The Dish

I don’t understand the New York Times’ decision to put its op-ed columnists in a web-cage where bloggers and others cannot read them without a hefty annual fee. Newspapers tend to want to increase their influence, not actively restrain it. Maybe there’s a financial rationale that I don’t know about. But the NYT’s ad revenues online are soaring. Why cut off the flow? But here’s an interesting contrast: next Tuesday, this blog is going to be streamed to the Washington Post’s online opinion section. WaPo, unlike the NYT, is trying to reach out to bloggers and increase the interaction between old and new media. They approached me; and I’m always up for an experiment. WaPo will carry my lede item at any given time, and a couple of teaser headlines for the rest. I have no idea what to expect; and neither do they. But it’s one of the first real cooperative ventures between an independent blog and the MSM. The experiment will be over after four days, and the Post is hoping to repeat it with other bloggers – of all political persuasions. Don’t worry. I’m perfectly free to criticize the WaPo and I wouldn’t agree to any editorial limits on my blogging. So check it out next week. And let me and the WaPo know how you think it worked, how it could be improved, or anything else constructive. And I’m sorry, David, John, Tom, MoDo, et al. You deserve a little better, I think.

TORIES AND DRUGS: There’s an interesting development in Britain with regard to drug legalization. A leading contender for the Conservative party leadership favors it – globally.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who decided to skip watching the president live last night. Across the blogosphere, it seems as if many others decided to catch it later, or on the web, or just read the transcript. Why? Because I knew what was coming: an attempt at spiritual uplift, greased by billions and billions that we don’t have, organized by a federal government that, under Bush, cannot seem to organize anything competently. I’m not saying we don’t need to spend money on the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I’m saying I don’t want to hear it from this guy. As a friend of mine commented last night over a drink, I don’t hate this president and never have. I’m just sick of him. Sick of the naked politicization of everything (Karl Rove over-seeing reconstruction?); sick of the utter refusal to acknowledge that there is a limit to what the federal government can borrow from this and the next generation; sick of the hijacking of the conservative tradition for a vast increase in the power and size of government, with only a feigned attempt at making it more effective; sick of the glib arrogance and excuses for failure that dot the landscape from Biloxi to Basra. I’m not the only one. See here, here, here, here, here, and more generally here.

THE DISILLUSION: Maybe the fact that I once truly did buy into this makes me more jaundiced today. I really wanted the man to succeed; believed he could; and, given the stakes, I felt it was almost irresponsible not to support him in the war and defend him from his worst and least principled critics (most of whom still make me retch). If so, filter my current negativism through the prism of my previous enthusiasm. Maybe I’m over-reacting. But please don’t ignore the facts: the biggest increase in federal government spending, debt and power since LBJ. Here’s one tiny example of what we’re seeing: hugely expensive trailer parks to create new federal ghettoes for evacuees. If that’s why you’re a conservative, fine. If you back this because the alternative is so awful, fine. Harry Reid’s call for a Marshall Plan for the South was a healthy reminder that many Democrats are still even worse than this profligate crew. But please don’t ask me to be enthusiastic about this. Buying popularity by spending billions was not why I originally became a conservative. Increasing the welfare state, burdening the future generations with mountainous debt, confusing politics with faith, failing to impose basic law and order as a primary reponsibility for government: these things I thought were characteristics of the left. They now define the Bush administration. I became a conservative because I saw in my native country what a terrible, incompetent, soul-destroying thing big government socialism is. It breaks my heart to see much of it now being implemented in America – by Republicans.

“Your post on the need for the Roman Catholic Church to have openly gay celibate priests reminds me of the title of the Best Rock Video Ever. Its by the Talking Heads and is entitled ‘Stop Making Sense.'”

I’m writing a column on penguins and the culture wars. Here’s a factual nugget that I found interesting. Some on the religious right have hailed the new – and wonderful – movie, “The March of the Penguins” as a socially conservative morality tale. Michael Medved even went so far as to argue that the penguin documentary “passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.” Well, not quite. It turns out that monogamy varies a lot among birds and even among penguin species. The emperor penguins featured in the movie have a very low monogamy habit. From year to year, only 15 percent of the blokes mate with the same, er, chick. Imagine humans with an 85 percent annual divorce rate. That’s the model that some on the religious right are now touting. Maybe they should re-think. When they’re not gay, these birds have as many spouses as Larry King. Even Liz Taylor beats them on the marriage front, I think.

