Category: The Dish

In three states, the attempt to strip gay couples of legally-defensible rights is faltering, according to several polls. Virginia results here; Colorado here; Arizona here. As with all polls, take under advisement. But there’s no question that this Rove-honed tactic has begun to lose its punch. Whether it will be enough to defeat these initiatives, I don’t yet know. But a few years’ back, it was a no-brainer that they’d pass overwhelmingly. No longer. Please be aware of these initiatives – and those regulating medical marijuana. Freedom is on the ballot tomorrow – your freedom.

Here’s a classic letter to the editor:

An axiom is defined as a statement that is widely recognized as true; a known truth. With today’s Republican Party, all axioms have been smashed.

Their axiom of fiscal responsibility has been smashed. Their commitment to limited government has been abandoned. A sound and prudent foreign policy is a distant memory. The effective and efficient execution of armed conflict is no longer theirs to claim. A strict adherence to constitutional constraints on state power is flotsam and jetsam. The ethical governance and personal responsibility of public officials such as former U.S. Reps. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif.; Bob Ney, R-Ohio; and Tom Delay, R-Texas, has been exposed as mere mythology.

Now, in the wake of the former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., cover-up where it appears Republican House leaders knew something about Foley’s alleged nasty habit of trying to seduce teenage male congressional pages, their axiom of buttressing (pun not intended) traditional morality, a.k.a. family values, has been smashed.

Why reward this in November? Save apple-pie authoritarians and White House adviser Karl Rove’s useful idiots, principled conservatives have no business sanctioning this perfidy. Absolute power corrupts absolutely indeed.

I’ve got my axioms, and I await and welcome the purge with bated breath.

Me too.

You can see it in Haggard and Klinghoffer. I write about it in "The Conservative Soul":

For the fundamentalist, a human being’s internal compass, what he has absorbed simply by being who he is, is always suspect – because the self is sinful, and must always be subject to correction from the outside. And so the fundamentalist learns to distrust himself, to wrest himself from certain habits, to conform what might have been his personality into a persona that is a vessel for something far greater than himself…

This kind of moral life, as we have seen, is often marked by the need to deny when one fails to conform to the ideal, or to punish oneself aggressively for waywardness. It zigs and zags from purity to sin and back again. Its motor is guilt, its achievement is often self-loathing, mitigated only by the faint hope of divine forgiveness. Every now and again, one particular doctrine may stand out as vital, and become an obsession – and this seems to be particularly true of the sins of sexuality, that Dionysian force of nature that seems constantly to push human beings into places they are taught to abhor but internally cannot resist…

In the most extreme cases, certain forms of sexual repression can become a new form of god in themselves, a pivotal criterion by which to judge the entire moral core of a person, a short-cut to assessing her virtue or vice as a whole. And so we lose perspective. And the chaste Christian discovers one day that his obsession with sexual purity has also led him to be callous to his family or mean to his colleagues or self-important among other Christians. Or the natural lawyer, determined that his truth be realized for all mankind, finds himself supporting laws that would send policemen into bedrooms, and doctors into jail. He never meant to be cruel, but his faith demands it. Salvation requires it. Oakeshott again:

"Too often, the excessive pursuit of one ideal leads to the exclusion of others, perhaps all others; in our eagerness to realize justice we come to forget charity, and a passion for righteousness has made many a man hard and merciless. There is, indeed, no ideal the pursuit of which will not lead to disillusion; chagrin waits at the end for all who take this path."

Chagrin indeed. There’s a lot of it going around. My book – analyzing how fundamentalists, both religious and political, cannot cope with reality – can be found online here and here.

The blatant use of God for partisan purposes is wrong whoever is involved. I’ve been tough on Republicans for deploying this tactic – because it taints faith and politics – but I’ve always insisted that it’s also wrong when Democrats use black churches for partisan messages. They have done and they are. Here’s some vile rhetoric from Maryland:

"Everyone who’s your color is not your kind," the Rev. Delman L. Coates told the mostly black congregation at Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton. "All your skinfolk is not your kinfolk."

"On Tuesday, we have to have more on our minds than color," the preacher told the roughly 1,500 parishioners. He rattled off a list of unsympathetic black people, including the slave who alerted the masters to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 and the black man who shot Malcolm X in 1965.

He drew parallels between the election tomorrow and the biblical account of Jews choosing to free from crucifixion the thief Barabbas instead of Jesus Christ. The minister asked how the crowd that loved Jesus only days earlier was tricked to switch from "Jesuscrats" to "Barabblicans" for that vote.

