclusion, it may subtly flatter those left behind and attach them more firmly to the church. As every beleaguered politician has found out, bigotry works. It may indeed work for Benedict as a strategy, especially in the Third World, where hatred of homosexuals is more common. But to rebuild a church on the basis of hate is a truly odious strategy. It may be Benedict’s ultimate legacy.