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“Whitman And Wilde Almost Certainly Had Sex”

That’s the conclusion that Mallory Ortberg draws from reading Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde:

Oscar was suitably humble in the presence of Whitman, greeting him with the words, ‘I have come to you as one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle.’ The contrast between the two poets could not have been more marked. Oscar was young, tall, slender and clean shaven. Whitman was in his early sixties, but looked much older. He was shorter than Oscar and wore a long, bushy white beard. Oscar was highly educated, cultivated and still in his languid Aesthetic phase. Whitman was self-taught, and robustly masculine in manner.

Could his meaning be more clear? “Hello, Daddy,” says the young dandy as he lightly crosses the threshold.

[Publisher John Marshall] Stoddart tactfully left the two poets alone. ‘If you are willing – will excuse me – I will go off for an hour or so – come back again – leaving you together,’ he said. ‘We would be glad to have you stay,’ Whitman replied. ‘But do not feel to come back in an hour. Don’t come for two or three.’ Whitman opened a bottle of elderberry wine and he and Oscar drank it all before Whitman suggested they go upstairs to his ‘den’ on the third floor where, he told Oscar, ‘We could be on ‘thee and thou’ terms.’ …

The next day, Whitman told the Philadelphia Press that the two of them had a “jolly good time” together. Did he get more specific? He did, reader. He did:

One of the first things I said was that I should call him ‘Oscar.’ ‘I like that so much,’ he answered, laying his hand on my knee. He seemed to me like a great big, splendid boy. He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly. I don’t see why such mocking things are written of him.

This is a gift. You do realize that, don’t you? History has reached out to you specifically and given you a gift. The gift is the knowledge that Oscar Wilde once put his hand on Walt Whitman’s knee and then they drank elderberry wine together; the gift is that the next day a reporter turned up and Whitman expounded at length on his big, splendid boy. Let this sink in a moment. This is like finding out Emily Dickinson once secretly stowed away on a ship bound for England and spent a weekend with Jane Austen at a bed and breakfast, doing it. This is like finding out Ernest Hemingway finally let his guard down one night in Spain and let F. Scott Fitzgerald lean across the table and kiss him. This is like finding out Gwendolyn Brooks lost her virginity to Willa Cather.

But Ortberg’s “smoking gun” on the Wilde encounter with Whitman is still to come – here.

How Callous Are Today’s Republicans?

In National Review, Henry Olsen admonishes Republicans for voting to cut food stamps:

The conservative war on food stamps is the most baffling political move of the year. Conservatives have suffered for years from the stereotype that they are heartless Scrooge McDucks more concerned with our money than other people’s lives. Yet in this case, conservatives make the taking of food from the mouths of the genuinely hungry a top priority. What gives? And why are conservatives overlooking a far more egregious abuse of taxpayer dollars in the farm bill?

It’s almost as if they want to be seen as the party of hand-outs to the very rich and brutal indifference to the needy poor. Tyler Cowen asks why the GOP is fixated on the program:

It doesn’t make sense to go after food stamps, and you can read the recent GOP push here as a sign of weakness, namely that they, beyond upholding the sequester, are unwilling to tackle the more important and more wasteful targets, including Medicare and also defense spending, not to mention farm subsidies. Here are a few basic numbers on when food stamps have grown and what has driven that growth. It has not become a “problem program” in the way that say disability has.

Krugman pinpoints how true fanatics and ideologues never see context. Context, after all, leads to understanding of why food stamps are still so big a program – and if understanding contradicts ideology, the shrunken GOP mind cannot compute:

So here’s the thing about SNAP: it’s one federal program that really has exploded in size in recent years, with the number of beneficiaries rising around 80 percent. Of course, it’s exploded for a very good reason, namely a once-in-three-generations economic crisis, and the program has stayed large because our so-called recovery hasn’t trickled down to the bottom half of the income distribution. But the right doesn’t care about any of that; in food stamps, it gets to see what it wants to see — surging government spending! Millions of takers! And so food stamps become public enemy #2.

Number 1 is, of course, Obamacare, which really does represent a major expansion of the government’s role.

Dylan Matthews finds that the food stamps vote was extremely partisan:

Democrats in districts with barely any food stamp users (such as Henry Waxman, whose district’s SNAP usage rate is a paltry 1.7 percent) all voted against cut, and Republicans in districts with huge numbers of food stamp users (such as Hal Rogers, 29 percent of whose district’s households are on SNAP) almost all voted for them. It’s yet another indication that House members are becoming less and less motivated by parochial interests of their districts and more and more unified on party lines.

