The Dish

Locusts and frogs are falling on my head, but John Derbyshire has a must-read on the failed papacy of John Paul II. This Pope lost even Ireland. Yes, Ireland. How much more damning an indictment can there be? I disagree with Derbyshire on his lack of hope for the Church. But I do believe that its revival will come from the West, not the South, and it will require amending some of the most anti-modern aspects of Church teaching on sexual ethics or the role of women and a refocus on the simple and powerful message of the Gospels.

I’m surprised that hard data on the damage the late Pope did to the Catholic church has not been readily available in the mainstream media. But here are some interesting statistics. Since 1975, the number of priestly ordinations in the U.S. declined from 771 a year to 533 last year. (In 2000, the number hit a low of 442.) When you adjust for population growth, in 1975, 771 newly ordained priests faced a Catholic population of 49 million; today, 533 emerge for a total of 64 million Catholics. Essentially, per Catholic, we saw a 50 percent drop in vocations under this Pope. No wonder that in 1975, 702 parishes had no priest; and today, over 3,000 are without a pastor. That’s quite an indictment. Globally, the picture is a little brighter, but still not encouraging. The number of parishes without priests went from 23 percent of all parishes in 1975 to 25 percent in 2000. In the U.S., weekly church attendance has slowly but innexorably declined to well below 50 percent of all Catholics. The decline in religious orders has been particularly steep: down by over 30 percent. And all this understates the crisis facing the American church, because almost half the current priesthood is over 60 – and their replacements are in shorter and shorter supply. This is the legacy of John Paul II: a church that may soon have no-one to run it. John Paul the Great? Puhlease.

POWERLINE CHOKES: So the Schiavo memo did come from Republican sources. Does Powerline concede? Barely. When your blog makes Sean Hannity look bipartisan, that’s what you’d expect. Yes, some of the original reporting was too vague. But the basic truth is that this was a GOP memo, it was crass, and it does reflect the cynical nature of many on the GOP right.

HEARTY STONERS: A marijuana-based compound could be a breakthrough in controlling heart disease. But what if these people living longer had more fun while they were at it? Time for Mr Bush to step in.

IN THE LITERARY LOCKER ROOM: “The locker room of the Fighting Illini didn’t have any fight left in it Monday night. In fact, the grief was so heavy I thought for a moment that I had left home for St. Peter’s, not St. Louis, where Illinois succumbed to North Carolina in the NCAA finals, 75-70. This particular locker room at the Edward Jones Dome, just outside of where the players would soon go to change their clothes, contained large dark wood cubicles, mostly empty, that looked almost like confessionals. Inside them, or on chairs just in front, sat young men–boys, really–staring off into space like novitiates who had lost their Holy Father. The pope was dead, and so was their season.” – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek.

WHY NOT FEDERALISM? Kansas is the latest state to put discrimination against gays into its constitution. A terrible stain but within the rights of the people of that state. Stanley Kurtz exults and points out that 18 states now have such constitutional bans against committed gay unions. Kurtz predicts 30 such anti-gay bans by 2008. But then he says this makes it all the more necessary to pass a federal amendment banning protections for gay couples in every state. Huh? Isn’t the opposite actually the case? Doesn’t state action mean federal action is less, rather than more necessary? This is surely how federalism is supposed to work. Why is it so terrible if the voters in Massachusetts or Connecticut or Vermont choose another path? (And voters have been involved. In Massachusetts, voters have punished pols who voted against marriage equality and rewarded those who supported it. The state legislature may well kill off an anti-gay-marriage amendment this year. In Connecticut and California, legislative bodies have enacted broad civil union laws, that are the effective equivalent of civil marriage.) We may well soon have a situation in which there are states that are safe for gay couples, and states that are unsafe. Gay people can move to the free states, rather as inter-racial couples moved across country to states where equality and freedom were respected. And in the process, we can see whether the gay-friendly states see marriage collapse, as opposed to the flourishing of marriage in those states which are constitutionally hostile to gays. I’m in favor of federalism. Today’s GOP right isn’t.

