A reader passed it along:
This Facebook post is from a CT Supreme Court justice. When he was a state senator, he was the main proponent and author (I think) of Connecticut’s marriage equality law (which was ultimately never passed – a court decision beat the legislature to the punch). He posted it around 8 pm eastern time tonight.
“The genuine artist is never ‘true to life.’ He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life. The poet sees with a poignancy and penetration that is altogether unique. What matters is that the poet must be true to his art and not ‘true to life,’ whether his art is simple or complex, violent or subdued. Emotion is thought to lie at the center of aesthetic experience. That, however, is not how the matter appears to me. If I am right, the essence of art is insight of a special kind into reality. But such insight is bound to be accompanied by remarkable emotions. A poem would be nothing without some meaning. The truth is that meaning is an awareness and a communication. But it is no ordinary awareness, no ordinary communication.
Novelty must be inspired. But there must be novelty. This crisis is most evident in religion. The theologians whose thought is most astir today do make articulate a supreme need, and one that has now become also an imperative, as their urgency shows, the need to infuse into the ages of enlightenment an awareness of reality adequate to their achievements and such as will not be attenuated by them. There is one most welcome and authentic note; it is the insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our consciousness and refuses to be managed and mastered. It is here that the affinity of art and religion is most evident today. Both have to mediate for us a reality not ourselves. This is what the poet does. The supreme virtue here is humility, for the humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts,” – Wallace Stevens, “On Poetic Truth,” in Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose.
“Well, I think there’s going to be a generational challenge. I don’t think that this is something that’s going to happen overnight. They have now created an environment in which young men are more concerned whether they’re Shiite or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting a good education or whether they are able to, you know, have a good job. Many of them are poor. Many of them are illiterate and are therefore more subject to these kinds of ideological appeals. And, you know, the beginning of the solution for the entire Middle East is going to be a transformation in how these countries teach their youth. What our military operations can do is to just check and roll back these networks as they appear and make sure that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to begin to take root. But it’s going to take some time … But in the meantime, it’s not just buy them time, it’s also making sure that Americans are protected, that our allies are protected …
With the allies, with their ground troops, and if we do our job right and the Iraqis fight, then over time our role can slow down and taper off. And their role, reasserts itself. But all that depends, Steve. And nobody’s clearer than I am about this. That the Iraqis have to be willing to fight. And they have to be willing to fight in a nonsectarian way. Shiite, Sunni and Kurd alongside each other against this cancer in their midst,” – president Obama, Sixty Minutes.
Well, if anything can calm me down, it’s this no-drama president carefully explaining what his strategy is. It’s not about transforming the Middle East, or unseating Assad, or directly intervening to try and achieve in the future what we couldn’t achieve in the past. It appears to be about minimally containing the threat of Jihadist networks so as to create some space for “a new way of doing things to begin to take root”. This is, as Krauthammer put it, containment-plus.
But the same worries persist. What if it becomes impossible to roll back a network like ISIS? What if air bombing campaigns – with civilian casualties – actually galvanize ISIS and empower it with a new global identity with which to draw recruits? What if the broken Iraqi state can never be put back together as a multi-sectarian democracy? What if a “new way of doing things” is actually decades in the future? Are we really going to be bombing for decades? And in how many countries does that formula apply?
The key thing for the president is that the Iraqis fight in a non-sectarian way.
But we already constructed a multi-sectarian government, we already trained a massive Iraqi army, we already ousted a Shiite prime minister – and there are precious few signs of such non-sectarian fighting, least of all in a region now convulsed in either a cold or hot Shi’a-Sunni war. A couple weeks ago, the Iraqi parliament could not overcome sectarian divisions to fill the interior and defense ministries even as an insurgency was nearing Baghdad! If they cannot get there in a real emergency, what chance if the Americans are busy saving their collective asses?
I can see what the president would like to happen. But even he implies it won’t happen for a long, long time. Which means we will be bombing for exactly that long time. And there are unintended consequences to all such wars which he doesn’t even seem to contemplate. Those are my worries – an indefinite military commitment, with no way to achieve the underlying changes that would end such a commitment, with the real possibility of blowback.