What The Hell Is Happening In Kenya?

In what was the largest terrorist attack in Kenya since the 1998 bombing of the American embassy, an estimated 10 to 15 militants stormed an upscale Nairobi mall on Saturday, killing at least 60 and injuring more than 175. The dead include an eminent Ghanian poet, a pregnant radio host, a 29-year-old diplomat, and citizens of at least 10 countries. The Kenyan government claimed control over the mall earlier today, but ongoing gunfire has been reported. Ishaan Tharoor provides background on the group that claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter:

[Al-Shabaab], whose name means the Youth in Arabic, was once the militant youth wing of a coalition of Islamist forces that held sway in parts of Somalia more than half a decade ago. The country has had no real functional central government for over two decades, and the Islamists, for a time, provided a veneer of security and stability despite the harshness of the Shari’a they sought to impose. That control slipped following a series of offensives spearheaded by the African Union, beginning with an Ethiopian-led invasion in 2006. In early 2012, a video emerged of a top leader of al-Shabaab pledging obedience to Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s head. …

Al-Shabaab fighters had launched a number of minor forays across Somalia’s porous southern border with Kenya, kidnapping tourists and aid workers. By 2011, after al-Shabaab impeded humanitarian aid into southern Somalia during a ghastly drought, the Kenyan government had had enough. It launched a sustained military campaign across the border, eventually dislodging al-Shabaab from its stronghold in the Somali port city of Kismayo in 2012, a defeat from which the group has yet to recover.

Shane Harris sees an emboldened al-Shabaab:

The Westgate mall attack marks an audacious return for al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda linked group that, as recently as last year, U.S. officials claimed was on the run in the face of an American-backed offensive in Africa. More recently, the Obama administration has expanded a secret war against al-Shabaab in Somalia, ramping up assistance to Somali intelligence agencies. The United States also runs training camps for Ugandan peacekeepers who fight al-Shabaab forces, and at a base in Djibouti houses Predator drones, fighter jets, and nearly 2,000 U.S. troops and military civilians.

But Ken Menkhaus believes the opposite:

Many [security experts] warned that Shabaab’s [previous] reluctance to attack soft targets in Kenya (or elsewhere, including in the US) was contingent on the group’s continued success in Somalia. Were the group to weaken and fragment, it would be more likely to consider high-risk terrorism abroad. Paradoxically, a weakened Shabaab is a greater threat outside Somalia than a stronger Shabaab. … The Westgate attack is the latest sign of the group’s weakness. It was a desperate, high-risk gamble by Shabaab to reverse its prospects.

Joshua Keating also points out how gains against the terrorist group in Somalia seem to have made it more dangerous to other countries:

Shabaab has attacked countries that have participated in military operations in Somalia before, most infamously the attack on World Cup spectators that left 74 dead in Kampala, Uganda in 2010. The group has also been blamed for several attacks in Kenya including the bombing of a Nairobi bus station last year and several grenade attacks on churches. Now that the group’s ability to actually control territory is waning, it seems possible that more of its efforts may be devoted to operations like these. Shabaab may start acting more like a transnational terror group than a rebel army fighting to control land.

Simon Tisdale elaborates on the group’s internal divisions:

Westgate … looks like a chilling statement of intent by Ahmed Abdi Godane, the al-Shabaab leader, who consolidated his power in June in an internal coup. … The apparent decision by Godane and fellow hardliners to again take the fight beyond Somalia’s borders looks like a bid to regain the initiative in the face of these setbacks and disagreements. In addition, the group’s occasional bomb attacks in Mogadishu keep the government on the back foot. The recent decision by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières to pull out of Somalia, due to worsening security, is a perverse vindication of such tactics. And Godane doubtless welcomes the negative impact of Barclays Bank’s decision to close accounts used to send remittances to Somalia.

Meanwhile, Patrick Gathara says the attack brought Kenyans together at a time of political and tribal acrimony:

Kenyans have come together in an impressive show of solidarity. The citizenry has literally responded with blood and treasure. When a call went out for blood donors, local hospitals were inundated and some had to turn people away. This morning, long lines of blood donors snaked across the city. Hospitals at one point were running out of blood bags, but not donors, so high was the turn out. An MPESA account set up for the victims has already raised millions of shillings. All over social media, on the streets and on air, the political bitterness of the last seven months seems to have, at least temporarily, abated.

