Obviously, it wasn't the most opportune weekend to begin selling CDs on eBay, again, but necessity is what necessity is. I've extended the auctions on the following CDs until Thursday, and reduced the price on most:
The Band, The Best of the Band
Barenaked Ladies, Rock Spectacle
Barenaked Ladies, Stunt
The Beatles, With the Beatles
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles, Let It Be
The Beatles Abbey Road
The Beatles, 1
Brad, Shame
The Chieftains, The Long Black Veil
Counting Crows, Recovering the Satellites
The Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It...
The following discs already have bids, but you have until a little after 5:00 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday) to get yours in:
Allman Brothers Band, Where It All Begins
The Beach Boys, Endless Summer
David Bowie, Young Americans
Jackson Browne, I'm Alive
Jimmy Buffett, Son of a Son of a Sailor
Jimmy Buffett, Hot Water
Nick Cave, The Boatman's Call
Phil Collins, No Jacket Required
Please bid!
To close out this Memorial Day, here're some links that have been building up in my bookmarks file to the sort of information that the Internet has become so essential for providing.
Arthur Chrenkoff has compiled a second post of good news from Iraq. This tidbit, although relatively superficial, is doubly surprising:
And the actor Gary Sinise, who played Lt Dan in "Forest Gump" had this to say after visiting Iraqi hospitals: "I also saw a beautiful interaction between our Soldiers and the Iraqi children. The kids I saw on my second trip to Iraq with Wayne Newton in November 2003 were loving our Soldiers and were so grateful to them for having liberated them from Saddam Hussein. It was a tremendous feeling to see these children hugging and kissing our Soldiers, cheering them with the thumbs up sign and in broken English saying, 'I love you'... Good things are happening over there [Iraq]. On the nightly news it looks like all hell is breaking loose, but I know, from being over there, there's another side to the story."
Meanwhile, readers of solely the mainstream media likely believe the wedding-day bombing to be a closed case (and not in a good way). Belmont Club begs to differ, and has been tracking information as it's become available:
The AP video shows a dead band member almost without a facial mark, peaceful and almost resting. (The very popular Baghdad singer?) Was he the only one killed? If the bomb hit the musician's tent, as indicated by the debris of musical instruments, where are the other dead men? Was there a third structure attacked, the figurative 100 Syrian fighters 'down the road'? Or were there just the two structures?
Personally, I'm skeptical even of the dead band member.
For his part, John Hawkins offers a broader view in "George Bush's Wildly Successful War on Terrorism":
Despite what we hear daily from the "nattering nabobs of negativity" in our country, we should be proud of the magnificent job that George W. Bush, his administration, our troops, and our intelligence services have done fighting the war on terrorism. In perhaps the two most perfectly executed military campaigns ever waged on this earth, our troops smashed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's regime, freeing 50 million people from tyrants who had made the lives of their people into a living hell.
Although some will surely object that the war in Iraq oughtn't be included in analysis about the progress in the War on Terror, WorldNetDaily suggests that such objections are increasingly less justified. Among other things:
Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Also less and less justified is the notion that Iraq ought to be placed in U.N. hands. James Lileks focuses on Europe:
If anyone thinks Europe is “three or four more times as democratic as America” he is living in a dream world. A world where Russia lectures us about treatment of Muslim detainees, France is a model of nation-building, the Patriot act muzzles the press, and China is deeply concerned about the sovereignty of conquered nations.
And while I'm linking around, I'll close with a column from a mainstream outlet, the Providence Journal — albeit, criticizing the mainstream media. Peter Brown calls for perspective among his peers:
My news-media colleagues are largely responsible. We rightly press for explanations about why things happened and how they could have been averted. But we also legitimize the mentality that it's okay to come down from high after the battle and shoot the wounded. We feel the need to make sure someone takes the fall, regardless of whether anyone would have done the same thing, or worse, in his or her shoes.It's a sick game. ...
It's a loss of perspective because the situation highlights why Rumsfeld should stay in office. We won the war. The United States took the prisoners, not the other way around.
We won it quickly and with many fewer U.S. casualties than even the optimists had predicted, not to mention the doomsday scenarios of the pessimists -- many of the same people now wanting Rumsfeld to resign. Last time I checked, the prime responsibility of the secretary of defense is to make sure that the U.S. military wins wars.
How our military treats enemy prisoners, although worth considering, ranks far, far lower on that totem pole. And rightly so.
