The Dish

Just when I was beginning to lose faith in my religious tradition, I have to come across a website like this. Enjoy.

Lucianne’s readers lay into Alterman. I’d correct the many factual errors, sly smears, half-truths and innuendo in his hatchet-job. But that would assume that reasonable readers believe Alterman could write an honest piece in the first place. Meanwhile, I’ve got a great new slogan for the site: “Dangerous – makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi.” It’s time to replace dear Professor Krugman at last. Stay tuned.

I’ve read and re-read Pope John-Paul II’s statement on the crisis in the Western Catholic Church. None of it is wrong; some of it reflects his obvious holiness; but it is clearly deeply worrying. He doesn’t get it. Nor do his officious and prickly representatives. Every serial sexual abuser in the priesthood and every hierarchical enabler must go. And then we must debate openly and bravely how to remake the priesthood in ways that reaffirm its core purpose. I want married priests, women priests, and openly gay priests – all upholding the sacred responsibility of the church to protect the young in its care. But what I fear is that the authorities are still playing defensive; that the Pope is incapable – for reasons of sheer illness, age and outlook – to do what is necessary. Peggy Noonan, in an impressive piece today, hopes it is the first of many statements by the Pope to address this issue. I fear he is simply not up to the task. I admire him greatly as a pope but I admire Ronald Reagan and I still don’t think he should be president today. Wojtila is a member the Reagan-Thatcher generation. Reagan and Thatcher are both sick and old – as, sadly, is the pope. Given the way we select pontiffs, we are leaderless at a time of profound crisis. Which is why we, the laity, must lead. For we are the church too.

O’REILLY FOR GAY ADOPTIONS: I don’t agree with everything Bill O’Reilly says here. But I do admire his ability to think clearly about mature, responsible gay people, to eschew the easy gay-baiting of some on the social right, and to argue for what are the genuine needs of children that can, in many cases, only be served by good, gay parents.

“I notice one reader finds me cynical. About politics, about the theater of presidential campaigns, I suppose I am, largely but not entirely. I would like to believe, as the reader does, that a politician’s core values and character and skills are visible beneath all the slogans and pageantry, and that the presidents that Americans elect take up residence in the White House because of voters’ accurate assessments about all of that. But –” Continued in the Book Club today.

SURPRISE!: The lefty poison-spreader, Eric Alterman, hates andrewsullivan.com! (This site is ‘dangerous.’ I make ‘Henry Kissinger look like St Francis of Assisi.’ He’s got such a gift for analogy, that Eric.) And Jim Romenesko – guardian of gay left media orthodoxy – links! My morning is complete. Can Michelangelo Signorile be far behind?

I don’t know why I took so long to read Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest piece from Kurdistan in the New Yorker. I started reading it coming back on the plane from Miami and I’m still reeling. It’s easily the most important piece of journalism produced this year: judiciously reported, pellucidly written, morally strict. It starts with Goldberg’s journey into the fledgling region of Kurdistan, the autonomous semi-state constructed by the Kurds betrayed and rejected by every major power for centuries. He reports on the horrors of what Saddam did in Halabja, and what, given a chance, Saddam and his proxies would do in this country and Israel if he is not stopped. What Goldberg shows is that Saddam’s chemical attacks on his own citizens were not merely exercises in genocidal evil. They were target practice:

“An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja, military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing in order to study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests, an experiment on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. ‘The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as ‘How far are the dead from the canisters?””

Even those who survived are hideously deformed, infertile, or sick. The children of the region die slow and awful deaths from lung cancer. No one can say we haven’t been warned.

THE AL QAEDA LINK: The first sign of real hope for those on the frontline of this maniac’s ambitions was president Bush’s state of the union speech, confirming its status in my mind as the Iron Curtain moment of the 21st Century. Bush’s address, according to Goldberg,

“had had an electric effect on every Kurd I met who heard [it] … General Simko Dizayee, the chief of staff of the peshmerga, told me, ‘Bush’s speech filled our hearts with hope.'”