The latest data on American sexual behavior and identity from the CDC has some interesting nuggets. Money quote: “90 percent [of adult males aged 15 – 44] have had oral sex with a female, and 40 percent, anal sex with a female.” If sodomy is defined as non-procreative sexual intercourse (and that is the basic definition), then it is now practiced by 90 percent of heterosexuals. So on what rational moral basis do we discriminate against gays – who, according to the CDC, make up around 3 percent of the population? Meanwhile, mixed news on the safer sex front:

Among men 15-44 years of age who had at least one sexual partner in the last 12 months, 39 percent used a condom at their most recent sex. Among never married males, this figure was 65 percent, compared with 24 percent of married males. Among males who had ever had sexual contact with another male, 91 percent used a condom at their last sex, compared with 36 percent of men who never had sex with another male.

Of course, this requires honesty on the party of survey respondents. But it’s encouraging nonetheless, with gay men understandably far safer than straight men in their sex lives.

He’s suing a blogger for parody? What a jerk.

Roy and Silo were together for six years and brought up a baby penguin. But now Silo has a girlfriend. Roy is hanging. I’m completely distraught.

“I have been reading you for some time now, and while a lot of conservatives and moderates have moved away because of your stances, I still come in to see what you have to say. I find this latest exchange between you and Reynolds distressing. I read Glenn all the time, and I do not think he is a ‘triumphalist’. He does err on the side of the positive, but frankly I am rather glad that he does. The mainstream press simply never ever does, and it is nice to have news sources that refuse to descend into eternal gloom and doom.
I fully understand your desire to point out the problems and hold people accountable. I am growing increasingly dissatisfied with Bush’s handling of the war I voted for him to handle. That having been said, your site does now feel relentlessly negative. I know it is not but it very much has that tone. Calling you a Kos diarist is unfair, but in a war where morale is difficult enough as it is, your site erodes it vastly more for me than any hardcore lefty site precisely because you did and do have credibility on the issue. It is painful to read your blog now and some people just can’t handle it. It is difficult for me.
I still support the Iraq war strongly. I still think it was completely the right thing to do, but I am beginning to realize that democracy in the middle east may be a necessary condition, but it is hardly sufficient. The London murderers grew up in a democracy. It did not seem to have helped. This problem is vastly more dire than I had hoped, and the neo-con strategy of transforming the middle east, which I agreed with before, may not work.”

A round-up of responses to the Hitch-Galloway debate.

“INSANE”: That’s how Catholic conservative Amy Wellborn describes the apparent new policy of the Catholic church to ban even celibate homosexual priests committed to the magisterium. I should say that her characterization of me is off-base. I do indeed dissent from Humanae Vitae and do not believe that all sex should be procreative in intent or potential. But I’m not a priest; and I’ve never said or argued that gay priests shouldn’t live by exactly the same standards as straight ones, i.e. celibacy; and I’ve never argued, for that matter, that my own beliefs about sexuality as a whole are compatible with the Church’s (I am joined in that by the vast majority of contraceptive-using heterosexual Catholics). The issue of celibacy itself – for gay and straight priests alike – is a separate matter to be discussed on another occasion. But I’m heartened by Amy’s view that the policy of “not-even-celibate-gays” is so extreme and so confused in its theology that it cannot be pursued. But we’ll see. Where I differ from Wellborn is her support for banning priests who self-identify as gay, rather than those merely privately tormented by same-sex desire. I think part of the problem that led to the hideous “acting out” of some emotionally stunted priests has been exactly the deep gay self-hatred among some gay priests, inculcated by the Church. So let’s be consistent here: If being gay is no sin, then there’s no sin in being open about it. In fact, if the Church is serious about urging gay men and women to be celibate even in their lay lives, shouldn’t celibate openly gay priests be key leaders of this effort? If more were open about both their sexual orientation and their commitment to celibacy, it seems to me it would be healthier for them and the church. And priests also emerge from the society they live in. The next generation will not grow up with the same prejudices about homosexuality that my generation did; and “gay culture,” if it exists as such, will change into something far more complex as well. Self-identifying as gay in a generation’s time will be no more dispositive about someone than saying you’re Latino or black; it’s a standard that won’t last five years, let alone five decades. The church should concentrate on forbidding sexual abuse, not stigmatizing sexual orientation. It’s an actual response to an actual problem – not scapegoating; and it’s the Catholic thing to do.

“If you read [Osama bin Laden] in his own words, he sounds like somebody who would be a very high-minded and welcome voice in global politics,” – Duke religion professor, Bruce Lawrence, on his new collection of bin Laden’s speeches and writing.