There isn't much to fruitfully argue in Walter Olson's latest post regarding Virginia's recently passed amendment to its Affirmation of Marriage Act. Olson presents his post as a response to Ramesh Ponnuru's explanation, which is similar to my own. Ponnuru and I have argued what the law ought to be construed to mean; Olson is arguing what it could (and shouldn't) be construed to mean. Inasmuch as even some of the articles that Olson cites present the central points that I would make, to argue along the "what will it do" line would be to continue a repetitive dance.
The amendment is now law, and until judges begin taking the cases that will eventually illustrate what it does and does not cover, restating ambiguities over and over would seem to lend credence to bill-sponsor Delegate Robert Marshall's suggestion that the intention is "to sow doubt about the statute."
However, the following from Olson oughtn't go without comment:
So, again: which private arrangements are void? Ponnuru's answer is agreeably circular: he thinks the law will ban only those arrangements which purport to convey incidents of marriage which cannot be conveyed by contract. In other words, it will ban only those arrangements that are already void.
That bit about Ponnuru's conclusion being "agreeably circular" seems, if Olson has paid half as much attention to the debate as I believe he has, disagreeably oblique. As we're discovering in Rhode Island, and as has been suggested here and there across the country, with states' creation of civil unions and legitimization of same-sex marriage, the explicit declaration of "public policy" in other states is pivotal in preventing importation of those arrangements. And indeed, the version of the amendment that passed the Virginia House uses the language "declares as existing policy."
Understandably, those who support SSM will object to any barriers' being built into state laws, but to imply that the barriers' redundancy indicates ulterior intentions is a bit much. On one hand, SSM advocates wish to push redefinition through the courts on the grounds that marriage isn't defined, and on the other, apparently, some of them object that legislating definition is so unnecessary as to prove expanding bigotry. For their part, those who oppose the judicial imposition of SSM believe any such laws would be redundant.
Although I'd suggest that all of the various imputations of motive muddy waters in need of clarification, the effort spent pushing laws and arguments to their most extreme interpretations is much more extensive among those who wish to do away with them. Consider Olson's "curious postscript":
Marshall (whose private views, of course, do not determine how courts will rule in interpreting the law) disagrees with the idea that durable power of attorney, medical directives or wills might come into question, but "said the Virginia law is intended to ban child custody and guardianship agreements between same-sex partners". ... The mention of guardianships is interesting since the designation of guardians has long been untethered to the "privileges or obligations of marriage" -- parents can and routinely do select sisters, cousins and completely unrelated friends of the family to step in as guardians for their children in the event of their demise. It appears that Marshall -- contra Ponnuru's thesis -- hopes the law will empower courts to undo private legal arrangements which are routinely upheld as valid when carried on between other unrelated persons on the grounds that they arise from a same-sex relationship.
Olson goes on to warn of a legal guardian from another state having her long-deceased partner's child snatched by the Virginia bureaucracy while on vacation within its jurisdiction. Such an event would be a travesty, indeed. However, posing the scenario on the basis of an unsympathetic reporter's paraphrase of Delegate Marshall's legally irrelevant statement on the matter would seem to discard Olson's previous emphasis on "plausibility."
In response, I'm tempted to ponder the likelihood that a federal judge will take the opportunity created by such extreme hypotheticals to strike down the Virginia statute in a ruling that's sufficiently broad to invalidate even more temperate state laws. Whether that happens, we'll just have to wait and see, but I'm not optimistic that supporters of SSM will apply their apparent aversion to surplus breadth in legal language to the ruling if it does.
Austin Bay's farewell entry of May 18 has been much on my mind ever since:
Removing Saddam began the reconfiguration of the Middle East -- a dangerous, expensive process, but one that will lay the foundation for true states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted. The job of building New Iraq falls on the Iraqi people, but they have a precious opportunity, one supported by government civilians and contractors, volunteer workers and, of course, the uniformed military personnel serving with the U.S.-led coalition.It is my privilege to join that group for the next few months. I know the hardest burden in this deployment will be borne by my wife and daughters. I thank them for their sacrifice.
Because I was born with two clubbed feet, there has never been a time when I wasn't aware that I was 4-F; as Merriam-Webster puts it, that means "classification as unfit for military service." In other words, it has never even been a matter of choosing not to enlist — a matter of rejecting the call to serve. For most of my reckless youth, I considered that to be an instance of good fortune. And I still do, although in a different way: in the way that the cleansing from sin of an adult baptism makes it a matter of luck to have once been an unbaptized atheist. The good fortune is in not having to face the reality of unmitigated shortcomings, whether cowardice, selfishness, or sin.
