The Dish

This is a picture of Father Mychal Judge, the pastor for New York City’s fire-fighters, an openly gay priest who died with those he served in the ashes of the World Trade Center. According to the new Pope, he should never have been ordained.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to read the news on the front page of the New York Times today. The day after Benedict’s election as Pope, I wrote:

I expect an imminent ban on all gay seminarians, celibate or otherwise.

Those who under-estimate the extremism of the new order in Rome doubted it. Those who have followed the career of Joseph Ratzinger will merely wonder why it took him so long. You can read my recent posts on this decision to ban all gay men from seminaries, regardless of their conduct, here and here. If you want to understand why this is not, pace the credulous reporters of the NYT, in any way consistent with the policies of the recent past, or with orthodox Catholic theology, take a look at this essay I wrote over a decade ago on the 1975 and 1986 Vatican letters on homosexual orientation – the last one written by Ratzinger himself.

BIGOTRY REDUX: The fundamental point is fairness. It is fair to place restrictions on the conduct of priests and seminarians; it is even fair to take special note of gay seminarians and their unique struggles and insist on the removal of any who violate their vows; it is fair to ensure that seminaries don’t become some kind of gay club, and that chastity is enforced and supported. It is not fair to discriminate against a whole group of people, regardless of their conduct. The latter is bigotry. Period. This new doctrine also stigmatizes the thousands of faithful, celibate gay priests now serving the Church: in effect, it says that they should never have been ordained, and that their “serious personality disorders” render them incapable of being priests. How are they supposed to continue? You will notice in the statements coming out of Rome that there is no attempt to address this, no pastoral effort to reach out to current gay priests, no acknowledgment of the pain this new policy will impose, no compassion whatever. One obvious conclusion is that the Vatican wants them out. Wouldn’t this devastate the Church, which is already reeling from a collapse in vocations? Or is that the point – to make way for a smaller, “purer” church of fundamentalists? To add to the incoherence, the Church is now saying that gay priests are constitutively incapable of chastity. Which begs a question: If gay priests are incapable of it, what hope is there for the gay laity? The old rule – being gay is not a sin, acting on it is – has now changed. The new rule is: all gays are psychologically sick and uniquely prone to mortal sin: Untermenschen. This was once described by Ratzinger himself as “an unfounded and demeaning” assumption. But Benedict’s church is now in the practice of demeaning gays and promoting utterly unfounded slurs against their souls and psyches. Why? To save its own skin. Rather than address the real issue – the stunted sexual development of priests who came into service in the 1970s and the criminal complicity in their crimes by Vatican and church officials – the Pope has decided to conflate pedophilia/minor-abuse with homosexuality, and to scapegoat all gay priests, regardless of their conduct or talents.

IT WILL FOSTER PEDOPHILIA: More important, this new policy may well worsen the issue it is trying to address – the screwed-up sexuality of emotionally stunted and self-hating gay or pedophilic priests. The bulk of the cases of child abuse came from the older generations who entered the church in part because they were conflicted about their sexual orientation and never dealt with it. Precisely because they never had a healthy sexual development or any chance to be open about it, discuss it or even receive counseling, they often “acted out” and committed unspeakably immoral acts. Subsequent generations of gay priests have been far better adjusted – in part because of social change and in part because they weren’t so in denial about their own psyches and issues. So the prevalence of child abuse has fallen dramatically in the last decade or so. What the new policy may well do is exclude the psychologically-balanced gay man seeking to serve God celibately, while allowing those who lie, or are ashamed, or too screwed up to discuss their own sexuality. In other words, it could lead to an exodus of good priests and make another wave of child abuse more likely. None of this is discussed because Benedict rules in a climate of fear. Since no one can talk honestly about the problem, we get a non-solution. Look at the NYT today. We have quotes from “three other church officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared they would lose their jobs if they revealed dissension within church ranks,” and one from “a gay American priest and professor at a Catholic college who did not want to be identified because he fears he could lose his church position if his sexual orientation was known.” Do we really expect sane policy to come from this kind of climate? What we need is openness, dialogue and compassion. What we have is fear, diktat and bigotry. Welcome to the era of Benedict XVI.

This is what the Iranian regime decrees for homosexuality: flogging a twenty-two year old a hundred times and reducing his face to a pulp. (Warning: graphic images.) He’s lucky he wasn’t hanged. I wonder what it will take to get gay groups in the West more exercised about this. Or human rights groups. Or our own governments.

DAILY KOS AND LARRY SUMMERS: It’s a small point but it helps illuminate some of the dumbness of the activist left. “Armando” of mega-blog/community board, Daily Kos, takes a dig at Larry Summers, and links to a new study on gender difference. I’m not getting into the new study here, but I will address Armando’s description of Larry Summers’ position. In a bid to be fair, Armando writes:

NOTE: Yeah I know Summers didn’t say men were smarter than women, he just said they had greater aptitude in math and the sciences than women. Huge difference.