But Paula Kahumbu cautions that the long-term impact remains to be seen:

The president of Kenya, members of his leadership team and the opposition have jointly called on Kenyans for support, and asked the international community not to issue travel advisories – revealing that tourism is the soft spot of greatest concern. Assessing the impact of the attack on tourism and foreign investments will depend very much on the success of the response by security forces. With things still unfolding as I write, it is far too early to analyze the implications, yet amazingly, Kenya feels stronger.

(Photo: An injured man is treated outside the Westgate shopping mall where hostages have been kept for three days on 23 September, 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya. By Ahmet Erkan Yigitsozlu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The Theocon Panic

The people in the hierarchy and the hard-right of the American Catholic church have put their best face forward after Pope Francis’ categorical rejection of their entire project. So allow me a big bucket of cold history and fact to show just how over they are.

For the last couple of years, their overwhelming theme has been that basic freedom of Catholic conscience has been denied by a small rule in Obamacare that makes public Catholic institutions, like hospitals and colleges that employ non-Catholics, provide contraception if women want it. The Catholic institutions do not pay for it; there’s a work-around. In the face of this and civil marriage for gay couples, the American hierarchy, backed by rightist Catholic entities such as National Review, launched a veritable crusade. Last summer, the Bishops even launched a Fortnight of Freedom, two weeks in which the hierarchy devoted itself almost entirely to the questions of contraception, homosexuality, marriage and abortion in the context of religious liberty. These themes were deafening and clearly designed to affect the presidential election. So let’s recall Francis’ words of last week:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods… The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

In that context, remember something that wounded me more deeply than any other in recent years, when, in 2009, my own then-archdiocese went to rhetorical war against gay people, using the homeless and sick as pawns:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

In the end, the archdiocese, mercifully, relented. But do you not hear the fresh relevance of Francis’ words:

The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules?

One of those whose writings have been almost obsessed with abortion, gay marriage and contraception is Kathryn-Jean Lopez. She’s still spinning as if nothing just happened:

As for [Pope Francis], Church teaching on sexual morality is about fruitfulness and surrender. That won’t be understood if catechetical fundamentals aren’t — and none of it will make any sense if Christ’s love isn’t encountered.

But that latter point got lost, did it not, in the recent past as an authoritarian Pope demanded “catechetical fundamentals” on everything all the time, often with more dictatorial fear than Christ’s love. Nothing better illustrated this in recent years than Benedict’s disciplining of America’s off-message nuns – even as orthodox child-rapist priests were routinely allowed to retire in peace. The final report on the nuns was as brutal as it was insensitively delivered:

The assessment accused the sisters of “corporate dissent” on homosexuality and failure to speak out on abortion.

The assessment also castigated LCWR for ties to NETWORK, a Washington-based Catholic lobbying group that supported the Affordable Care Act … Leaving the Holy Office, Franciscan Sister Pat Farrell felt numb. “It was in the press before we had time to brief our members,” she recalled.

Let us again recall Francis’ words. Here he addresses the role of nuns and monks in religious orders and the need for them to speak their conscience, even if they ruffle papal feathers:

In the church, the religious are called to be prophets in particular by demonstrating how Jesus lived on this earth, and to proclaim how the kingdom of God will be in its perfection. A religious must never give up prophecy…Let us think about what so many great saints, monks and religious men and women have done, from St. Anthony the Abbot onward. Being prophets may sometimes imply making waves. I do not know how to put it…. Prophecy makes noise, uproar, some say ‘a mess.’ But in reality, the charism of religious people is like yeast: prophecy announces the spirit of the Gospel.”

And yet Benedict attacked this very charism in favor of top-down papal control of every minute doctrinal issue. On this, how can the theocons ignore the following:

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing.

To whom do they think the Pope was referring? Who else if not them? Or do they have alternative suggestions?

(Photo: Pope Francis delivers his speech during a meeting with young people on September 22, 2013 in Cagliari, Italy. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)

Perfectly Sane Delusions

Rebecca Schwarzlose says a surprising number of mentally healthy people experience them:

Delusions are a common symptom of schizophrenia and were once thought to reflect the poor reasoning abilities of a broken brain. More recently, a growing number of physicians and scientists have opted for a different explanation. According to this model, patients first experience the surprising and mysterious perceptual disturbances that result from their illness. These could be full-blown hallucinations or they could be subtler abnormalities, like the inability to ignore a persistent noise. Patients then adopt delusions in a natural (if misguided) attempt to explain their odd experiences.