Just as one must remember, however, that being an unbaptized atheist surely contributed to sin, which contributed to misfortune, which defined much of the starting point for adult life, one must understand that never having had to consider the most potent form of service to one's country contributed to a larger attitude of service's avoidance. Put more simply, 4-F was — and continues to be — an excuse, at least on my part, piled on top of many others, until what is excuse simply cannot be peeled away from what is reason.
To each his own, and we're all called in different directions. But a citizen who sacrifices less profoundly must sacrifice more, and for longer, until every excuse has been hammered into a reason in retrospect. The life not risked is not thereby absolved of the responsibility to be a life given over. If my legs prevented my carrying what burden a commanding officer might have place upon my shoulders, then my mind and fingers must work until an equivalent service has been rendered.
So, on this Memorial Day, we who have not served ought, by duty, to thank those who have — not just for their sacrifices, but for setting the bar so high. What they have given — what you have given — is an example of such weight as to inspire a lifetime of continual striving according to the individual callings of the rest of us.
Whether he intended it or not, Austin Bay speaks more broadly than just the war against the terrorists when he writes that "every American, in some form or fashion, is part of this war." And although each of us contributes to humanity's larger struggle, we rightly pause to thank and to honor those who have fought directly to establish the foundation from which the battles of the mind may be waged.
Music critic Dave Marsh makes a culturally telling comment on the back cover of the Ted Hawkins CD — The Next Hundred Years — with "Ladder of Success" on it:
When [Hawkins] declares that you can't get anywhere without "connections," in his "Ladder of Success," he's speaking a simple truth which becomes more convoluted only when you realize how utterly simply he means it: He genuinely believes contact with God possesses more power than contact with mammon. This complex simplicity lends his songs their sense of strangeness and eccentricity.
Personally, I get more of a sense of strangeness from the fact that this comment was printed in full promotional view on the CD in question. And what eccentricity it indicates in an industry when it apparently stands as an oddity that somebody actually believes God to be more powerful than money.
No matter what you know, it's who you know
No matter how great you are
You got to know somebody
That knows somebody
Who knows somebody
That is somebody
So run and tell somebody
To finance somebody
So they can pay somebody
To push somebody
You have to trust somebody
You have to trust somebody
So why not trust the Maker
He will help you make it
Convoluted as the route from one to the other might be, the song "Ladder of Success," by Ted Hawkins, came to mind when I finally saw Return of the King last night.
One aspect of The Lord of the Rings' climactic scene, emphasized thereafter, that the movie really highlighted for me was the degree to which everything ultimately came down to two characters and the strength of their friendship. We tend to see our own lives in close-ups, and when the camera is focused on Frodo and Sam struggling up Mt. Doom to dispose of the ring, it is easy to believe that the fate of Middle Earth rests with them. When the camera hovers over the crowd of warriors who have made bait of themselves as a distraction, and one sees Mt. Doom off in the distance, it is quite a bit more strange to think that the real action isn't with the king, or the soldiers, or the company wizard.
A similar sense, although much more profound, followed me from the theater when I saw The Passion of the Christ. From the point of view of our globalized world, it's striking how small in scope were the worldly events involved with Christ's coming, death, and resurrection. There's no mention in the Bible, or elsewhere, that every person in the world looked up at the sky — or something — with knowledge that a major event had just happened in the world. Surely there were a great many people even in Jerusalem who had no idea why the Earth might be shaking.
It may sound self-contradictory, but to expect such an instant global effect is to put abnormal limits on God. God, it ought to be clear, has time. Specifically, He has time to wait for the spark of Christ's coming to compound into broad flames of belief. I can imagine an apostle staggering through the streets after the Passion, or striding through them after the Resurrection, and wondering, "Is it possible that none of these people bustling about with their lives know what has just happened?"
Well, yes. It is possible. Probable. God has time.
He also has scope — defines scope. This divine measure of the extent and breadth of events' importance speaks to our own perspective within the limited reach of our actions. A few months ago, a much older friend of mine suggested that she had only recently realized that not everybody can be Mother Theresa. I took the comment to be an equal reference to the amount of good done and the amount of notoriety received. A parent, for example, cannot abandon his or her children to roam the world doing good, and even those who are free to do so will not likely gain worldly fame for their deeds.