This is one of those memes that, although demonstrably untrue, still survives. Read the transcript of Summers’ now infamous remarks. His point was not that men are better at math and the sciences than women, as Armando would have it. His point was that there is a difference not in the mean but in the standard deviation:

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper – looked at the book, rather – looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those – they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth – but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation – and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways – you get five to one, at the high end. (My italics.)

Summers was addressing the discrete issue of why at the very high end of Ivy League math departments, there were too few women. His point, as the Harvard Crimson summarized it was that, in math and the sciences, “there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.” Armando is wrong; and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of leftist blog credibility. Will he correct? I’ll keep you posted.

An emailer writes:

Many of us either withheld or tempered our criticism before the election for the practical reason that (1) its detrimental effect on Bush’s election chances outweighed any curative effect it would have on his governance (which curative effect it could still have post-November); and (2) Bush, even with his weaknesses, was a better choice than Kerry. You obviously concluded otherwise. That doesn’t make you any more responsible for criticizing Bush or me any less responsible for holding my tongue.

Point taken. We all have to make judgments and I know few people who wouldn’t have preferred a better choice last November. But I think we had also learned by last November that Bush never listens to criticism (except, perhaps, from his wife); that his re-election would confirm him in all the worst judgment calls of his presidency; that his administration was slowly killing off conservatism as we had known it; it was manifestly incompetent and immune to correction; and that the only responsible thing was therefore to back Kerry as the lesser of two evils. I think Kerry would have made a pretty poor president. But Bush was already clearly on course for disaster (and had already made a basket case of Iraq). I wish I was being proven wrong. At least now I feel a little less lonely.

Max Boot is leery of the new agreement with Kim Jong Il. For good reason.

A sea-change? Dan Drezner, who actually criticized this administration when it could have made a difference (yes, he even endorsed Kerry in frustration at the incompetence of it all), notices a change in right-wing blogs. Check out the comment section. Money quote there:

Funny, these are the same guys who idolized him for the first five years of his presidency. What changed, all of a sudden? Certainly not Bush, he is still acting the same way he has his entire career.
What’s changed is that after five years of presidency, the elections are finally over. It is now safe to criticise Bush, because such criticism can’t possibly matter any more – it can’t affect his reelection chances.
Forgive me if I don’t perceive this as responsible conservatism. Responsibility would have been criticising him before it’s too late to do anything about his weaknesses.

Ahem.

“Q: Let me change gears here for a moment, if you don’t mind. I’m curious if you, Governor Schwarzenegger or private citizen Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you’ve have ever attended a gay marriage or a gay commitment ceremony — a gay or lesbian marriage or commitment ceremony?

Arnold Schwarzenegger: I can’t remember.”

– San Jose Mercury News. You mean to say you could forget going to a same-sex marriage or commitment ceremony? Who is he, Bill Clinton? Later in the interview, he says: “I don’t work like a politician.” Uh-huh.

The bird-flu situation in Indonesia appears close to panic. Money quote:

Maybe the most ominous sign here in Europe is that even CNN International devoted a full 10 seconds to the Indonesian situation before returning to the more important business of supermodel Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine use.

Alleged? Meanwhile, the CDC is acting like FEMA in some respects.

Flickr has an idea. Who said fiscal sanity is dead?

NOW, THE FAMILIES: The impact of the new baldly bigoted policy of the Vatican toward gays is not just restricted to gay priests or gay Catholics, but affects their families as well. I know my own family has been torn up by the new anti-gay stance. Others are as well. Here’s an email that speaks to the widespread pain wrought by the proposed ban on gay priests and apparent papal assertion that homosexuality represents a “serious personality disorder”:

I, too have felt the complete and utter devastation of the Catholic church’s new and most hateful policies designed (in my opinion) to push out every last gay Catholic. But let me point out that this is not just affecting the Catholic gay community, but everyone who loves them. As a cradle Catholic and married mother of 3 children, one of them gay, I have found it utterly impossible to pass through the doors of a Catholic church for some time now. I have three children in different stages of their education in three different schools – two in Jesuit Universities and one in a Catholic high school. And though our experience with the Jesuits has been most wonderful, the conclusion reached by this family of five is that we can no longer be a part of a church that has deemed one of our beloved family “evil”. I am all cried out, heartbroken, a bit lost, but at peace with our decision.

Gut-wrenching.

The NYT is preventing syndicated TimesSelect columns from appearing elsewhere online for free. An obvious move – but, again, it might mean fewer papers run the columns; and certainly means fewer people will read them. Meanwhile, WaPo is running a stream of independent blog posts. One way of expressing your opinion is to let the WaPo know that you appreciate their experiment; and look forward to other bloggers’ participation in the future. The email address is opinions@washingtonpost.com.

WAPO SUCK-UP CONTINUES: Meanwhile, they have an excellent new blog on national security. Check it out.