The Dish

An astonishing leak in London from the office of the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. It’s in the form of prep-notes for a meeting with the prime minister, Tony Blair. According to the Telegraph, Straw argues that

lack of political progress in solving the linked problems of security, infrastructure and the political process are undermining the consent of the Iraqi people to the coalition presence and providing fertile ground for extremists and terrorists.

He wants more troops and more resources. The Telegraph hints the British initiative is also designed to buttress the White House’s resolve in providing more troops. Let’s hope it works. For the record, I see nothing wrong with the U.S. seeking U.N. help and support in Iraq, even if it means losing some control. What matters now is rescuing Iraq from the logic of chaos and terror. And for the record, worrying about the drift in Iraq is not a function of going wobbly. Not worrying – and coming up with all sorts of facile defenses of what is clearly going awry – that is going wobbly.

THE ENEMY REGROUPS?: More troubling news from the war. This time, in Afghanistan. On the other hand, here’s another report, picked up by an intrepid blogger, that brings better news. Whom to believe? Maybe the truth is that the Taliban are resurgent, due, in part, to our poor follow-through in Afghanistan, but it is just as true that those soldiers who are there are doing a great job, given their limited numbers and resources. Which is why we need more resources for rebuilding Afghanistan and more troops to police it. C’mon, Dubya. Follow-through; follow-through. Some of us are worried not because we want you to fail, but because we want you to succeed.

Here’s a sentence you don’t expect to read in National Review: “Homosexuals are and should be entitled to all of the civil rights that heterosexuals possess.” The author, who pens a screed against gay people being allowed any position of authority in the Anglican Church, nevertheless seems to recognize that civil laws and religious edicts are separate matters. This is huge progress. There is no deeper civil right than the right to marry. It’s great to see NRO publish someone who sees this Constitutional and moral truth. On the other hand, Jonah Goldberg is shocked to find that a few gay radicals in Canada – including the editor of something called “Fab magazine” – don’t want to get married. You could find plenty of “hip” straights who feel that way too, of course, especially if they edit something called Fab. But Jonah doesn’t seem to believe that because many heterosexuals are ambivalent about marriage, shack up, commit adultery or get divorced, they shouldn’t be allowed the right to marry in the first place. Why not?

JONAH AND LINCOLN: Jonah also rebuts the civil rights argument that the denial of same-sex marriage is equivalent to the denial of inter-racial marriage. Why? Jonah argues that it’s because no blacks back in the 1960s entertained radical notions about marriage and family life. Really? Has he read much cultural history? In 1967, when blacks first won the constitutional right to marry whom they pleased, you could also have had a front-page story in the New York Times citing many blacks who disapproved of inter-racial marriage. A hefty plurality still do. Would Jonah have written a column saying: “See? Those negroes don’t even want to marry whites! Why should we debase this sacred institution for just a few of those people who don’t represent most blacks anyway?” I doubt it. The racial analogy is also instructive in other respects. I wonder if Jonah has looked at the rates of illegitimacy, single motherhood, divorce and promiscuity among African-Americans as a group. Does Jonah infer from that that the right to marriage should be denied African-Americans? Of course not. If anything, such a minority, with difficult cultural and social baggage, is more in need of the anchor of marriage than others. And those members of that minority who aspire to marriage are not lumped in with those who don’t, but cherished and supported, as they should be. So why does that logic not also apply to gays? Why should culturally conservative gays be denied the right to marry because more socially radical ones don’t want to? The argument reminds me a little of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas essentially argued that blacks were intrinsically unable to be as full and worthy citizens as whites. Lincoln replied that that was even more reason to grant them equality, so that they could live up to their fullest potential even if it wasn’t as elevated as the white norm. Today we rightly abhor even Lincoln’s bigotry of low expectations. But in the case of gay citizens, some social conservatives endorse not Lincoln’s posture, but Douglas’s.

