Category: The Dish

"Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labors, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a rebel, in act and deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men." РRoger Casement, Irishman, (1864-1916).

I respect Charles Krauthammer too much not to offer a small rejoinder to his thoughtful column today. He fairly represents my side of a debate we already had a few years’ back. I stick with my position. I believe that someone’s sexual orientation is a deeper issue than the number of people they want to express that orientation with. Polygamy is a choice, in other words; homosexuality isn’t. The proof of this can be seen in the fact that straight people and gay people can equally choose polyandry or polygamy or polyamory, or whatever you want to call it. But no polygamist or heterosexual can choose to be gay. If you’re not, you’re not.

To put it another way: If polygamy and sexual orientation are interchangeable in human identity and psychology, there is no slippery slope. You’re already there. Once you’ve allowed heterosexuals to have legal marriage, and you see no distinction between sexual orientation and polygamy, there’s no logical reason to prevent polygamy. And it’s straight people – and mainly straight men – who are the prime movers behind polygamy as an ideal anyway.

I think legalizing such arrangements is a bad idea for a society in general for all the usual reasons (abuse of women, the dangers of leaving a pool of unmarried straight men in the population at large, etc.). I also think it’s reasonable for society to say to a heterosexual polygamist: we won’t let you legally marry more than one person, but we encourage you to marry one. Now, look at it from the gay point of view. We tell the gay polyandrist: we won’t let you marry more than one person, but we won’t let you marry one person either. In fact, we will give you no legal outlet for your relationship, and no social support, and do all we can to stigmatize and marginalize it. Is the difference not obvious?

Gay people are not asking for the right to marry anybody. We’re asking for the right to marry somebody. Right now, heterosexual polygamists have an option: marry someone. And gay people are told: you can marry no one at all. That cannot be just. It cannot be fair. And it cannot be conservative to refuse to give 9 million people an incentive to settle down and take care of one another.

Read this fascinating and revealing interview with Kanan Makiya, who saw the decision-making process of the war against Saddam close up. His view of the Bush administration is that, while many in it had good intentions, the president never reconciled the warring parties within his own government, and Condi Rice at the NSC never forced a unified policy between the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA. The result was the "unbelievable mess" we are still struggling to recover from. Money quote:

"You either do an occupation and you do it well, or you don’t do it in the first place. But you don’t do it in a half-assed way, with inadequate troop levels to boot!
The United States government never deployed enough troops. It opted for an occupation but didn’t provide the wherewithal to do the job properly. Here again is this tension between the Pentagon and the Department of State. State wants an occupation, but Rumsfeld ‚Äî who has theories about how to conduct warfare in the modern age with less and less troops ‚Äî never wanted an occupation. In fact, he may never even have been for Iraqi democratisation. He was just an in-and-out kind of a guy. It was the other people within the defence department, in particularly the really extraordinary figure of Paul Wolfowitz, who argued the political case for democracy."

But Rumsfeld trumped Wolfowitz. My own view is that Cheney and Rumsfeld had and still have no interest in democratization, and have been "to-hell-with-them hawks" from Day One. But the real responsibility lies with the president who, as Makiya points out, seemed unable to lead decisively. Makiya is admirably frank about his own mistakes as well – particularly his misreading of the state of the Iraqi army in the last days of Saddam, which, by the time of invasion, had already basically disintegrated. But that new insight leads us to a better understanding of the last three years, and where we are now:

"When the war came the army did not fight. There was no Iraqi defeat in 2003 in the sense there was a defeat of the Nazis or the Japanese armies in World War Two. The army just disintegrated. There was no war of liberation in that sense. Our liberation and our civil war are occurring now, simultaneously, so to speak."

There is still hope. Illusions have been shattered by reality, but that in itself is a ground for renewal. I think we’re doing about as well now as we can be, thanks to Khalilzad, peace be upon him. I believe we need to stay longer and not withdraw in any significant degree until we have given the nascent Iraqi state a chance to live and breathe. Iraqis will have to do the rest. And Makiya has exactly the right message for them:

"A great deal of politics, not only in Iraq but the Middle East as a whole, and across the left for that matter, is about elevating victimhood. This is a legacy we have to overcome.
Think of the Palestinians. They have done this to excess, to the point of self-destruction, so many times. Their rhetoric rests on the fact that they were victimised. It is a fact they were victimised, but it isn’t enough to be political on that basis. You have to go beyond victimhood. People cannot bow and genuflect before you solely because you are a victim. You have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and not be a victim. Don’t think like a victim even if you are one."

And so we await the Iraqi Mandela. And pray.

(Photo: Lyle Grose/101st Brigade/Getty.)

"Mr. President: Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?" – Peggy Noonan, yesterday, in a column called "Hey, Big Spender."

"In three short years, this President has so ramped up government spending that he has turned a fiscal surplus into a huge and mounting debt. Far from taking responsibility for the nation’s finances, the President has shirked basic housekeeping and foisted crippling debt on the next generation. If a President is in some sense the father of an extended family, Bush is fast becoming a deadbeat dad, living it up for short-term gain while abandoning his children to a life of insecurity and debt." – yours truly, September 15, 2003, in a Time essay called "Come On, Big Spender."

Some true believers are aware of the Satanic evil behind today’s festivities:

"Right at this very moment, the Pope is instructing his new cardinals, all wearing dresses the color of Satan’s rump, to open the lower dungeons of the Vatican and let loose their annual storehouse of malignant leprechaun spirits to steal gold from wealthy, blessed Evangelicals and spread green leprosy into the homes and upholstery of True Christians.
As always, Landover Baptist is well prepared for the demonic onslaught this year. "Saint Patrick’s Day is like green beer – something the Lord never intended," says Pastor Deacon Fred."

