The Dish

A reader writes:

(Small correction; it's "Most Holy Redeemer.")  I was a member there and sang in the choir for several years when William Levada, who is now Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, was archbishop.  The church was absolutely full every week, thanks to the visionary priest assigned there in the early '80's to close it down due to poor numbers but who instead roamed the Castro is his clerical garb engaging disaffected former Catholics in conversation and asking them to "just show up" and see if there wasn't some way the Church and they could find a middle ground.

The parish never had any trouble making its obligatory payments to the archdiocese, so our reactionary archbishop kept his distance and let us do our thing, which was to worship and pray as both faithful & questioning Catholics.  The pastor and his assisting priest, a remarkable older man assigned from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) order and who was the finest homilist I'd ever heard, were terrific.  I said then and still do that MHR is an excellent model of what the Catholic church can and should be in practice.  I'm afraid what the Catholic Church is currently doing instead right now is sowing the seeds of its ultimate demise in generations to come, which is too bad.  Vatican II and John XXIII showed the world in one shining moment that it really has so much more to offer, and rare parishes such as MHR continue to be the living proof.

Another writes:

Your post on Most Holy Redeemer Church brought a tear to my eye because both my Irish Catholic grandmother and my Italian Catholic grandfather spent their last days in hospice care at Most Holy Redeemer.  When they died (of cancer in 1989 and 1991, respectively), the AIDS epidemic had caused widespread devastation in San Francisco particularly.  As you can imagine, many of the other people in hospice were gay men at last yielding to a disease which had no cure and (at the time) very limited treatment options.  At least here these men dying of AIDS were surrounded by love and compassion from their friends and caregivers. 

As my mother and her sisters prepared to mourn their parents, these men were mourning their friends and lovers.  United by death, they were also embraced by a respect for life.  Like many Catholics, my family experienced the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and Vatican II, with many family members leaving the fold and others staying, and I still have conflicted feelings about the Church's medieval attitudes towards women and gays.  But in San Francisco, at least, in what many regard as the most tolerant city in the country, we found a refuge when we needed it. 

There's clearly much work to be done in bringing people together and resolving conflicts, but I'm glad to see that such an inclusive place still exists 20 years after we said goodbye to my grandparents.

Another:

When I find myself struggling with love, I reread I Corinthians: 13.

DiA makes some good points:

I never quite processed the fact until I read this article, on the AMA recommending renewed study of the medical utility of cannabis, that the federal government actually restricts marijuana more severely than cocaine or morphine. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, meaning it's illegal and has no medical uses. Cocaine and morphine are controlled substances that do have some medical uses and can be prescribed. So even though coke is physically addictive while marijuana isn't, and morphine can kill you while marijuana can't, they're Schedule II. That's kind of nuts, and it puts into perspective the reason why people want to get it scientifically established that marijuana really does have some medical applications, particularly in fighting pain and nausea for cancer patients; the medical-marijuana movement is not purely a stalking horse for people who want to legalise and tax it like alcohol. (Though it is that, too.)

Greenwald trains his fire on Peter Galbraith:

What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years — as he traipsed around advocating for Kurdish autonomy — was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he "stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars."  In other words, he had a direct — and vast — financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region.

The lack of disclosure is shocking.

Brian Beutler does some digging.

A reader writes:

It's this very thing that sent me into the arms of the Anglicans.  I added premature twins to my family of two other children.  My mother was unable to come help me, and suggested I ask the church for help.  I was sure they wouldn't help me, but she called, and they said they couldn't help.  She then called the long distance operator and explained her plight, and they helped her connect with a home-help service to send a nice woman to help me until I got back on my feet.  She got more help in a crisis concerning newborn babies from the PHONE COMPANY than from the Catholic Church. 

Then when I took all my children to mass, the priest would go on and on about the sanctity of life and choosing life, even though when I needed someone to help me after choosing life, they weren't there.  I'd sit in the pew steaming, thinking that this man, who had no idea what it was like to give birth to and take care of one, never mind two, new babies, could tell me what I should do, and then go home to the quiet house, bigger than mine, which I helped pay for, and get an uninterrupted night's sleep, while I was awakened every two hours by my "Gifts from God." 

Make no mistake, I'm deeply grateful for my darling twins and all my children, but when you tell a woman who hasn't had a good night's sleep in months or years, that she should "just choose life", and then go home to a quiet, empty rectory, well, rage is a good word.  My husband suggested that if I was just going to go to church and steam in the pew every week, that maybe this wasn't the best plan.  Going to Protestant churches with married and female ministers who have actually dealt with the difficulties of raising children, instead of the romantic "Choose life and it will all work out", gave me the support I needed to do a good job with my darling children, and I bolted.

Incidentally, that priest had to leave the priesthood.  The young man he was dallying with was (barely) over 18, so he didn't go to prison, like the other priest from the same parish, whose chosen one was younger.

Levi keeps mentioning some dreadful secret. It’s gonna be an interesting couple of weeks, isn’t it?

Weigel doesn't think Palin needs to worry about HarperCollins making money off her book:

In the end, will it matter for Palin? I don’t think so. If Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption” could top the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, surely Palin will top it for at least one week. Palin’s book merely needs to produce juicy gossip and place her in potentially competitive 2012 states to be a “hit,” and it’ll do all of that. Early reports claim that the book skimps on policy, which is the one area commentators and possible 2012 rivals always say she needs more polish, but they don’t really mean it. The more interesting measure of Palinmania might be whether she can pull tie-in books like Matt Continetti’s “The Persecution of Sarah Palin” onto the bestseller list.

Matt Cooper wonders if Dobbs' leaving CNN could leave him available for a third party challenge in 2012. I think there is an obvious space for a third party, anti-illegal immigrant, anti-free trade, populist candidate for "real America." The Dobbs crowd is also not as fixated on the religious and social issues, the way the GOP now is, which would give it much more appeal to fiscally troubled independents. And it would destroy the current GOP, especially if populist figures like Beck signed up.

And it would mean an Obama electoral college landslide. American politics is in flux again, isn't it?

Marty Beckerman, like many others in his generation and older, is a recovering Republican:

I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

And at this point, the GOP are addicts. Because the addiction to outrage is easier than a commitment to actual conservative solutions to our current, actual problems. And I don't mean mere recitation of conservative dogma, a recourse to cliches such as "big government", or a binary left-vs-right paradigm that is blind to actual policy. I mean grappling with actual solutions to health insurance cruelty and expense, to climate change which is real, to Islamist terror that doesn't make global polarization worse.

This also strikes very close to home:

Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming

an extremist happened over time.

One by one I saw the flaws in conservative orthodoxy: attempting to fight terrorism with torture, which only aided our enemies' propaganda efforts and thus created more terrorists; seeking to liberalize the Muslim world while curtailing rights for gay people at home; criticizing public schools for lackluster results and therefore cutting funds further; disdaining the weak while never analyzing why they are weak; always seeing the effect but never the cause, which on a mass scale perpetuates the effect.

The 2008 financial crash further proved to me the necessity of an economic safety net within the market system; tying health insurance to employment suddenly made no sense, for example, when millions of people lost their jobs due to conditions beyond their control. Capitalism with a few safety pads — or a condom, I suppose, since the recession has fucked us all — is a far cry from a Marxian worker's paradise.

This is called thinking. And if more people – on both sides – were prepared to acknowledge their own shifts of view and to explain and examine exactly why they have changed with the times, our public discourse would be immeasurably improved.

The finale is pretty astounding:

(Hat tip: Laughing Squid)