An intriguing study from the early 1960s illustrates how rapidly delusions can develop in healthy subjects when expectations and perceptions inexplicably conflict.

The study, run on 20 college students at the University of Copenhagen, involved a version of the trick now known as the rubber hand illusion. Each subject was instructed to trace a straight line while his or her hand was inside a box with a secret mirror. For several trials, the subject watched his or her own hand trace the line correctly. Then the experimenters surreptitiously changed the mirror position so that the subject was now watching someone else’s hand trace the straight line – until the sham hand unexpectedly veered off to the right. All of the subjects experienced the visible (sham) hand as their own and felt that an involuntary movement had sent it off course. After several trials with this misbehaving hand, the subjects offered explanations for the deviation. Some chalked it up to their own fatigue or inattention while others came up with wilder, tech-based explanations:

[F]ive subjects described that they felt something strange and queer outside themselves, which pressed their hand to the right or resisted their free mobility. They suggested that ‘magnets,’ ‘unidentified forces,’ ‘invisible traces under the paper,’ or the like, could be the cause.

In other words, delusions may be a normal reaction to the unexpected and inexplicable. Under strange enough circumstances, anyone might develop them – but some of us are more likely to than others.

Pulling The Plug On Big Coal

On Friday, the EPA proposed tougher emissions standards that new power plants must meet. In the absence of climate change legislation, it’s a BFD. Brad Plumer examines the impact:

The regulations aren’t likely to have a huge impact in the near future — the standard will make it extremely hard to build new coal plants in the United States, but utilities weren’t planning many new coal plants anyway, because natural gas is a cheaper alternative. Still, the rule does have fairly big implications for the energy industry and climate change down the road.

Brian Merchant thinks the proposal means the end of coal power plants:

Essentially, if someone wants to build a new coal plant, in order to make it clean enough to meet these new rules, they’ll have to invest in Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology. CCS is a highly experimental (and highly expensive) technology that allows coal plants to pump their emissions underground instead of releasing them into the atmosphere … Unfortunately for the coal companies, but thankfully for pretty much everyone else on the planet, nobody really thinks CCS will work.

Molly Redden believes that this is a watershed moment for climate policy:

What makes these rules truly significant is that they will be the first to ever regulate the carbon-dioxide emissions of power plants, the largest cumulative source of emissions in the American economy. They thus set the stage for the more truly meaningful regulations Obama plans to introduce in his second term, on carbon-dioxide emissions from existing power plants. That makes them natural testing grounds for industry and environmental lobbyists—and for some of the same legal challenges that are expected to beset the draft rules to regulate existing power plants.

Obama’s Moment Of Truth With Iran

In what strikes me as another death-knell for neoconservatism, Ken Pollack, a key supporter of the Iraq military intervention, draws the line at Iran. He wants a real deal on nukes or containment – and his arguments are solid (of course, I’ve made them myself for years now). First off, a mere air-strike wouldn’t do much but delay Iran’s nuclear program – which, if Iran were attacked, they would almost certainly re-start with even more vigor and pride than before. Second, a strike would empower all those forces and factions in Iran, like the Revolutionary Guards, that seek deeper and deeper religious conflict. Third, the strikes would not be the end of a conflict, but merely the beginning:

The Iranians almost certainly would retaliate. They might fire missiles at American bases in the Middle East, or persuade allies like Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to fire rockets at Israel. But my biggest fear is that they would embark on a prolonged terrorist campaign against Americans, including attacks on the homeland. The Iranians have said as much, and the United States intelligence community believes that they have expanded their capacity to do so since their failed attempt to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 2011.

You want another wave of Jihadist terrorism in the US? Do what Netanyahu and Kristol want. But Pollack also notes that if the US struck, and Iran retaliated with terror strikes, the conflict would inevitably escalate:

I fear that if we started using force in the belief that we could keep it limited, we would either fail and find ourselves facing an enraged, nuclear Iran, or be dragged into another large-scale, protracted war in the Middle East. Containment is hardly a perfect policy, but I see the costs and risks as more easily mitigated than those of war.