But Goldberg’s key contribution is to show, convincingly to my mind, how logical and likely it is that Saddam is now in league with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to bring these awful weapons of mass destruction to the cities and towns where you and I live. The key linkage, Goldberg suggests, is a small fanatical Islamo-fascist terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam, operating in the hinterlands of Kurdistan. Goldberg writes:

“The allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.”

It also seems to me to mean something quite simple. Even if it is merely possible that these allegations are true, the consequences are obvious. This war has just begun. Afghanistan was a preliminary. Iraq is the issue. We must act – and quickly, and decisively and with no possibility for error. I trust this president to get that balance right, and was relieved to hear his renewed commitment yesterday. The phony war is nearing its end. The real and vital conflict will soon be here. And the sooner it comes, the less likelihood of the unthinkable occurring.

(For an online Q and A with Goldberg about his article, click here.)

NIXON AND NOW: Perusing former president Nixon’s deranged and taped harangues against Jews, gays and weed today, reminds me again of what a disgraceful president he was – catastrophic in domestic policy, mediocre abroad. But it says something, doesn’t it, that a website like this that routinely defends Jews, gays and weed would now be regarded by many as conservative. Progress, no?

Your first take on my take on Frank Bruni. For some strange reason, you’re all pro-Bush so far. Bush critics and skeptics, time to weigh in.

PLAY: I hope some of you read Gerry Marzorati’s marvelous profile in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine of the pop musician Moby. It’s a very deft and evocative piece and reminds me why Moby is one of my favorite current musical artists. The beauty and energy of his sound, the way in which he has mastered technology to create an entirely derivative and yet entirely new music keeps me listening to him again and again. This afternoon, I plugged my iPod in and played my favorite collection of Moby songs, while I grabbed a beach bike-cruiser and coasted around the contours of Miami’s South Beach, where I’m staying for a few days with the boyfriend. Bliss. I’m not surprised Moby has a blog. In some ways, blogging – with its referential riffs, innovative forms, mix of genres, technological edge – is the journalistic equivalent of Moby’s music. Except, of course, not as beautiful.

LETTERS: “You are absolutely correct in your assertion that the Church’s “basic institutional integrity has vanished”. But there can be no doubt this disintegration is a direct result of the Second Vatican Council. This is painful for me to admit as I still believe most of the reforms are worthy, but the fact remains the Church was growing and vibrant before Vatican II and began this downward spiral immediately afterward. This and many other contributions to the debate on the Catholic crisis on the Letters Page.

MATT ON THE BEACH: Dinner with Drudge last night. He drew up in his gleaming white corvette, paid for, as he boasts, by the Internet. Huge fun at Pacific Time on Lincoln Road. I hope he survives the Oscars. If ‘A Beautiful Mind’ loses, all hell could break loose. As usual, Matt seems both awed and exhilarated by the prospect of being blamed. And, of course, he’s going. I wonder if, without his fedora, anyone will recognize him.

FAITH AGAIN: Rod Dreher seems to think my reflections yesterday were emanations from the ‘incoherent Catholic left’. You know something? Human beings and their faith lives are never as tidy as some clerics and theologians would like them to be. If Rod wants to call being human incoherent, then I think God may be more forgiving of incoherence than some members of his church. Thinking about this again today, and reading many of your perceptive emails, it became even clearer to me that sex is the problem – sex with minors, sex with members of the same gender, sex with members of the opposite gender, relations with the opposite gender. And the striking thing is how, when you read the Gospels, you hear so little about this subject. Jesus seems utterly uninterested in it. So why is the Church so obsessed with it? You could infer, I suppose, two things. You could infer that those of us who object to the Church’s attitudes to women, treatment of gays, extra-marital sex, and so on are overly preoccupied with the matter and should simply get in line. But it seems to me that what the current crisis clearly shows is that the Church’s teachings on sex have contributed critically to its current crisis, and that our dissent would help the church rather than hurt it. The collapse of credibility after the ban on all contraception, the dwindling of the needlessly celibate priesthood to gays and the sexually conflicted, the alienation of women, the isolation of lay homosexuals – all these are problems caused by this agenda. Why cannot the Church be as neutral as Jesus was about this issue? Why can we not leave the dark and difficult realm of eros out of fundamental moral teaching?