"Can’t you just see the commercials that were designed to endear Barabbas to the crowd," he said. "I can just see Barabbas well dressed, well groomed [and] holding a puppy."

The race-baiting that Senate candidate Michael Steele has had to put up with is indefensible. Invoking Jesus against him is worse.

This election campaign has revealed a lot, hasn’t it? Whatever happens tomorrow, some people have finally revealed what they really believe. A reader writes:

The terminology of the NRO piece is fascinating:

"Gay advocates reason that because a man has a temptation to homosexuality, he has little moral choice other than to obey it."

"A temptation to homosexuality?" I assume gays are "tempted" by homosexuality in the same way straights are "tempted" by heterosexuality. In other words, homosexuality is as much of a "temptation" as lefthandedness. We’re not talking about temptations; we’re talking about what people are.

The analogies are fascinating, too:

"…another thing that makes a homosexual temptation difficult to resist is that, at least until the advent of AIDS, it produced no physical ravages (as alcoholism and anger do)."

Here, Klinghoffer seems close to an epiphany, but he’s just missing it: homosexuality is different from alcoholism, anger, etc., because homosexuality doesn’t hurt anyone – at least, no more than heterosexuality.  Which is part of why it’s ridiculous to describe sexuality itself as a "temptation."

Ice cream is a temptation. Hunger is a condition. If you think hunger itself is a temptation, you just bought yourself a one-way ticket to an eating disorder.

Keep fighting, my friend.

I will.

"The hard truth ‚Äî and I know people don’t want to hear it ‚Äî is that Rumsfeld is hugely popular among the military," – Mario Loyola, from the curia.

A very strong contender. Olivia Newton-John’s "Physical."

Click here to see the other entries…

A reader writes:

No doubt this President has made mistakes and that his administration should be held accountable on election day. I am not even voting for the Republican candidate in my state, because I am disgusted with Bush’s reckless spending and mismanagement of Iraq. But the Freedom video is a disgrace. 

I don’t even know where to start. On a day where Saddam Hussein received the death penalty through democracy and a fair trial, you totally ignore this major victory for Iraqis, yet post that garbage Freedom video instead. It shows a pregnant woman in her third trimester rubbing her baby and shouting "freedom."  What the hell is she saying? That it should be her right to decide whether she has this baby or not, even at that stage in pregnancy? …  It also shows Bush kissing Joe Lieberman, as if to say that Joe Lieberman is responsible for all of Bush’s mistakes. I am proud to say that I am a volunteer with the Lieberman campaign, and consider him one of the few honorable members of Congress. He isn’t afraid to take a stand for something that he believes in, and does so without worrying about the political consequences. Have you turned on him as well? Would you rather Ned Lamont be elected?

Nope. I’m for Lieberman. I posted the video without comment, and I agree with the basic sentiment that we are fighting for freedom tomorrow. But I did find some of the clips distasteful and extreme. As readers know, I embed and link to things I do not agree with all the time.

More data here, showing a Democratic generic lead of 13 points. This lead is the biggest recently reported by the same poll: it was 11 points a week ago and nine two weeks before that. More interesting to me:

Among those saying they will vote for the Democratic House candidate, twice as many say it is because they want a change in leadership (54 percent), while others say it is because they agree with the policies of the Democratic Party (21 percent).

If all the other independents held their noses and voted Democrat, simply to express their view that policy must change in the White House, it could make a huge difference. I’ve never believed personally in abstaining, although it’s obviously anyone’s right. But in this election, I think it’s vital if you’re a true conservative or independent to grit your teeth and vote Democratic. This White House does not respond to measured or reasoned criticism. They need a metaphorical two-by-four in the face.

National Review gets personal:

I hope Ted Haggard does pray for Andrew Sullivan, because it is Sullivan and those on his side of the culture war who do much greater damage to our lives.

Earlier on, the author, David Klinghoffer makes the following argument:

This is why gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. When the awe in which people once held matrimony is diluted, by treating it as a man-made and thus amendable institution rather than a divinely determined one, heterosexuals find sexual sins of all sorts harder to resist.

It’s an argument. And it is unpersuasive to me. But whether you agree with it or not, notice its logical basis: civil marriage is a "divinely determined one." The laws of this country are divinely determined. This is not close to a theocratic worldview. It is one.