But a serious deal would obviate both bad options, help us out with Afghanistan, empower the Green Movement, and allow us to put more pressure on Greater Israel to return to its proper 1967 borders, with land swaps. Win-win-win – and a way out of our long Middle East entrapment. Fred Kaplan implores the administration to think big:

For years, many have noted that the problems in the Middle East are so intricately related that it would be hard to solve each on its own. Obama may have before him a rare convergence of events, factors, and forces where at least some of those problems can be dealt with simultaneously. He has a remarkable chance to pull the gold ring. Maybe it will prove to be the diplomatic equivalent of the Maltese Falcon, the stuff that dreams are made of. But maybe it could be the real deal. Either way, it’s worth grabbing at the chance.

My feelings entirely. Omid Memarian profiles Rouhani:

Tehran’s former mayor, Gholamhossein Karbashchi, who met with Rouhani both before and after the June election, told the Daily Beast that Rouhani throughout his political life “has tried to control extremism and radicalism among the Iranian political forces.” The three words to best define Rouhani are “disciplined, rational, and convincing,” according to the former mayor who says that Rouhani is meticulous in both form and manner. “He pays serious attention to his clothes and appearance,” says Karbaschi, adding that the president is known for his verbal skills. “Sometimes he defeats his opponent through jokes and humor. He is an intelligent and expert orator, never interrupts anyone, and pays close attention.”

Walt examines the challenges ahead:

The United States and Iran may begin direct discussions and explore lots of options, yet ultimately end up unable to cut a deal. That effort will be complicated by the opposition from hard-liners on both sides, who will look for any opportunity to toss a monkey wrench into the process. So a lot depends on how well you think Obama and Rouhani can control the domestic politics in their respective countries and explain to the relevant stakeholders why a deal would be better for nearly everyone.

My guess is that Rouhani will have an easier time than Obama will, in part because Obama will face potent opposition from Israel, its supporters in the United States, and countries like Saudi Arabia. These actors would rather keep Washington and Tehran at odds forever, and it’s a safe bet that they will do everything they can to run out the clock and thwart this latest attempt to turn a corner in the troubled U.S. relationship with Iran.

Remember Bill Kristol’s outrageous call last week for Israel to strike Iran to pre-empt the US president. Jeffrey Goldberg, on the other hand, thinks Israel can play a constructive role:

Netanyahu’s role is to play bad cop to what I hope will be Obama’s ambivalent cop. One of the dangers of the coming weeks is that the White House will become so excited by the prospect of a resolution to the nuclear issue that it ends up making a bad deal, one that allows Iran to retain at least some capability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Or Iran’s negotiators might find themselves unpleasantly surprised by the extent of the Obama administration’s demands, and ultimately balk.

… Rohani, assuming he’s sincere, doesn’t have much time. The hardliners in the Revolutionary Guard Corps are lying in wait. It would be premature for the U.S. to lift sanctions now, before anything substantive has happened. But it would also be a mistake to be too rigid.

(Photo of Rouhani by Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)

Cruz Out Of Control

Sen aide tells me a dozen+ GOP sens are fuming this am over Cruz making a vote to proceed (CR cloture) seem like support for law they hate

— Robert Costa (@costareports) September 22, 2013

I have to say Jason Zengerle’s Cruz profile is both hilarious and horrifying. My favorite douchey detail from the alleged populist:

As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

Chait is taken aback by the latest gambit of the least self-aware ego-maniac in the Senate:

[T]he new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting.

Got your popcorn yet? This is gonna break bad. The Fix reports, moreover, that, unless “there is a major shift among Republicans in the Senate, Cruz won’t [even] be able to find those 40 votes”:

Does Cruz launch a traditional talking filibuster, a doomed but principled effort to show how strongly he opposes the measure?

If he doesn’t, is he able to convince/cajole a handful of wavering Republican senators to vote against cloture? Can Cruz make enough of a stand in the Senate to stiffen the spines of House Republicans — assuming the legislation, sans defunding Obamacare, is headed their way some time in the next week?

Drum’s assessment:

Unless Reid agrees beforehand to Cruz’s demands, he’s going to filibuster the House bill even though it includes language defunding Obamacare. Can he get most of the Republican caucus in the Senate to go along with this? I doubt it—not in the long run, anyway. Cruz isn’t willing to admit that a Republican filibuster against the House Republicans’ own bill would strike the American public as ridiculous, but it would.