She’s off to a great start in the fall. Here’s arguably the most fatuous sentence yet penned by the air-brained columnist: “If all those yuppies can climb Mount Everest, at 29,000 feet, can’t we pay some locals to nab Osama at 14,000 feet?” Yep, she wrote that. Yep, they published it. It’s her critique of the armed forces’ failure so far to capture Osama bin Laden. Does she think it’s funny? Does she think it’s insightful? Does she think it’s helpful? Here’s hoping none of that applies. Wouldn’t you love to see her in a room with special forces troops, risking their lives right now to protect us? Wouldn’t you love to see her tell them that an outdoorsy yuppie could do their job better?

A few of you complained that I was going wobbly in the war on terror in my posts yesterday. Au contraire. It’s precisely because I believe in this war passionately that I believe we need more commitment, more money and more troops to aid the effort. The issue should never be: do you support the president? The issue should be: is what the president doing going to work? I’m not omniscient, but it’s simply crazy to deny the real problems we are facing right now and the need for clear and urgent thinking about them. Many Americans who support the war agree. That’s not going wobbly; it’s doing what any thinking person should do, which is try and figure out what’s going wrong and how to fix it. Mercifully, the administration seems to be trying to find a way to make the liberation work, with more international back-up. They’re not that pig-headed. The president has no bigger fan in his conduct of the war so far. But my fear is that he is going astray. Am I supposed to keep that under wraps? As for the aricraft carrier landing, my point is that Bush gave the impression that the war was over by that event. That very signal made it look as if the current violence – a war with growing intensity – is somehow a reversal of that achievement, rather than a continuation of the struggle. It has undermined him. And we need him. I’m still wildly unconvinced that any of the Democrats can be trusted with this war. Which is why it’s even more important to ensure that the only man who can wage it doesn’t fail. Want to hear reflexive defenses of everything the administration does? Go read someone else.

AIDS RACISM? A bizarre piece in today’s New York Times, reminiscent of the worst of the Raines reign. A front-page story trumpets that Africans are better at taking their anti-HIV drugs than Americans; and that worries about their not being able to do so amount to “racism.” But then when you read the story, you find that we’re not comparing likes at all. The data on Americans includes very complex regimens – especially in recent years. My own intake amounted to a couple dozen a day at different times and in different combinations. But in Africa,

Compliance has become easier because drugmakers from India and elsewhere are beginning to make triple-therapy cocktails that come in as few as two pills a day. (These are not available in the United States yet because of patent problems – no Western company makes all three drugs for an ideal cocktail.)

Hmmm. Do you think that might have something to do with it? The difference between two pills that combine all the drugs and twenty-five that don’t would make a difference in getting the compliance right, no? And worries about Africa were mainly about medical supervision in rural areas – not a function of racism. Other factors that make Africans more adherent are their greater exposure to actual sickness. Many who are on meds have experienced opportunistic infections and witnessed death. The drugs make them feel better. In contrast, many Americans have had no HIV-symptoms and the meds make them feel worse. Hence the temptation to miss a dose sometimes. I’m not saying that this research isn’t interesting and valuable. I am saying that the spin at the Times is preachy and over-reaching. And wrong.

BUSH-HATRED REVISITED: Yep, there’s barely a soul in Provincetown who doesn’t hate George W. Bush. The stores are fully of fatuous t-shirts, lamenting Bush’s alleged stupidity. I know of about five people who support the war on terror. People randomly express their hatred of the president on all sorts of occasions and expect you to chime in. There really is a phenomenon here. I’m not sure it’s worse than the loathing some parts of the right felt for Clinton but it’s disturbing – and way more stupid than Bush could ever be – nonetheless. But the trope that has really caught on among elites is the notion that Bush is a liar. The New Republic and Paul Krugman trumpeted this charge early on, and now the Washington Monthly has chimed in, with one of the most fatuous and rigged pieces of lazy insta-journalism I’ve read in a while. (Bob Somerby gets it right, for once.) It’s not just that I find the Monthly’s (and Krugman’s) charges silly. They conflate mis-statements, deliberate confusion, euphemism, ignorance and dishonesty in ways that make it hard for anyone to emerge a non-liar. It’s more that when you start using the term “liar” promiscuously in public discourse, you make such discourse increasingly impossible. The term should be reserevd only for a conscious and deliberate statement that you know is untrue as you sepak or write it. It’s rarer than you might think. That’s why calling someone a “liar” is forbidden in the House of Commons. It undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.