They’re inevitable. This president, who knows how to duck personal responsibility, may not have to preside over them. But his successor will be forced to. The Medicare explosion and Social Security crunch mean something obvious to anyone with eyes to see:

[B]aby boomers’ children and grandchildren face massive tax increases. Social Security and Medicare spending now equals 14 percent of wage and salary income, reports Bell. By 2030, using the trustees’ various projections, that jumps to 26 percent. Of course, payroll taxes don’t cover all the costs of Social Security and Medicare. Still, these figures provide a crude indicator of the economic burden, because costs are imposed heavily on workers via some tax (including the income tax), government borrowing (a.k.a. the deficit) and cuts in other government programs.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative (or what used to be a conservative), has begin to think of how best to minimize the damage Bush is doing to the economy, and believes a VAT is the least worst option. My only point is that it is absurd to believe that this president has really lowered the tax burden. By spending through the roof, while cutting taxes, all this president has done is borrow. The debt will have to paid off, or inflated or devalued away. But before then, this president’s big government spending will require either massive cuts in entitlements (which he has threatened to veto) or massive tax hikes. I have no confidence that either party will cut entitlements. Bush’s domestic legacy is that he has made America safe for a vast expansion of government and taxation.

A major academic group in Britain, the Association of University Teachers, readies itself to ban Israeli lecturers, unless they sign an affidavit condemning their own government’s actions.

Last night on Hardball, I said what I think needs to be said. Under John Paul II (and his predecessors), the Roman Catholic church presided over the rape and molestation of thousands of children and teenagers. Under John Paul II, the church at first did all it could to protect its own and to impugn and threaten the victims of this abuse. Rome never acknowledged, let alone take responsibility for, the scale of the moral betrayal. I was staggered to see Cardinal Bernard Law holding press conferences in Rome this week, and appearing on television next to the man who announced the Pope’s death. But that was the central reaction of the late Pope to this scandal: he sided with the perpetrators, because they were integral to his maintenance of power. When you hear about this Pope’s compassion, his concern for the victims of society, his love of children, it’s important to recall that when it came to walking the walk in his own life and with his own responsibility, he walked away. He all but ignored his church’s violation of the most basic morality – that you don’t use the prestige of the church to rape innocent children. Here was a man who lectured American married couples that they could not take the pill, who told committed gay couples that they were part of an “ideology of evil,” but acquiesced and covered up the rape of minors. When truth met power, John Paul II chose truth. When truth met his power, John Paul II defended his own prerogatives at the expense of the innocent. Many have forgotten. That’s not an option for the victims of this clerical criminality.

Good for him. Just ignore the blather about being taken out of context. He wasn’t. He contributed to anti-judicial emotionalism; and he has retracted his inflammatory remarks.

Glenn adds his voice to the growing chorus. The more I mull over John Cornyn’s disgusting remarks about violence directed toward judges, the more outrageous they seem. Shouldn’t Cornyn be required to retract his comments? Can’t the blogosphere do something to keep up the pressure? Here’s hoping that even the judicial critics at conservative websites can draw the line at this poison. How must Judge Lefkow be feeling right now?

Sorry for the lack of insta-analysis. It’s taken me a while to sort out my conflicted mess of feelings and ideas about him. I’ve written a short piece for TNR on his legacy – a deeply mixed one, in my view. I’ll post it once it’s available.

BAITING JUDGES: Josh Marshall links to Senator John Cornyn’s extraordinary diatribe about the judiciary. Yes, Josh, you’re right to be appalled. Just not shocked. Money quote from Cornyn:

I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in – engage in violence.

Over to you, Mr DeLay.

BLAIR’S LEAD NARROWS: Several polls show a fast tightening British electoral race. The gap between Blair and the Tories has narrowed to two or three points. Labour should still win, but it no longer looks like a shoo-in.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I don’t own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone needs to get a hold of me they just say “Mitch,” and I say “What?” and turn my head slightly …” – comedian Mitch Hedberg. Those were the days.

DANCE, WHITE BOY: Another Internet star is born.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE VERSUS GAYS: BoyfromTroi makes an interesting point. Wealthy spouses are allowed to contribute an indefinite amount to their spouse’s campaign. But gay candidates are not allowed legal spouses. Isn’t this a formal form of electoral discrimination?

A new, liberal-leaning, internationalist foreign policy blog.

MORE ON SCHIAVO: Whatever happened to theological moderation? My take in the Sunday Times.