PUTTING SEX IN ITS PLACE: More specifically: Why can we not hold up marriage and committed loving relationships as the goal but not punish and stigmatize the non-conformists or those whose erotic needs and desires are more complex than the crude opposition to all non-marital and non-procreative sex allows. My mother’s only instruction to her children about failing to adhere to the church’s sexual strictures was a good one, I think. She told us that non-marital non-procreative sex was a sin, but it was not the worst sin by any means. And it was only a sin because it distracted from God – not because it was somehow terribly evil in itself. No more sinful than wealth or pride or cruelty or insensitivity or dishonesty – and often much less so. She demystified it for me, robbed it of some of its obsessive power. And it’s the obsessive power of sexual repression that has so warped our current Church. Let it go. And let’s focus on what really matters: love of neighbor, prayer, compassion, service, honesty, justice.

‘Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearance tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.’ – Ethik, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1940.

I know some of my fellow Catholics will disagree, especially those next to me in the pews who are more orthodox or strict in their adherence to Vatican authority. So I beg their forbearance and understanding that I write this not from disdain of the church but from love of it. My point? It seems to me that something far more profound is happening to the Church than its leaders now recognize. This is big. The horror any decent person should feel at the brutal exploitation of children in the Church’s charge has turned into something even deeper in the collective Catholic soul. We wonder whether there really is something rotten at the heart of this institution. We wonder whether its continued indefensible subjugation of women, its cruelty and condescension toward gay people, its reflexive hostility to inspection or openness, even in defending and shrouding the abuse of children, doesn’t bespeak something that isn’t the antithesis of the Gospels. Like everyone else in the Church, I’m a sinner and I’m not speaking out of any sense of moral superiority. On the contrary. But the evil that we have discovered in our church these past few months is not simply incidental. It is structural. It comes from a hierarchical structure that, far from reflecting the truth of the Gospels, has become its own rationale. I am sick of belonging to a church where even its own priests do not believe some of the tenets they are supposed to uphold, where most of the laity cannot understand the reasons behind some of the doctrines we are supposed to adhere to, where reasoned dissent is dismissed or ignored, where the dignity of the human person is denied in the very rules by which the institution is governed.

PERESTROIKA: I think the hierarchy believes it can ride this out. I think they believe that with a few more apologies and a few more appointments and re-shuffles, the faithful will return as we were before and behave as we have before. We won’t. The Catholic Church in America will not endure as we know it unless the current hierarchy is rooted out and unless the issue of a celibate all-male priesthood is addressed head-on without euphemism or denial. Others may differ, but it seems to me that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is the root of the problem. None of this hideous abuse of children would have occurred in the same way if women were fully a part of the institution. Not only would they have blown the whistle on some of this evil, their very presence would have helped prevent it from happening. There is simply no profound theological reason for the exclusion of women from ecclesiastical power, nothing but the inheritance of a patriarchal anachronism that is suffocating the Church from its apex to its roots. No church can exclude half of humanity from its sacred offices without denying the fundamental dignity and equality of the human person. The pedophile scandal and the homosexual dimension of the priesthood are not the fundamental problem. They are symptoms of a deeper problem – male privilege and secrecy and hierarchy that distorts the psyches of the people running the Church and betrays the faithful who need and love it so much.

STAYING AND FIGHTING: I’m sometimes asked as a gay man how I can stay in a Church that even now, in some respects, believes me to be ‘intrinsically disordered.’ I stay because I have no choice, because faith is not a choice, it is a gift, because without the sacraments of grace, my life would be barren and my soul parched. I stay because I believe God wants me to stay and struggle to defeat the forces of fear and secrecy and exclusion on which the current church – but not the Gospels – is constructed. I’m not alone. And many have other reasons for pain and discomfort. But what I realize this now means is an end to passivity in the face of such corruption. We have been far too compliant in the past than we should have been. In some ways, I fear the Church in America in 2002 is not completely unlike the Soviet Union in 1984. Its structure has lost moral and popular support. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Church’s essential truths remain unsullied and eternal. But like the Soviet Union, confidence in its basic institutional integrity has vanished. That means that a collapse is coming, if it is not already here. That means that we, the people of the Church, have to demand change – structural change – before it implodes. And part of that change must mean a frank discussion about what has gone so terribly wrong and about the end of an all-male and all-celibate priesthood. That is the least we can accomplish. And it may yet not be enough.