MOORE CONCEDES ERROR: This is a major news event. Hard-lefty admits he was wrong. Kinda.

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE …: … comes out against the Federal Marriage Amendment. The arguments are rock-solid. George Will and Bob Barr have been there already, of course. Opposing a measure that would trivialize the constitution and destroy states’ rights should be a no-brainer for conservatives.

HOW THE LEFT COLLAPSED: A spritied and lively essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on what 9/11 continues to do to the Western Left.

THE CHURCH AND EVIL: More evidence of the Vatican’s complicity in sexual abuse. This particular child-abuser was promoted to the higher ranks of the Vatican’s diplomatic staff, despite his own admission of heterosexual minor abuse. He’s still a priest “in good standing.”

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Of course, the euro alone is not to be blamed for slow growth. The weak global economy, including moribund America, is part of the problem. But a good monetary system should protect an economy.” – Joseph Stiglitz, the Guardian. If America’s economy is “moribund,” what does that make Europe’s?

It rained lightly today. And tonight, as I walked the beagle, the streets were empty for the first time in months. It was an exquisite summer here in Provincetown – suddenly new and hazily old friends, bear-buddies on East End porches, lightly stoned gatherings on the beach, beagle-walks at low tide halfway across the harbor, polka-dot drag-queens trundling around on motor scooters, conversations begun by chance and continuing for days, the boyfriend and I actually having days together when we didn’t have to work or even worry about working. It was the same as years gone by but more poignant. Turning forty in a place where you turned thirty, retreading steps in solitude, watching the moon rise again and again across the bay: these things, like old jokes, somehow improve with repetition and time. I’m so lucky to have this little escape-hatch of a town, and the wildernesses that surround it. I realized one day at Long Point at the tip of Cape Cod that this is where I want my ashes to be spread – across the dunes into the ocean. I want one day to be an actual physical part of the earth and sea and air here, to experience these summer afternoons as dust and silt for an eternity. Politics can seem so strange from such a distance. But it continues, of course. And the light moves. And we drag ourselves reluctantly into fall.

I almost felt light-headed some days with all the spare time. I couldn’t read much – my brain’s battery was too low. But I did keep an eye on the papers and the web. This was the month in which it became official that the Bush administration is not interested in restraining the size of the federal government, but in expanding it to serve its own ends. When Fred Barnes concedes it, the conventional wisdom is set. And when the president can say, as he did yesterday, that “when somebody hurts, government’s got to move,” you begin to see why therapeutic liberalism is thriving in this White House. Nixon II? The other aspect of Bush’s domestic policy that is now undeniable is insolvency. The CBO data on the future federal deficit turned out to be chilling. You can argue whether this return to debt was avoidable, after the bubble and 9/11; but you can’t argue that Bush has shown even the slightest concern about it. In other news, The BBC did its bit to undermine the battle against al Qaeda; and it made enemies in law enforcement at home. Yet another prominent “ex-gay” turns out not to be “ex.” A pioneer of “abstinence-only” sex education resigned. An interior design company coopted the Kristols. A critical document showed how the Vatican had a policy of cover-up of sexual abuse of minors for decades. And diversity-mongering reached new heights in the culture. No, I don’t mean the non-reform at the University of Michigan.