“Some would say, it is not fair or it is unjust to deny same-sex partners the civil “right” to marry. In reality, it is not unjust at all because marriage and same-sex unions are essentially different realities. Justice actually requires society to maintain its long standing definition of marriage. To uphold God’s intent for marriage, in which sexual relations have their proper and exclusive place, is not to offend the dignity of homosexual persons. Of course, a central issue with many same-sex partners are the social benefits that are received through marriage … In trying to think of an analogous situation that could cause a pastor to deny Communion, one might think of an involved Catholic parishioner who was then ordained as a Protestant minister. They would likely be acting according to their sense of conscience and they would probably be a very good person, but they would have broken their communion with the Catholic Church in a very fundamental way,” – Bishop Michael Warfel of Montana, explaining why he stripped an elderly gay couple of their communion after they got a civil marriage license.
My italics. One wonders how a Protestant minister would be able to attend mass regularly at a local Catholic church as well. The hierarchs had better find a better analogy than that – and I wonder if they actually can. Heterosexuals can privately commit sodomy all the time within a public marriage and never arouse any suspicion of scandal; devout gays who simply want to protect themselves in civil marriage – and who are in their sixties and seventies – have no such lee-way.
Which is to say that the church is no longer penalizing heterosexual parishioners for sin; they are uniquely penalizing homosexual parishioners for love. How much longer can this specific discrimination and persecution of a minority be sustained without wider and wider revolt? How many of the next generation will find it possible to belong to a church which singles out a small minority for persecution in this way?
“I think one of the poignant things about human beings is that they’re so undefended, physically. And that there’s an absolute relationship between that defenselessness and everything that’s impressive about them. I think a lot of us would like to be turtles and porcupines, and I think that in a way one of the impulses of human beings is to defend themselves in a way that nature did not. But I think the other impulse is to just love the experience with nothing to protect oneself, and actually feeling in fact no barrier. People know about their mortality in a way that we can’t know that any animal knows. They know about Earth being a ball in space. Intelligence of the high human sort could be translated as defenselessness, because we can know many things that are very hard to bear,” – Marilynne Robinson, in an interview included in A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson.
This colorful language from @bterris‘s great Barney Frank in today’s print WaPo is now gone from the online version. pic.twitter.com/J9H1SDzxuK
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) September 25, 2014
“Let me first state what I understand to be your position. It is, that if it shall become necessary, to repel invasion, the President may, without violation of the Constitution, cross the line and invade the territory of another country; and that whether such necessity exists in any given case, the President is to be the sole judge … But Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and allow him to make war at pleasure….
If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’ The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood,” – Abraham Lincoln.
Obama is no Lincoln, is he?
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason,” – Barack Obama, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, December 10, 2009.
(Photo: Syrians fleeing from clashes between the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) militants and Democratic Union Party (PYD) forces in the Ar-Raqqah Governorate of Syria, wait at the Turkish-Syrian border to cross into Turkey on September 19, 2014 in Suruc district of Sanliurfa province of Turkey. By Orhan Cicek/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)
“The pretensions of human cultures and civilizations are the natural consequence of a profound and ineradicable difficulty in all human spirituality. Man is mortal. That is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances. But man is not merely the prisoner of time and place. He touches the fringes of the eternal. He is not content to be merely American man, or Chinese man, or bourgeois man, or man of the twentieth century. He wants to be man. He is not content with his truth. He seeks the truth. His memory spans the ages in order that he may transcend his age. His restless mind seeks to comprehend the meaning of all cultures so that he may not be caught within the limitations of his own.
Thus man builds towers of the spirit from which he may survey larger horizons than those of his class, race and nation. This is a necessary human enterprise. Without it man could not come to his full estate. But it is also inevitable that these towers should be Towers of Babel, that they should pretend to reach higher than their real height; and should claim a finality which they cannot possess. The truth man finds and speaks is, for all of his efforts to transcend himself, still his truth. The ‘good’ which he discovers is, for all of his efforts to disassociate it from this own interest and interests, still his ‘good.’ The higher the tower is built to escape unnecessary limitations of the human imagination, the more certain it will be to defy necessary and inevitable limitations. Thus sin corrupts the highest as well as the lowest achievements of human life. Human pride is greatest when it is based upon solid achievements; but the achievements are never great enough to to justify its pretensions. This pride is at least one aspect of what Christian orthodoxy means by ‘original sin.’ It is not so much an inherited corruption as an inevitable taint upon the spirituality of a finite creature, always enslaved to time and place, never completely enslaved and always the illusion that the measure of his emancipation is greater than it really is,” – Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Tower of Babel,” in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563, via Wikimedia Commons)
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people… I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere,” – Harry Truman, December 22, 1963.
My take on the CIA as an increasing malignant cancer on our democracy is here.
The Dish 