Yes, his sense of the ridiculous seems somewhat tenuous, I’d say. No wonder so many of Cruz’s congressional colleagues hate him:

[R]unning for president (which Cruz would plainly like to do one day) means getting a whole lot of people to like you. Fundraisers, reporters, other politicians who might endorse you, power brokers from the highest party pooh-bah down to every block captain in Des Moines—you’ve got to court them and make them love you so they’ll work their hearts out. Politicians like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who excel at that personal side of politics have an immense leg up.

It’s one thing to be personally awkward, like Al Gore or Mitt Romney—that makes it harder, but not impossible. But if you’re someone who inspires this kind of venom, that’s another matter entirely.

(Photo: United States Senator Ted Cruz speaks during a town hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action For America at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas on August 20, 2013. By Brandon Wade/Getty Images)

This Extraordinary Pope, Ctd

Watching the theocons respond to the rebirth of Christianity in the Catholic church was bound to be a bewildering experience. For thirty years, the Ratzingerian dynamic held sway – an era in which papal authority was elevated far above the faith of the people of God, in which doctrinal orthodoxy in every single particular was the highest virtue and the one by which all other virtues were judged, in which a pure, orthodox, doubt-free and smaller church was supposed to somehow convert all of Europe back to Christianity, in which liturgical esoterica became neurotic fixations, and outreach meant finding ways to bring opponents of the Second Vatican Council, including even Holocaust deniers, back into the fold.

In every single, defining characteristic of Ratzinger’s long rule – from the era of Ratzinger as head of orthodoxy to Pope Benedict XVI himself disappearing inside a fabulous flurry of fabric and jewellery – Francis has turned a corner. Definitively, bluntly, unmistakably. So what do the the “reactionaries and legalists” (Francis’ own words) have to say now? Matthew Schmitz grapples:

The pope certainly does mean to propose an adjustment, though the nature of that adjustment isn’t immediately clear. The hope of many (and too-eager suspicion of some) that he was muzzling the Church’s moral witness was immediately disappointed. A mere day after the publication of his interview, he denounced abortion in the strongest terms of his papacy, some of the strongest of any papacy …

The Pope’s approach is one familiar to any reader of the gospels. Pharisees try to discredit the gospel by trapping its teacher; the teacher refuses the terms of their question and raises the spiritual stakes. The point here is not to compromise on or back away from truth, but rather to reject its caricature. This is good practical guidance. If it’s what he meant in his broader remarks, then those remarks offer wise advice well worth taking.

Note that he immediately has to grasp onto a short statement after the 12,000 word interview to try and belittle the seismic shift. As if Francis were likely to change a deep moral truth about life in the womb. John Zuhlsdorf, in contrast, just goes into total denial:

People who focus just on the comments that Francis made about compassion for homosexuals and “social wounds” or about not talking about abortion all the time or that the Church has no right to “interfere” with people (as if to say that Francis thinks homosexuality is okay or that the Church should be silent in the public square or that we mustn’t talk about abortion) without also underscoring that Francis was talking about things which need healing and that they are matters for confession (read: sins) have distorted his meaning.

Really? Homosexuality is not okay for Francis in exactly the same way it was not okay for Benedict? Let me offer two direct quotes from both pontiffs. Benedict XVI:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not…

The proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.

There is even a hint that gays deserve bashing for pushing society too far. And this edict was issued as the AIDS epidemic was destroying so many lives – and where Francis’ view of the church as a “field hospital” could not have been more appropriate. Instead: condemnation, marginalization, cruelty, tone-deafness.

Francis, in stark contrast:

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being. In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation.

And these words cannot but be understood as a gentle but nonetheless revolutionary rejection of the entire John Paul II-Benedict XVI era, which was fixated first and foremost on doctrinal orthodoxy in all things, from legalistic details about coverage of contraception to refusing even to employ gay people in lay services for fear they might be infected with the horror of a civil marriage. Can the theocons not read? Or is it too much right now for them to absorb? Francis could not be clearer:

The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

Remember the American nuns under investigation – still ongoing? Why were they under investigation? Because they were not being insistent enough on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and contraception! They were too busy serving the poor. What did the new Pope just say?

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible.

