The Dish

As in Massachusetts, the public’s view of marriage rights for gay couples has changed a little since the marriages became legal. Now, 55 percent of Canadians favor keeping marriage legal for gay couples, while only 36 percent want the new law repealed. Once the abstract threat becomes the reality, people calm down and realize what a small and sensible reform this is.

Here’s a question from a French high-school exam: “In what way was American power challenged on 11 September 2001? (1 point).”

This could be useful if you’re getting worked up about the Plame investigation. I’m sorry but I confess to being underwhelmed. We can chase our tails daily on this, and be subject to multiple, simultaneous spins.

MARGARET CHO’S DOG: Now, there’s a global story. She named him after a leader in the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang in the 1970s, back when murdering people, according to Cho, “had a chicness to it, which made it seem less like a dangerous menace and more like fashion.” Cho, a formerly hilarious comedian, is now a bore.

Those words could come back to haunt Karl Rove. According to Matt Cooper, they were the last words Karl Rove said to him in their telephone call over the Wilson affair. Rove also told Cooper that Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the “Agency on WMD.” That might not be illegal, but it does seem to me to be consistent with an attempt to smear Wilson, using his wife, while skriting the fact of her CIA cover. Classic Rove sleaze. The somewhat aggressive Grand Jury also seems to consist of many African-American women – not exactly Rove’s base. Time also reports that

White House political advisor Karl Rove told the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame spy case that he heard about Valerie Plame’s identity from a reporter-or perhaps from someone else in the administration who said he got it from a reporter-Rove just couldn’t be certain or remember which one, a source who has been briefed on his account tells TIME.

So it could have been from the administration or the CIA. The bottle keeps spinning. When it stops, who’ll be the guilty one? And guilty of what? It’s not even clear any more what possible crime Fitzgerald is investigating.

Steve McWilliams (see below) isn’t the only person with a serious illness who has died in part because of the government’s ban on medical marijuana. Here’s another case, bizarrely of another McWilliams. (Ryan Sager writes about the first McWilliams here.)

I’ve linked to these pieces before, but here they are on the site: on staying alive with HIV (to the chagrin of some in the AIDS establishment); life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and why, however chastened, I’m still in favor of the Bush-Blair Iraq war.

IRSHAD PROFILED: The “lipstick lesbian” challenging the mullahs.

An emailer defends the Jesuits:

“As I recollect (from reading John O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits, a book well worth reading), the Jesuit ban on Jews was because to begin with, unlike other religious orders (and, indeed, all Christian society) they did not ban conversos, and therefore included a rather high percentage of them in the first generation or two of the Jesuits’ existence. (Note, for example, St. Teresa of Avila, in the loosely-Jesuit-affiliated Carmelite order, herself of converso descent.) The ban was in some ways forced on them: their rival orders (Dominicans, etc.) were making hay about “the Jesuits are all a bunch of Jews,” so the Jesuits conformed with the rest of Christian society. It’s also specifically in line with the Spanish limpieza de sangre laws, barring conversos from a variety of occupations–with which the Church in general at first fought and then generally compromised. Of course, by the time the compromises were done, and the Jesuits had forbidden conversos from the order, a rather large number of conversos and part-conversos in the middle and upper classes had forged sufficient genealogies to get into any order they wanted. The limpieza de sangre laws were in some ways more a tool in intra-Castilian factional fights–your great-grandmother was a Jew, so you can’t get this lucrative job, Don Miguel–than an expression of simple bigotry. But the point being that to identify the Jesuits as particularly guilty of anti-Semitism avant la lettre is 1) counterfactual; and 2) buying into the old tropes of anti-Catholicism, where it’s always the Jesuits, the Jesuits, the Jesuits who are evil, evil, evil. At the time they’re disliked from being too philosemitic; now they’re accused of the reverse.”

I don’t think any reader of this blog would remember me having anything but respect for the Jesuits. In this country, they are becoming the underground resistance that will keep the decent church alive while Benedict spreads his brittle reactionaryism. My point is simply that the Church hierarchy has acquiesced in and found theological justifications for the stigmatization of minorities in the past – and their chief objects of loathing were Jews. Like gays, Jews’ very existence seemed to violate the abstract notions of natural law that the Church had constructed to qualify the message of universal love in the Gospels. The Church hierarchy is human. It has perpetrated bigotry against the marginalized in the past. It is doing so again today. Merely the objects of dehumanization have changed. And one day, it will be as ashamed of its treatment of gays as it now officially is of its persecution of the Jewish people. It just may take a couple of millennia for the point to be conceded.

