Category: The Dish

There’s a new poll from South Dakota, ground central for the Christianist attempt to criminalize all abortion. It’s another state constitutional amendment that would not just ban civil marriage rights for gay couples, but also domestic partnerships and civil unions, and any legal rights for gay couples. And the news is: it’s too close to call. In South Dakota. The extremism of the anti-gay measures is beginning to sink in with fair-minded people, who may balk at marriage but don’t want to see gay couples stripped of all legal rights. But that’s what most of these amendments do – and were designed to do. People may be finally waking up. Let’s hope it’s not too late in Virginia either.

My jaw is still on the floor after reading this, because it is not fom the Onion, it is from a blog by an evangelical pastor, Mark Driscoll, trying to draw some conclusions from the Haggard affair. One of his conclusions is this:

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

Beyond belief. But this is the patriarchal voice of Christianism speaking. And now we are hearing what it says in private. If you like this kind of value system, you know how to empower them still further next Tuesday.

Here’s a typical email response:

Thank you so much for the link to Frum’s NRO piece. I think this editorial in the leading conservative political magazine in the country by one of the most influential Republican strategists, David Frum, speaks volumes about the conservative view on sexuality. I’m neither gay nor a man and reading this made me literally sick to my stomach. I can’t imagine what you must feel.

Well, he’s no Ben Cohen, but a reader vents:

Sexy? Doesn’t even come close. I’d do terrible, terrible things to him if he’d let me.

In fact, I often fantasize about buying some meth from him, throwing it away, then having a completely non-sexual, you know, just two guys hangin’ in a hotel room, naked, ‘just bein’ guys’ kind-a evening, during which we might occasionally give each other a hot-oil rubdown or two, in the most manly and hetero way, of course. In my fantasy, sometimes I mount his naked body and ride him around the hotel room, but not in a gay way ‚Äì in a ‘just two guys completely confident in their masculinity’ way. I have to admit, last weekend I actually bought some meth and threw it away while watching old Ali G episodes. Naked. Does that make me gay?

Nah: just a Republican staying the course.

Wally Olson writes:

If you went looking for some one to write a systematic or impartial account of the conflicts that are pushing America’s conservative movement toward breakup, just about the last author you’d pick for the job would be Andrew Sullivan.

The British-born commentator’s new book, like all his work, is engaged, quirky and personal, the view of a gifted outsider who can’t go for long without circling back to gay issues. Yet "The Conservative Soul" will still resonate as one of the year’s key political books, a free-associating literary polemic that well complements "The Elephant in the Room," the recent book by New York Post contributor Ryan Sager.

Olson goes on to complain about my conflation of many different strands of religious certainty into a monolithic bloc called "fundamentalism." I think his criticism is a fair one, and it is a refrain among several reviewers. Here’s all I’d say in response: you’re right. Two defenses. The book is really a series of essays, like my last two books. It’s not history as such, although it’s full of history. It’s not even political philosophy or theology as such although it is also saturated by both. It’s an essay, i.e. an objective argument informed by subjective experience. I think it’s the most honest way of writing, which is why I love Orwell’s and Montaigne’s and Oakeshott’s essays so much.

The central theme in the essay is a journey from the polarity of complete certainty to the polarity of total skepticism (and then a few steps backward). That’s what I believe is the deepest tension of our time: not right and left any more, but certainty versus doubt. And so I deal with different shades of fundamentalism – and different hues and idioms and expressions of fundamentalism – all under the rubric of the total certainty that is so prevalent in the world right now. I use the Bush administration (and some of my own mistakes and life-story) as a "crucible" for such certainty. And then I try to imagine a conservatism rooted in its opposite – and make a case for why doubt itself is the real key to traditional conservatism, a doubt that leads to individual liberty, especially of conscience and thought.

As I say in the prologue, this is a huge amount to deal with in around 300 pages.

I have bitten off a great deal – probably far too much… It is both alarming and humbling to try and state your beliefs so baldly in one place – and everywhere I look in the text I see further complications and nuances that I want to add or subtract. But there are times when it’s helpful to pull your thoughts together, set them down as clearly as you can, draw a line beneath it, and let the readers take the arguments where they want. Think of this book, then, as an opening bid in a conversation, rather than the final summation of a doctrine.

You can think of this as a lame excuse for not providing The Definitive Account of What To Do Now, or an inadequate description of as vast a subject as religious faith or political thought. I think that’s a fair critique. Or you can take it for what it is: just one argument – idiosyncratic, personal, but passionate and reasonable – about what conservatism can mean in the future. I am grateful to Wally for continuing the conversation. I have a feeling it’s just begun in earnest.

Yes, we’re that meta already. It’s the classic from the British TV series, "The Office," as former office manager David Brent spends his severance money on making a music video. The Buddha is a nice touch.

Morristown, New Jersey, 1 pm.

Scott Horton writes a moving, powerful defense of an honorable soldier who did what she had to against the war criminals who run the Pentagon.

A final confirmation that Haggard was still lying yesterday. But what’s interesting to me is that having adulterous gay sex is apparently, in Haggard’s mind, a worse sin than buying crystal meth. He copped to the meth before the sex. A reader commented yesterday:

It’s telling that Rev. Haggard first admission is to purchasing meth. America can tolerate drug stories. We’ve heard them before. We like them even. The popularity of James Frey’s memoir, err, novel, speaks to our affinity for these tales of dissolution and rehabilitation. After all, a user can be redeemed. Not so with a homosexual. What I believe is most horrifying to many Christianists about homosexuality is that it can’t be fixed, or worse, that its practitioners do not even desire to be fixed. Gays are sinners who don’t want redemption.

Recall that Rep. Foley used a similar tactic in the unspooling of his confessions. As I remember it, Foley checked into a substance abuse program just days after the allegations of page abuse surfaced. That strategy: turn pedophilia into a story about alcoholism and Foley’s own childhood abuse. We don’t know how the Haggard story will eventually unfold, but I bet that his handlers will hide the sex behind the smoke of the meth pipe as much as they can.

Wrong, it turns out. The drugs-worse-than sex may be a story that works in the mainstream; but among some Christianists, drug abuse is nowhere near as bad as being gay.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

David Frum didn’t really argue that a meth-snorting homophobe who for three years cheated on his wife with a male prostitute while at the same time denouncing gay relationships is more moral than an openly gay man, did he?  Oh yes he did.

Kathryn Lopez didn’t really call the piece "excellent," did she? Oh yes she did.

And to think, some people think of the GOP as unhinged or homophobic.

How on earth did anyone get that idea?