And then there’s the war. I could forgive this administration almost anything if it got the war right. But, after a great start, it’s getting hard to believe the White House is in control of events any more. Osama bin Laden is regrouping in Afghanistan; Saddam, perhaps in league with al Qaeda, is fighting back in Iraq. The victims of terror in Iraq blame the United States – not the perpetrators – for the chaos. And the best news of the war – that Shi’a, Sunnis, and Kurds were not at each others’ throats – is now fraying. Worse, the longer the impasse continues the harder it will be to get ourselves out of it. About this we hear two refrains from the White House: a) everything is going fine, actually; and b) this new intensity of terror in Iraq is a good thing because it helps us fight the enemy on military, rather than civilian, terrain. The trouble that we’re discovering is that a full-scale anti-terror war is not exactly compatible with the careful resusictation of civil order and democratic government, is it? And if we are in a new and vital war, why are we not sending more troops to fight it? And why are we not planning big increases in funding for the civil infrastructure at the same time? The response so far does not strike me as commensurate with the problem, and I say this as a big supporter of this war. What to do? I’d be hard put to express it better than John McCain Sunday: more troops, more money, more honesty from the president about the challenges, swifter devolution of power to Iraqis, and so on. And yet the White House in August decided to devote the president’s public appearances to boosting his environmental credibility. Are they losing it? So far, I’ve been manfully trying to give the administration the benefit of the doubt, especially given the media’s relentlessly negative coverage of Iraq. But they’re beginning to lose me, for the same reasons they’re losing Dan Drezner. They don’t seem to grasp the absolutely vital necessity of success in Iraq. And I can’t believe I’m writing that sentence.

THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER LANDING: Can we all now agree that that was the dumbest political gesture of the last two years?

And yes, I’ve been following the inquiry into the death of David Kelly, the British scientist who killed himself in the midst of the BBC-Blair dust-up over WMDs in Iraq. On the merits of this matter, the BBC is simply wrong and the Blair government right. And the Beeb’s cover-up, of course, made matters far worse. Well, you know what I think. But when the following paragraph even appears in the New York Times, you know that the case against Blair is so thin as it be non-existent:

While the 11 days of testimony have uncovered evidence that the government was feverishly involved in the wording and shaping of the intelligence dossier, it has not turned up any corroboration for Mr. Gilligan’s report that it deliberately published dubious claims over the objections of intelligence chiefs.

End of story. End of the BBC? Not likely, but we can always hope. Along with the National Health Service, it’s the institution most responsible at this point for holding Britain back from its true potential. (And even some lefties are beginning to see this.)

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “What brought me here is Dean – and George,” said Karin Overbeck, an independent at her first political rally, in Spokane. “For the second time in my life, I’m ashamed of my nationality. I was born in Germany and I was ashamed; now I’m ashamed to be American.” – from a New York Times report on Howard Dean’s strongest supporters.

POSEUR ALERT: “(1) Lady Di: You ROCK! In inches as well as centimeters!! THANK YOU!!! (2) Edgewood, MD: Boris & I went for walkies this morning with Grand Arse and Little Nixon.” – John Derbyshire, National Review.

I interrupt my break to say simply: Yay! A pro-gay, pro-choice, hard-ass Republican! An Eagle has landed. Now let him soar.

I feel very conflicted about taking my annual blog hiatus this August. But I’m going to do my best to take a break. If some catastrophe occurs, I’ll be back. But blogging each day, sometimes thousands of words a day, is a wonderful but grueling way to write. I think bloggers do well to take time out. We can lose perspective, stop thinking in longer form, and also get exhausted. Obviously, my emotions right now are also wrung out from the barrage of backlash we are now experiencing, and it may be sensible to take a deep breath and a break. I wish at times I could be immune to this – and not get wounded or angry. But this debate is not an abstract one for me or for many others. Our very integrity as human beings and equality as citizens is being weighed in the balance by others with enormous power over us. That’s enough to work anyone’s last nerve. But I also need some time and space for spiritual reasons. It’s hard to describe the agony gay Catholics are now in; and I’m facing a pretty major life-decision. In this, you need quiet to listen to God and pray sincerely for his help in the struggle to maintain a good conscience and lead a moral life. From your emails, I know I am not in this alone, and I’ll be praying hard for all of us in this storm, pro and con, to find God’s will for us, whatever it is.