Yes, I know it’s a parody. Buy your Protestant merchandise here.

Yep, I can now confirm that Viacom and Comedy Central caved in to the Scientologists and Tom Cruise, but the South Park team are unrepentant. Here’s their official statement:

" So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!  Hail Xenu!!!

– Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu."

As the alternative universe Cartman would say, "I love you guys!"

If you want to know the theological context for this statement, check out Wikipedia.

A reader writes:

"There may well have been people on the ‘anti-Bush left’ who wanted the war to fail ‘solely to attack the president,’ as you suggest. However, let me offer another more nuanced view, giving myself as an example. I’ve never been a Bush supporter, and could easily be counted as ‘anti-Bush.’ But I’m not anti-Bush just for the thrill of it. I have what I believe to be good reasons, among them many that you yourself have noted over the course of the last couple of years.  What has scared and outraged me perhaps more than anything else about Bush is the extent to which he has followed a ‘narrative’ that is simply not supported by any empirical evidence and, more importantly, that he has apparently not been particularly interested in empirical evidence or expertise, period. It’s as if the discussion about the Iraq war, and how to wage it, has been a private conversation between Bush and his Maker (with Rumsfeld and Cheney chiming in).  I really don‚Äôt care what Bush’s religious beliefs are, as long as he doesn’t run the country and wage wars according to those beliefs alone, unencumbered by empirical facts or the opinions of experts. But that appears to be precisely what he’s done. 

Now, tens of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars later, Iraq is on the verge of civil war. And so, I’ve found myself actually ambivalent about how this war turns out. On the one hand, of course I want the United States to succeed. The potential consequences of losing the war in Iraq are horrendous. But on the other hand, I worry that if we finally do succeed in Iraq, Bush and his ‘base’ will conclude that, yes, if they just ‘listen to God,’ (and no one else), things will turn out just fine. And that conclusion, I fear, could be worse for this country than losing this war. I feel like I‚Äôm weighing two great potential catastrophes ‚Äì one, a failed state where Iraq used to be; and the other, a United States ‘cut loose’ from its traditional basis of rational assessment and empirical evidence, ‘guided’ by a president who thinks the rest of us should just ‘trust him,’ since God is whispering directly into his ear. I honestly don’t know which is the greater catastrophe. Hence the odd ambivalence about how the war ends."

This, I think, is the consequence of the Rovian conflation of politics and religion. It corrodes a democratic polity like acid. It turns patriots into people ambivalent about their country’s success. The great challenge for liberals but especially conservatives today is how we can best rescue our secular politics – and sincere faith – from the theocratic poison that has been opportunistically injected into both.

A reader writes:

"With regard to your item on sexual orientation and security clearances, I too am troubled by the change in language. But I can see an innocuous explanation for this – maybe they thought the previous language was too restrictive in terms of allowing the government to disqualify people who engage in irresponsible sexual behavior (eg. cruising, going to bathhouses, or the like – straight people are also usually disqualified if they go to swingers’ clubs or engage in wife-swapping.) Whereas more responsible sexual behavior would seem to fall under the "strictly private, consensual, and discreet" banner.

Also, speaking from personal experience, I have several openly gay friends who hold high-level security clearances, including one who has the highest level of clearance and lives with his long-term partner. So far I haven’t heard anything about them losing clearance. But really the only way to calm the concerns about this is for the Administration to come out and say specifically what behavior is allowed and disallowed under the new regulation. And sadly, in the current political environment I can’t see the Administration making any public statement that even indirectly approves of homosexuality. So, unfortunately we’ll have to wait and see if they start turning away gays and lesbians for security clearances before making a final judgment."

Agreed. You can hope for the best. But vigilance is now more necessary than ever. I’m afraid I’ve given up hoping for decent treatment of homosexual citizens in this administration. How many other significant American minorities will the president of the United States never be seen addressing or even meeting? If you make a conservative estimate of 9 million gay Americans, isn’t it astonishing that the president has never been seen in a public event with any of them? And that no one in the administration has ever talked with a gay representative in public? This may not be because Bush is personally bigoted toward gay people. There’s evidence he isn’t. But even appearing with an openly gay person in public would prompt a small revolution in his base. And so gays are the only minority this administration treats as "untouchables." Policy is made with regard to us – like barring our relationships in the constitution – and it never even occurs to Karl Rove to consult with any gay people about it. We’re so used to this radical exclusion from our own president, regardless of whether we’re Republican or Democrat or other, that we don’t even notice it any more. But it is amazing when you think about it. And telling.

David Ignatius sees glimmers that may merit cautious optimism. The prospect of civil war may have been the one indispensable goad to Iraq’s leaders to get serious about a national unity government. Money quote:

"One seeming obstacle to unity has been fear about the role of Iran. To finesse that issue, [Shiite leader Abdul Aziz] al-Hakim said he is urging Iran to talk with the United States about Iraq’s political future. Khalilzad himself has been quietly exploring what he calls the "modalities" for such U.S.-Iran talks on Iraq."

And then today, we find that some elements in Iran’s government have responded to Hakim’s invitation in a positive fashion. Scott McClellan has confirmed that Zalmay Khalilzad has been authorized to negotiate with Iran solely on the issue of Iraq. It is not in Iran’s interests to see Iraq descend into civil war, and for the conflict there to broaden into a regional Shiite-Sunni conflict. And so, as I put it the other day, "sometimes the darkest days are inevitable – even necessary – before the sky ultimately clears." Here’s hoping – but still not confidently expecting – that those skies may be clearing.

Has the international joke and Scientologist actor, Tom Cruise, declared war on South Park? Stay tuned …