But this insistence was not just possible, it was mandatory in the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for the last several years, with their ridiculous Fortnight of Freedom, their obsession with contraception in Obamacare – ignoring the vast moral sea-change of universal coverage in their cramped Pharisaical insistence on these sexual matters – and their bitter, nasty, divisive attacks on gay Catholics and our loves, even as they shielded child-rapists from exposure and from accountability.

Now, of course, the Pope is not about to alter core doctrines nor does he have the authority to do so. But what he has insisted upon is that the truth of the faith is not guarded by one man alone, as John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried to argue. Their deliberate attempt to ratchet power back into the papacy, to use that authoritarian office to purge heretics, freeze debate and chase out the “luke-warm” liberal Catholics in favor of a smaller “purer” church … has been replaced by something much more like John XXIII’s and John Paul I’s vision and the Spirit of the Second Council. Francis understands the appeal and temptation of strong authority. Because he once tried it:

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

What replaces that? The authority of the people of God in a journey of faith:

The church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together. This is what I understand today as the ‘thinking with the church’ of which St. Ignatius speaks. When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine, then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit. So this thinking with the church does not concern theologians only.

No, abortion is not okay. It remains profoundly wrong to take life away from the vulnerable and unborn. But when recognition of this truth springs up from the life of the people of God and does not seek to coerce others by law or intimidation – it has so much more moral authority than when it is imposed by a distant, political monarch in ermine.

One way to ignore these seismic reprimands of the recent past is the following from First Things:

God’s mercy on sinners is the key in which Francis exercises the Petrine ministry. This represents no great change from the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who spoke frequently of the mercy of God and the reality of sin and, in the case of the former, wrote an entire encyclical on the divine mercy.

Sorry – but weak. Read the whole thing. And absorb how deep, penetrating and yet charitable a refutation it is of almost everything that has defined the hierarchy of the last three decades. And rejoice.

Getting Parents To Change Their Tune

Mark Oppenheimer laments the persistence of parents forcing their children to learn a musical instrument, finding it to be the remnant of an earlier age:

Before the twentieth century, there was a good reason for anyone to study music: If you couldn’t make the music yourself, then you would rarely hear it. Before the radio and the phonograph, any music in the house was produced by the family itself. So it made sense to play fiddle, piano, jug, whatever. And before urbanization and the automobile, most people did not have easy, regular access to concerts. Of course, small-town people could come together for occasional concerts, to play together or to hear local troupes or traveling bands. Growing up in the sticks, you still might see Shakespeare performed, and a touring opera company could bring you Mozart. But very infrequently. If music was to be a part of your daily life, it had to be homemade.

How he thinks we should approach the issue today:

We can probably all agree that it’s worthwhile for children (as well as their parents) to try new activities, and that there is virtue in mastering difficult disciplines. So what challenges should we be tackling, if not ballet and classical music? How about auto repair? At least one Oppenheimer should be able to change the oil, and it isn’t me. It may as well be one of my daughters. Sewing would be good. And if it has to be an instrument, I’d say bass or guitar. The adults I know who can play guitar can actually be seen playing their guitars. And as any rock guitarist will tell you, there is a shortage of bassists.

But I do not believe that all artistic pursuits, or all disciplines that one studies, should be judged for their usefulness. The sublimity of art is tied, after all, to its uselessness (cf. Dazed and Confused). More than anything, I want children to find pursuits, whether useful or not, that they can take with them into adulthood.

Paul Berman is unpersuaded:

Those childhood violin studies of mine have shaped my adult ear and brain, and, when I listen to Mendelssohn or to any of the greats, I naturally respond in ways that are encouraged by the grand tradition. I do not know what it is to be a person without access to that tradition, and I can only picture a lack of access as a kind of poverty.

Oppenheimer replies:

Many music teachers, and parents, believe that there is something special, better, about the classical and art-music tradition. Several wrote to tell me how offended they were by the comparison of violin to ukulele: The former is so much more difficult, and its repertoire, so much richer. They may be right, but they have touched on a debate worth having, one we do not have enough. Given how relatively easy it is to get a little bit competent on, say, guitar, enough to lead a camp sing-along, why do we start so many children on harder instruments, and ones bound to seem less relevant to their lives? I was trying to make the case for pointless pastimes, things we do just for the fun of it, whatever instrument or hobby pleases us—and Berman replies with reasons we might favor the classical instruments. That’s great. It’s all great, so long as it’s not parents buying music lessons as part of some upper-middle-class acculturation plan.