During a period when I believed in a vague sort of fate, I half-jokingly fretted that my role in the world might be to cut off some guy on the highway, snapping the final straw, sending him into a frenzy during which he would kill some random woman, who would say something profound on her deathbed, which would affect her son in such a way that, when he became President of the United States, he would institute some policy that averted war. At my most selfish (in my bachelor days), I outlined a story about a failed musician whose child went on to become famous. The story would have been constructed as an expression of tragedy.
In the Christian view, however, God doesn't create human beings simply to be means to another end. Not one of us is merely a bumper in a cosmic machine of events, there only to reflect the sphere of significance in a meaningful direction. So, we oughtn't fear to accept that hints of reality's purpose may not arise directly out of our actions. It may be that momentousness, according to humanity's conception, touches our lives only at a distance. In the mechanism of society, it may be that any given person's manifest role is only to finance somebody to pay somebody to push somebody so that somebody else might make it.
But to God, we all exist in close-up — where it is easy to believe that what we do affects the fate of the entire world.
Letters from Rhode Islanders expressing conservative ideas have been mounting in the Providence Journal. (I wonder what an analysis of which letters are published in print versus online would reveal.) In keeping with my desire to establish a Red Politics beachhead in the Ocean State, here are links to some of the brave souls.
Echoing with different emphasis some comments from the (apparently liberal) International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mike Toppazzini, of North Providence, thinks the Islamicists are waiting, with nervous anticipation, the outcome of our national elections this year:
Terrorists, like bullies and dictators, only survive by creating an environment of having your opponent in constant fear or insecurity, thus paralyzing them from fighting back. Once this doesn't work, I'm sure it makes them uneasy.My guess is that they are waiting for the election with the hope that John F. Kerry wins, so things can go back to the old ways, like having meetings and putting sanctions in place that never work anyway.
Although he implies them in his closing, Mike neglected to add international bureaucrats to the list of people who thrive on the paralysis of the masses. In an interesting twist on this cross-disciplinary trait, Lt. Col. Patrick Donahoe insinuates that members of the media segment of that crowd might wish away the realization of their dark desires through the success of their advocacy:
Frank Rich's commentaries (Journal, May 9 and 23) are examples of a generation of journalists pining for the "good old days" of Vietnam. Rich admits that the "Vietnam parallels are, as always, not quite exact," but he poses the flawed argument anyway.In reality, Iraq is not Vietnam, neither politically nor militarily; Fallujah is not Hue City; and Abu Ghraib is not My Lai. The constant refrain of a "new Vietnam" is the sad musing of an aging generation of reporters who cut their teeth on the jungles of Southeast Asia. These writers want to paint our country in the worst light. They can assign no other motive to America than the evil exercise of power. ...
I feel sorry for Mr. Rich. He will not get his Vietnam. He and others of his ilk will have to look elsewhere. They will be denied their crowning glory, the ignoble defeat of American aims in Iraq and the corresponding humiliation of our nation and our country's armed forces.
And if John Kerry were to win in November, they'd lose even the ability to strike their favorite poses. The domestic regime change would have been brought about well before hippy-era activism filtered through our society. Indeed, the switch in tone from foaming to fawning might very well result in mass infliction of whiplash and (even more) unfavorable public attitudes toward the opinion elite.
In what might prove to be a foretaste of that outcome, a letter from Cliff Hanks, of Cumberland, makes me wonder whether its author can claim some of the credit for this spate of contra-Blue opinion in the pages of the state's only major newspaper:
Is there a left-leaning group that controls which letters get printed in The Journal, or just one leftist fanatic? Who controls the editorial process, since there is lots of space for such vacuities as John MacArthur and Froma Harrop, et al., with their interminable mindlessness, and little space for thoughtful commentaries.
This is, to be sure, a refrain that I regularly sing, although I try (often unsuccessfully) to keep in perspective that the demands on a newspaper — a professional media organization — are different than those on a blogger. Being online, after all, I have unlimited space for vacuity.
I'm behind today because I got caught up with a long, but absolutely fascinating, piece about the degree to which online virtual-reality fantasy games are becoming almost small nation states:
[Economics professor Edward Castronova] gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each [virtual] item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game — the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.
It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.
