The Dish

A reader writes:

I want to share with you an anecdote that I think powerfully illustrates the disconnect between the hierarchy and the sensus fidelium on how LGBT people should be treated by the church.

I was born and raised a very conservative Roman Catholic environment in Texas. This was true for my home, my parish, and the private Catholic school I attended from ages 10 to 18. The liberal Catholics you describe were not only nowhere to be found, I had no idea such people even existed until I moved to Boston during college. The Catholics I grew up around had much more in common culturally and politically with Southern evangelicals than the East Coast lefty Catholics I got to know as an adult. They still do for the most part.

I’ve spent the last several years living in DC and now Brooklyn, but my job has sent me back to the home town in Texas for six weeks of training. Last Thursday, I had dinner with two friends (both about 15 years older than me) from the parish I grew up in. We got to talking about our kids, and one of my friends mentioned that he thinks his daughter (in her early 20s) is probably a lesbian. I have the same impression but don’t know for sure one way or the other (I’m friendly on Facebook with her) and told him so. At this point, I need to explain exactly how conservative this man is. He carries a concealed weapon at all times (not that uncommon in Texas), BUT – he told us that he even carries it to church, because he wants to be ready if ISIS invades through the southern border and attacks our church, which he reasons would be an obvious target (FYI, we are hundreds of miles from the border). He is 100% serious about this. That should give you an idea of where this man is coming from. Now, after he mentioned his suspicion about his daughter’s orientation, our other friend asked him how he would react if she came out to him.

He said that he’d tell her that he doesn’t share with her what he and her mother do in bed, so she doesn’t need to share it with him, but that he loves her and always will. He also told us that he’d respect her more if she came out instead of hiding who she is. One can certainly criticize this reaction, but there can be no question that it is one of unconditional love. We didn’t discuss any matters of church doctrine, but this is the type of attitude that I believe Pope Francis is trying show us we need to take towards our LGBT brothers and sisters: First and always love. This is how everyday Catholics know to treat real people in real life.

Andrew, if the hierarchy has lost my dear friend, who is as right-wing and reactionary as they come, I honestly don’t know who they still have. Both my friend and his daughter love the church and are quite active in it. As you’ve written, Francis is forcing the bishops to finally have a conversation the faithful have been having for years. And I’m beginning to think that the sensus fidelium may be that there’s little left to discuss. We can only pray that Francis succeeds in leading the hierarchy into the light of Truth, the Truth being love. First and always love.

(Photo: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images)

The latest example:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) raised some eyebrows on Monday when the Associated Press reported that he said Obamacare repeal wasn’t going to happen and opposition to the law was purely political. It was practically heresy for a Republican — which probably explains why Kasich was quickly walking the comments back just a few hours after the report.

He started by saying the AP had misquoted him, but then his defense became truly puzzling. Kasich said he was talking about Medicaid expansion, which his state has implemented at his urging, not Obamacare — and he doesn’t see the two as related.

But Beutler welcomes Kasich’s remarks:

Liberals are predictably reveling in Kasich’s contradiction—the Medicaid expansion was a huge piece of the Affordable Care Act’s overall coverage scheme—and in the contortions he’s had to undergo to assure conservatives that his Obamacare apostasy extends only so far. But I don’t actually see much of a contradiction here. And more to the point, millions of poor Americans would be much better off if more Republicans adopted Kasich’s position that states should adopt the ACA’s Medicaid expansion while tilting at windmills to topple its private sector program. …

[I]f it became the GOP consensus, approximately five million poor people would be lifted out of the coverage gap and become insured almost immediately. The political fight over Obamacare would settle around the private sector coverage expansion, where there’s more room for horse trading, experimentation, and improvement. The potential damage a Republican president could do to the end of universal coverage would be greatly diminished.

David Graham examines Kasich’s predicament:

Even if Obamacare is irreversible, it’s not politically tenable to say such a thing in today’s Republican Party. Even if it’s not clear that Kasich’s hasty walkback makes a lot of sense as policy, it does seem—as Philip Klein notes—like another indication that Kasich would like to run for president in 2016. If he does, he’ll continue to be caught in a vise by Obamacare. Candidate Kasich would wish to appeal to Democrats and moderates by pointing out that he successfully governed in a purple state and expanded healthcare for needy citizens; maybe comments like this could even position him as a bold truthteller, conservative but coldly realistic. Yet he’d also want to appeal to Republican primary voters who abhor the Affordable Care Act. Those are two hard masters to serve.