SUPER-HIV: Since the mainstream media has been doing such a piss-poor job of understanding or even explaining the alleged case of super-HIV, with the New York Times leading the pack in reckless, dumb reporting, I thought it would be worth posting the technical details we now have. Some of this stuff is available online only to doctors subscribing to certain websites. One of them at NIH sent me this analysis:

The results of genotyping studies to ascertain the drug susceptibility of the patient’s HIV-1 revealed broad resistance to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI), non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTI), and protease inhibitors. The genotype was confirmed by further testing done at ViroLogic with one notable difference: the detection of a mixture of M184V/I in reverse transcriptase (RT). The researchers interpreted the collection of mutations to confer resistance to thymidine analogues, lamivudine and emtricitabine, reduced susceptibility to abacavir and tenofovir, high-level resistance to nevirapine, possibly an attenuated response to efavirenz, and broad resistance to protease inhibitors. They also noted low degrees of reduced susceptibility to lamivudine and emtricitabine. Superficially, these findings suggest little evidence of drug resistance to these agents. However, given the presence of mixtures of viral species detected at aminoacid positions 184, 210, and 215 in RT – all resistance-conferring substitutions for NRTI – a discordance between the genotype and phenotype results was predicted. Additionally, the results of the phenotyping assay showed the virus was highly resistant to nevirapine and all commercially available protease inhibitors. The virus tested sensitive to two NNRTI, efavirenz and delavirdine, and to enfurvitide, an inhibitor that blocks HIV-1 entry into cells.

Treatment options for the patient are therefore limited. His virus is resistant to all protease inhibitors and nevirapine, and is sensitive to efurvitide and efavirenz. The phenotype data for NRTI show susceptibility to various drugs in this class. However, viral mixtures with aminoacid substitutions at positions 184 (conferring resistance to lamivudine and emtricitabine) and with thymidine analogue mutations at 210 and 215 (conferring resistance to abacavir and thymidine analogues) suggests that most NRTIs are unlikely to be effective. Furthermore, the presence of M41L together with mixtures reflected at positions 210 and 219 in RT predicts an attenuated response to tenofovir. Therefore efurvitide and efavirenz are the only two antiretroviral drugs that can possibly provide full activity against the virus in this patient. As I understand it HAART has been initiated, including efurvitide and efavirenz, and possibly fuzeon. I hope that he responds, and that efurvitide and efavirenz do prove effective – if they do, he’s got a fighting chance.

I know many of you will not be able to follow much of this, but those of us who have learned to understand some of the science can glean something useful. First: this is how sophisticated HIV treatment now is – specific genetic analysis of everyone’s own viral strain and a callibrated response. Second: this patient is treatable. In fact, his options are far greater than they would have been, say, five years ago. Notice that resistance to various drugs is not binary. There’s a spectrum, and skilled doctors can provide very precise combination options to target viral replication. I’ll make a rash prediction: this guy will have a much improved immune system in a few months. As long as he doesn’t touch any more crystal meth.

My apologies but the Weekly Standard has already gone a long way toward answering my “What If?” question. In a subtle but ultimately very radical piece, Eric Cohen argues that the will of the vegetative person to be allowed to die, even if expressed in a living will or supported by all her family, is not the real issue here. People cannot be allowed to revoke life simply because it is theirs’ to revoke:

[T]he real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are … [T]he autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate.

So if we reject the “autonomy regime,” what replaces it? The moral obligation to keep even people in PVS in permanent medical care, regardless of her own wishes or that of the family. But Cohen is somewhat vague on how this new regime can be imposed. The only possibility, it seems to me, is that the law state emphatically that living wills are not dispositive, that family wishes are not relevant, and that the law set a series of medical or moral criteria to determine whether to keep someone alive indefinitely. Doctors and families would be obliged to obey such laws. The state would be obliged to enforce them – through the police power if necessary. What if the family could not afford the care? Presumably the state would be required to provide it. So let us be plain: the theoconservative vision would remove the right of individuals to decide their own fate in such cases, and would exclude the family from such a decision as well. Indeed, the law might even compel the family to provide care as long as they were capable of doing so. My “what if?” is a real one. And the theocon right has answered it. They want an end to the “autonomy regime.” They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom – autonomy over one’s own physical body – is now under attack. And if a theocon government won’t allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?