SUMMER READING: Still, I also feel a responsibility to keep in the public square on this and other subjects. So if you’re still interested in this debate, I hope you can take the time to read some of my previous long-form work on the subject, which tries to answer all the many questions we have been discussing these past few months. Indeed, it’s been a little frustrating to be conducting insta-responses to insta-points without resorting to a real and solid piece of work. But I wrote those some years back, perhaps a little too long ago. Virtually Normal is a political argument; Love Undetectable is a spiritual memoir. Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con is an anthology of materials from all sides on the issue – historical, theological, legal and cultural. I’m not going to plug them any more, except to say they were and are my best attempts at rational persuasion. (If I have persuaded you, or if you still believe in gay marriage despite my arguments, then I also hope you’ll add your name to an Internet petition for equal marriage rights.) I’ll also post whatever columns I write in the next month on the site, so check in every now and again. When I dish here next, I’ll also be over forty, an age I once thought I’d probably not reach. A celebration is in order. Until then, have a wonderful August. And thanks for sticking around so loyally and cantankerously for so long. See you the day after Labor Day. Meanwhile, don’t forget …

… DEAN AND DA LOSER? Okay, it’s not such a great pun. I should be a good candidate for supporting Howard Dean: he’s fiscally conservative (unlike the president); he believes in gay equality (unlike the president). But, of course, he loses me on national security issues. His frustrating promise is explored opposite. These days, what’s an eagle to do?

DA BEARS: They’re the Homer Simpsons of the gay world. But with more back hair. Why I love them, posted opposite.

ORTHODOXY AND DIVORCE: A fascinating email on the position of the Eastern Orthodox church on divorce. They really do seem saner out east:

The Orthodox Archbishop Kallistos (Timothy) Ware explains the Orthodox position on divorce:

“Certainly Orthodoxy regards the marriage bond as in principle lifelong and indissoluble, and it sees the breakdown of marriage as a tragedy due to human weakness and sin. But while condemning the sin, the Church still desires to help suffering humans and to allow them a second chance. When, therefore, a marriage has entirely ceased to be a reality, the Orthodox Church does not insist on the preservation of a legal fiction. Divorce is seen as an exceptional but unavoidable concession to our human brokenness, living as we do in a fallen world . . . the Orthodox Church knows that a second alliance cannot have exactly the same character as the first; and so in the service for a second marriage several of the joyful ceremonies are omitted, and replaced by penitential prayers. In practice, however, this second marriage service is scarcely ever used. (The Orthodox Church, NY: Penguin Books, 1993 edition, p. 295).”

I.e. – the Eastern Orthodox Christian churchs, recognized as fully apostolic and valid churchs by Rome (in schism only over papal infallibility and the filoque), not only condones the dissolution of the first marriage, but accepts up to 2 more marriages after it. Why the “concession” to straight couples? Bishop Ware explains that is it due to “tragedy due to human weakness and sin. But while condemning the sin, the Church still desires to help suffering humans and to allow them a second chance.” And third.
Where is the Christian response to the situation of the homosexual? Where is the response born out of charity for “tragedy due to human weakness and sin.” Where is the “exceptional but unavoidable concession to our human brokenness” acknowledging “living as we do in a fallen world” that for homosexuals too “it is better to marry than to burn.” (1 Cor. 7:9)?

The answer, I think, is that many powerful Christians still don’t think of the homosexual person as fully human. If they did, they would exercise compassion and fairness. Instead homosexuals are seen as either sick or so disordered as not to be capable of genuine affection and love. I can see no other reason why so many compassionate exceptions are made for heterosexuals in sexual ethics (the infertile, the divorced, annulments, etc.) but none – zero – for gay people.