Douthat thinks “the controversy around Kasich’s comments are a useful reminder that not only is there no Republican consensus on how to actually replace the health care law, but almost no G.O.P. Senate candidates are actually campaigning on a politically credible replacement plan”:

The one major exception is Ed Gillespie, running against Mark Warner in Virginia, whose plan Ramesh Ponnuru has commented on and defended here and here. … But Gillespie is also, per current polling, unlikely to join a Republican Senate majority next year, whereas many G.O.P. candidates — the potential Majority Leader included — who have hemmed and hawed or talked in anti-Obamacare boilerplate and vague generalities when asked about health care policy are more likely to pull their races out. Which will be seen by some, no doubt, as vindicating the risk-averse, somewhat cynical approach to health policy that Republicans have taken throughout the health care debate …

… except, of course, that in this cycle that debate is happening against the backdrop of a political map that heavily favors the G.O.P., whereas in 2016 (as in 2012) the map will be different, tougher, and the health care law (while no doubt still unpopular overall) will be more locked-in, more a part of people’s ordinary experience, and the promise of full repeal will look even sketchier than it does now. At which point a Republican Party that wants to be competitive nationally will start to feel a lot of pressure (probably not quite enough to counteract the influence of the primary electorate, but we’ll see) to drift toward something like Kasich’s (quite popular, in a purple state) position, which basically amounts to “if you like the single-payer part of Obamacare, you can keep the single-payer part of Obamacare, and let’s talk about the other stuff later.”

Suderman makes related points:

This is why it was so important to have a replacement plan, some alternative, or even just an explanation, ready. The question of what to do and what to say after the coverage expansion kicked in was never answered, or at least not answered effectively, and the result is clear enough. We see some Republicans refusing to answer questions about Medicaid; we see Kasich claiming that Medicaid isn’t really part of Obamacare and should be saved; and we see Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) arguing that Kentucky’s exchange, which doles out subsidies funded by Obamacare, is not really part of the law either. Republicans don’t know what to do, because they didn’t come up with a plan in advance.

Legendary WaPo editor Ben Bradlee died yesterday at the age of 93. David Remnick reflects:

[T]he most overstated notion about Bradlee was the idea that he was an ideological man. This was a cartoon. Because of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, he and Katharine Graham were often seen as ferociously committed liberals. They were, in fact, committed to the First Amendment, committed to publishing; they made their names by building an institution strong enough to be daring.

But Bradlee did not question deeply institutional Washington. Bradlee and his wife, the writer Sally Quinn, were at the center of what remained of old Georgetown, not outside of it. (He had been married twice before, and had four children in all.) And when, in conversation or in his memoirs, he did talk about his political ideas, they did not run very deep. As a former soldier, he was ambivalent about the anti-Vietnam War movement. After a trip to Vietnam, in 1971, he “ended up feeling uncommitted politically as usual,” he once said. …

Bradlee was, above all, a driven newspaperman, a man of his time and of his institution, and more alive than a major weather system. He was a man of great principle and of great luck, blessed in the ownership that supported him and blessed with a loving wife who cared for him to the very end–an end that was miles from easy.

Peter Osnos explains what Bradlee’s “editorial genius” consisted of:

It was his unfailing sense of what made a story stronger. His questions were precise and invariably to the point. His credo for the front page was that stories carry impact, preferably were exclusive, and were written with flair. He had particular admiration for intrepid reporting, especially when it was connected to good writing. If a piece was a dud, Ben would let you know one way or another, but he rarely held a grudge as long you came roaring back with a better version or some breakthrough on a running story.

Ben was renowned for creating the Post’s Style section, which was the ne plus ultra destination for major profiles and features that changed the character of what readers could expect to find in newspapers. The edgier writing of the kind that had previously been found in magazines like Esquire made the section hugely popular and influential.

John Dickerson adds some nuance to Bradlee’s celebrity culture:

When I think of the journalists and columnists of the Kennedy era—Teddy White, Hugh Sidey, Joe Alsop, and Bradlee—I wonder where any of them would fit today. They were all mythmakers in one form or another. White worked with Jackie Kennedy to give us the Camelot story, but Bradlee irritated the former First Lady by writing his account. He also ticked off the president at times, which accounts for the gaps in Conversations with Kennedy. This suggests at least some astringency in the relationship, and that Bradlee retained some perspective.

In retrospect, the book is such a glowing account that it’s hard to see what anyone in the Kennedy camp could be sore about. But Bradlee’s relationship with Kennedy defines a category that we could use more of: the irritating confidante. There’s plenty of critical coverage of presidents and there are plenty of official meaningless statements put out by the president’s mouthpieces. What’s required is someone who can work the gap in the middle, a sympathetic voice who gives us some insight into the office, what really happens, and what it does to a person that only access can bring. At the same time, this someone must have enough self-respect, experience, and wisdom to know that using that access to write hagiography is a special kind of dull lie.

Former WaPo writer Ezra Klein chimes in:

Most men with that kind of charisma are crippled by it. They so love to be liked that they cannot stand to be hated. But Bradlee could. The decision to run the Pentagon Papers could have destroyed the Washington Post. The decision to keep pursuing President Richard Nixon could have done much worse than that.

Bradlee was better than virtually anyone else from his generation at being liked, but he built his legend — and his paper — because he was willing to be hated in service of journalism. “As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences.” he wrote in 1973. “The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.” A lot of editors write things like that. But Bradlee really believed it, and he proved it, again and again.

(Photo: The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee in the composing room looking at A1 of the first edition headlined “Nixon Resigns.” By David R. Legge/The Washington Post via Getty Images)