BOOK CLUB: The discussion begins today. It will have a slightly different structure than last month. If you go to the book-club page, you’ll find a set of topic questions for the next couple of days. Another set will follow on Friday and next Tuesday. We’ll publish as many responses to these questions as we can, grouped around these topics so as to organize the discussion a little better. Frank Bruni has agreed to pitch in when he feels like, which I hope will be often. So join the debate – about this president, his character, the press and the conduct of the war.

It’s hard not to be struck by the following story in the New York Times today about the Iranian response to President Bush’s aggressive posture in his state of the union address. Here’s the money quote:

But Mr. Bush’s implied threat against Iran generated a discussion among politicians here about relations with the United States, with many arguing that anti-American oratory no longer serves Iran’s interests. Some suggested that direct talks were the only way to avert the threat. The minister of defense, Ali Shamkhani, was summoned to Parliament to answer questions over hostile remarks by one of his commanders.

Duh. The language these regimes understand is the language of clarity, force and threat. Engaging them in dialogue without the credibility of the potential use of force is pointless. I just don’t buy the argument that soothing words promote the chances for peace or reform. On the contrary. I hope Dick Cheney gets this. And I hope that his emollient stance in the Middle East is a great fake that will lead to decisive action against Iraq.

CLERICAL SEXUAL ABUSE IN AFRICA: A reader reminds me of this year-old piece in the National Catholic Reporter. It highlights grotesque heterosexual priestly abuse of nuns in Africa – one of the centers for Catholic growth in the world. Nuns were selected for sex because, in a continent plagued by AIDS, they were deemed more likely to be HIV-negative and so less likely to infect the priests. Many other African priests, of course, are covertly married to one or more women, and the Church turns a blind eye. More and more, it seems to me that the strained sexual doctrines of the current church – with regard to both priests and laity – are beginning to destroy the Church from within. And the Pope’s deafening silence on this – and Cardinal Egan’s refusal to acknowledge his own past malfeasance – suggests that this is only going to get worse before it gets any better.

STEIN VERSUS KRUGMAN: Here’s an amusing and pertinent critique of Paul Krugman’s anti-monetarism by Ben Stein. Krugman’s Tobin column has enraged a whole swath of academic economists who don’t hew to Krugman’s politics. Still, it seems to me Krugman has a point in his column on health-care today. He’s dead-on in noting that a huge, looming issue in our politics is government guaranteed health-care for seniors and others – and the vast expenditures it would require. But he’s surely excessive in thinking that Americans cannot tolerate inequalities in health-care between the rich and the poor. Such inequalities are inevitable in a free society and with a free-ish market in health-care goods and services. Where most people do agree is that what Krugman calls ‘essential’ health-care should be available to all. The difficult issue is how to define ‘essential.’ Technology, as Krugman rightly notes, has transformed and is about to transform even further what medicine can do for us. The hard question is: what is ‘essential,’ given almost limitless possibilities? The latest breakthrough drugs – or generic ones? State-of-the-art surgery – or emergency care? What we now regard as essential would have been deemed science fiction by the men and women who first came up with Medicare and Medicaid. So do we keep these models of government-guaranteed health-care or junk them? These are immensely hard calls and I wish conservatives would be more openly honest about the trade-offs we have to make. Of course, when the issue is fodder for demagoguery by liberals, it becomes harder to have a serious debate. A simple, universal entitlement to the best healthcare available at any point now and in the future would simply bankrupt the country. But what stopping place before that point is morally and fiscally acceptable? And is there any way to have a political debate about this that doesn’t degenerate into life-and-death horror stories? Count me as one of the less hopeful observers.

MAN WINS FEMALE BEAUTY PAGEANT: At Harvard, natch. The story gets better as it goes along.

What a weird, self-pitying, angry, self-righteous tirade from Gray Davis. Did he eat a bad tuna sandwich as well? By the way, I’m feeling a little better.