The organizers write:
I just wanted to follow up and thank you for posting about our project. Thanks to you we have recruited several volunteers doing books drive in other multiple cities and have even received some $ donations. You have really made a difference.
The readers made a difference. Thanks for your generosity. Volunteering time is the best gift many can give. More info here.
In today’s Corner, Jonah Goldberg posits himself as the true conservative on an issue like gay marriage, contrasting his moderation with yours truly. Money quote:
I favor civil unions and it’s my guess that gay marriage is ultimately inevitable. And yet, I still oppose it. Why? Truth be told, my primary ‚Äî but not sole ‚Äî objection isn’t
religious. Rather, it’s that, unlike some relevant advocates of same-sex marriage, I am humble and skeptical about the extent of what I can know. I work from the Hayekian assumption that there is a vast amount of social-evolutionary knowledge and utility embedded in traditional marriage that should be respected even if I cannot tell you what it is… Sullivan’s argument for gay marriage is a Progressive one at its core (though of a conservative bent). He wants to use the insitution of marriage to change gay people. And in truth, that’s always been the most persuasive argument for gay marriage in my opinion. In short, my objection to gay marriage isn’t primarily principled in the sense that my objection really has nothing to do with my attitudes toward homosexuality per se. It has to do with my views toward the pace of change itself. Gay marriage is a very, very, new idea. My view/hunch is that implementing it too quickly is a bad idea (for all sorts of obvious and unobvious reasons).
Now Jonah has read my book, and so he knows, I think, that my position and his are close to identical. The Conservative Soul, despite some claims on the right, has a mere handful of paragraphs about gay marriage in 300 pages. But they’re worth citing here. I speak first of the emerging social and cultural fact of more openly gay people, gay couples, and so on, in the last three decades. This is one of the largest social changes in recent times. It cannot be denied. What’s a conservative to do? Here’s my take:
A conservative in government expects such changes in society as time goes by. His job is to accommodate them to existing institutions. He might come up with some solution
like civil unions; or, worried that setting up a less demanding institution might undermine marriage, he might argue for coopting gay couples into the existing social institution in one fell swoop. He might think it’s wise to try this out in a few states first. But he will understand that some adjustment is necessary, because the world changes; and the job of the conservative is to adjust to such changes as soberly and prudently as possible.
Notice what this isn’t. It’s not a declaration about the ultimate morality or otherwise of marriages for gay couples. That is left to the churches or synagogues or mosques or university seminars. It’s not an assertion that gay couples have a God-given or naturally-required "right" to marry, as some liberals might argue. It’s simply tending to a felt social need by an imaginative political adaptation. It is a conservative move. A radical may want to abolish or privatize civil marriage. A fundamentalist will assert, as president Bush did, that civil marriage is a "sacred" institution, ordained by God, and that the civil laws, regardless of social reality, must conform to Biblical revelation. A conservative will escape both traps.
My book is a statement of classical conservatism in this respect. (You can also judge by this passage whether its tone is "shrill," as Jonah claims.) Jonah also knows that I have never argued for judicial imposition of marriage rights across the whole country. I have argued for federalism, while believing, as he does, that marriage rights are indeed inevitable. I have preferred legislative action to judicial power, but, unlike some on the right, I also believe that courts have a role to play in protecting the rights of minorities. This messy acceptance that both courts and legislatures have a role to play in forwarding this debate is also, I’d argue, well within the conservative tradition.
Now, as a gay man who went through the AIDS epdidemic and saw the human wreckage that the lack of civil marriage compounded, I have some personal passion on the subject of gay integration. I don’t want to see another catastrophe among my brothers. I don’t think, by the way, my opponents begrudge that or fail to realize why it makes me sometimes sound like a progressive on the subject. But given my passion, my insistence on gradualism, moderation and federalism seems to me the sign of a strong commitment to conservatism, even when it doesn’t give me all I want. Given my passion, my defense of federalism, and my support for a president who opposed marriage rights in 2000 are telling in my defense, I think. Yes, I drew the line at a federal constitutional amendment. But that was a conservative line, not a gay one. Ask all the other straight conservatives who opposed it as a step too far. That Bush went there proved to me he was a religious radical, not a political conservative.