The obit. The first medical marijuana martyr?

Here’s the genuine item: tough, relentless but also, ultimately, merciful, and magnanimous.

THE WAR ON POT: Here’s a tragic story from the federal government’s campaign to prevent people with severe medical conditions from relieving their pain with marijuana. A San Diego man, Steve McWilliams,

who had to cease using medical marijuana after a 2002 arrest, suffered from chronic pain and was likely facing prison time after being charged by federal prosecutors three years ago with possessing 25 marijuana plants. A Supreme Court ruling handed down last month said that federal law prohibiting medicinal use of marijuana trumps California’s voter-approved Compassionate Use Act.

Facing time in pain and in prison, McWilliams killed himself. Another victory for the nanny state.

PTOWN MOMENT:

NADAGATE? John Tierney turns in his best column to date:

For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.

I agree with all that, but especially the first two words. For now. Someone somewhere initiated this Washington series of Chinese whispers. Who? This quote from Bob Novak in Newsday on July 21, 2003, still hangs in the air: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.” Who are “they”?

The usually reliable Catholic Reporter’s John Allen reports that a long-awaited (and long-feared) document is now in Pope Benedict’s hands. The document would put the Vatican’s full authority behind banning all gay men from seminaries and the priesthood, regardless of their commitment to celibacy or faithfulness to Church teachings. Their very existence as involuntary homosexuals would make them ineligible for the priesthood. Money quote:

[T]he document will reject a solution that some seminaries, religious communities and bishops have tended to adopt in recent years – that it doesn’t matter if a candidate is gay, as long as he’s capable of remaining celibate. “I suspect some people, in good will, have gravitated to this idea,” one bishop said. “But that’s not what the church is saying, and this document will make that clear.” To date, there’s been no indication of what the pope intends to do.

Just ponder what this might mean. The Church concedes that gay people are involuntarily gay; the Church asks them to commit to a life without sex or physical or emotional intimacy; if they are priests, the conundrum is resolved anyway: celibacy is mandatory for gays and straights alike, and, so the very distinction becomes moot.

THE TURN TOWARD BIGOTRY: But now the policy could become something much, much different: even if gay priests live up to all their responsibilities, even if they embrace celibacy wholly, even if they faithfully serve the Church, they would still be deemed beneath being priests, serving God, or entering seminaries. Why? Because, in pope Benedict’s own words, they are “objectively disordered,” indelibly morally sick in some undefined way, and so unfit, regardless of their actions, to serve God or His people. It is no longer a matter of what they do or not do that qualifies or disqualifies them for the priesthood; it is who they are. Not since the Jesuits’ ban on ethnic Jews, regardless of their conversion or Christian faith, has the Church entertained such pure discrimination. The insult to gay Catholics is, of course, immeasurable. It is also an outrageous attack on the good, great and holy work so many gay men and lesbians have performed in the Church from its very beginnings. Father Mychal Judge, for example, the fire-fighters’ priest who died in the ruins of the World Trade Center ministering sacraments to fire-men, would retroactively be deemed unfit for the priesthood. So would literally thousands and thousands of gay priests, bishops, cardinals and popes over the centuries. The old doctrine, however cruel and inhumane, at least concentrated on moral acts and made no distinctions between who committed them. It laid out clear rules and insisted that gays and straights abide by them equally. The proposed policy would instead focus on a human being’s very core – and exclude him or her as a result. That kind of discrimination is the definition of bigotry. This is the Church? This is God’s voice for human dignity and equality in the world? This is an institution that says all are welcome at the Lord’s table? I can only hope and pray that pope Benedict doesn’t go there. And if he does, I hope that heterosexual Catholics will rise up and defend their gay priests and friends and family members against this unconscionable attack.

(P.S. I am leaving aside, of course, the long history of discrimination and subordination of heterosexual women in the Church. It is equally indefensible, in my view, but the arguments for and against women priests has a different lineage and history that, for now, is best discussed in a different context.)