Some on the right are portraying my book as somehow extreme or angry. It is neither. While being honest about my own biases and personal history, it’s a constructive attempt to go back to conservative first principles and re-imagine a conservative future. If you’re a conservative wondering where this debate goes next, I hope you give it chance.
Big email response – so another link to my discussion with former governor James McGreevey about life, faith, sex and politics.
Poppy was finally forced – once again – to rescue the wayward son. My take in the Sunday Times:
The events of last week in America have an almost Shakespearean quality to them. It‚Äôs like some ghastly conflation of Richard II’s doom-laden ‘Down, down, I come’ and Richard III‚Äôs ‘winter of our discontent’. Richard II is how Bush would like the world to see him ‚Äî a king of noble motives brought low by injustice and fate. Richard III is … well, ask Karl Rove, the hunch in W’s back.
All of this is fascinating psychodrama, of course, and a humiliation for the dauphin. But it’s also good news. It’s a chance to leave behind the acrimony of the recent past and construct a new direction for Iraq and America. Poppy Bush can unite again with his son; Gates, Baker and Rice can try and put a realist finale to a neocon adventure; Democrats can unite again with Republicans … oh, who am I kidding? I don’t know what the future will bring. But if things look dark at the end of Act IV, there’s always Act V to come.
(White House Photo.)
A true conservative wrote:
"To prove that these sorts of policed societies are a violation offered to nature, and a
constraint upon the human mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary measures, and instruments of violence which are every where used to support them.
Let us take a review of the dungeons, whips, chains, racks, gibbets, with which every society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of victims are annually offered up to support a a dozen or two in pride and madness, and millions in an abject servitude and dependence. There was a time, when I looked with reverential awe on these mysteries of policy; but age, experience, and philosophy, have rent the veil; and I view this sanctum sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastic admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the necessity of such a proceeding in such institutions; but I must have a very mean opinion of institutions where such proceedings are necessary."
It’s from "A Vindication Of Natural Society Or A View Of The Miseries And Evils Arising To Mankind From Every Species Of Artificial Society" published in 1756.
Madison, Wisconsin, 6.15 am.
Frank Stallone (Sly’s bro) teams up with John Travolta in tights for an ’80s classic: "Far From Over."
A reader writes:
In response to a reader, you say,
"The Republicans had become so enthralled by what they were against that they had forgotten what they were supposed to be for."
In a broader context, isn’t this the crux of Fundamentalism? While the faithful can simply say, "This is what I believe," a Fundamentalist must say "This is what I believe, and what you believe is wrong." A Fundamentalist defines himself by what he is not.
This is also a good working definition of original sin. At the beginning of his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote (I’m grossly paraphrasing here) that before the Fall, man was aware only of God, and had no awareness of himself apart from God, as one who looks straight into the sun cannot see anything but the sun. The Fall came when man turned away from God and became aware of himself as something apart from God, as one who turns from the sun and sees his shadow is aware of himself only as an absence of light.
In the Old Testament, this is illustrated by Jonah, who (unsuccessfully) fled from God when commanded to go to Nineveh. In the New Testament, the parable of the pharisee and the publican makes the same point.
Seeing yourself only as what you are, rather than as what you are not, requires Christ-like humility. All who try will fail. The Fundamentalist embraces this failing and proclaims it as virtue. This is why Fundamentalist religion and Fundamentalist nationalism (jingoist patriotism) are such natural allies.
Christianity can and will survive the fundamentalist temptation. It ahs in the past; and it will in the future. It’s just the recognition of a lost spiritual compass that is hard.
A reader writes:
You articulated what I have been thinking for years about Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, and these supposed conservatives.
If you listen to Limbaugh, Savage, and Hannity on the radio or TV you discover that their perceptions of terrorists and U.S. Democrats and liberals are identical, as is their level of vitriol for both groups, and the methods they expouse for dealing with them: obliteration, actual or rhetorical.
Their rage is contagious. You either buy into it or become agitated with them and have to turn them off. This dichotomous ‘all or none’ ‘good and evil’ thinking (called splitting in the psychoanalytic literature), to me, is not healthy.
With Hannity, you only have to read the title of his recent book: "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism". The fact that he can equate liberalism with terrorism and decribe each of them as "evil" means he has given up on democratic discourse. I wish it had given up on him.
The classic 1915 verses by Canadian John McCrae:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The Dish 