As the self-contained worlds of such games have aligned with real-world systems and attitudes, they've not surprisingly moved toward the core influences on society. As the objects and "lives" in them begin to have real value, the games seem to me to be moving out of the phase during which it was possible to talk about a utopian reality in which everybody begins from equal footing and advances based on effort and merit. Human nature is too complicated, and intractable.
In some ways, the virtual worlds can be likened to a newly discovered, inhabited and intellectually modern, country — like an island paradise. Whatever tenuous dreamworld has been enabled by the absence of physical pain and mortality is drained through interaction with the wider world. The major difference, although the article doesn't go this in depth, is that these worlds have powerful "gods" — the designers and administrators — with control over every detail of the internal reality. One doesn't expect, for example, that a jealous god will wink an island nation out of existence as external economies make inroads, but such a thing is still possible in the games.
The formulation of the people who run the games as gods points to an interesting trend. The common (simplified) view of theology's progress in human history is from sort of mechanical gods spiritually connected to specific things in the world; through the concept of powerful deities who aren't much different than comic book superheroes, replete with human-like foibles and passions; followed by distinct, often competing, "forces"; and ultimately to the all-powerful God of the monotheistic faiths. The virtual gods have gone in the reverse.
At present, they are like the ancient Greek gods. They can dictate certain rules of nature, transform objects, make things (like money and goods) appear and disappear, but the medium in which they work imposes restrictions. However, as our legal system begins to assert rights to regulate — if the game owners choose to continue to allow the expansion of the games — they will become somewhat less powerful, even, than world leaders. If a head of state pushes a button and annihilates a civilization, he faces only what consequences other nations or his own people are able to force. Were the game owners to do the same, they'll eventually be criminally liable, at least for lost money.
What this really means, though, is that, as the gods of the games shift toward their actual humanity in power, as the games become more a component of this world, the God of the games becomes the real God. And that raises some intriguing ethical questions. Primary among the answers, I would suggest, even before the questions begin to be asked, is that excessive immersion in a virtual world threatens one's soul, inasmuch as it moves one's consciousness an implementation of reality further from God.
How significant would charity within EverQuest be if it came at the expense of, for example, depriving children of an active father? Not very, I'd say. But turn that question around a bit, and an answer to the real-world parallel must be more intricate: how significant is charity of the body that comes at the expense of the soul?
Economics isn't the only field that can find a model in these games, but I don't know how much our secular society will like the theological and philosophical conclusions to which the virtual worlds may lead.
(via Shiela Lennon)
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "from The Toonijuk," by Bill Goetzinger.
It looks as if, since I felt compelled to say something, I should have just gone ahead and made my point about comparisons between the Family Research Council and the Nazis. Trey, the blogger who suggested the comparison, has clarified, but without answering my unvoiced concern:
Do I believe the rhetoric of hate and demonization that the FRC uses has the possibility to increase violence and legal discrimination against my family? Yes, most defininitely. Just as I believe child pornography endangers children and extreme violence on TV numbs us to real violence (I'm sure Mr. Katz would agree.. as would the FRC, so why doesn't the FRC see what they are doing?), the speech the FRC uses against gays is a danger both now and in the future. Their rhetoric is indeed comparable to that the Nazis used against Jews.
I wonder if Trey has actually read through the disgusting Nazi propaganda from which the selective quotes of his source for the comparison were drawn. If he has, I'm at a loss to understand how he could fail to see how the equivalence abets evil through its diminishment with one hand and inflicts unjust harm with the other. Here's a taste:
When the agricultural Egyptian population prepared to defend itself against these foreign usurers and speculators, they emigrated once again, and plundered their way into the "Promised Land," where they settled and mercilessly pillaged the lawful and culturally-advanced inhabitants. ...Here, the ultimate mixed race that is the Jews developed over the centuries from the oriental-preasiatic racial mixture, with a hint of the negroid - foreign to us Europeans, born from totally different kinds of racial elements, different from us in body and above all in soul. ...
In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, they spread from Eastern Europe like an irresistable tide, flooding the towns and nations of Europe - in fact, the entire world. ...
Then (1918/19) the Jews seized their chance. They came to the forefront, pretending to be faithful citizens, deeply disturbed about the fate of the German people. ...
While millions of established Germans were unemployed and in misery, immigrant Jews acquired fantastic riches in a few years - not by honest work, but by usury, swindling, and fraud. ...
Supposedly their so-called religion prevents the Jews from eating meat butchered in the ordinary way. So they let the animals bleed to death. ... It would otherwise been inconceivable, considering the well-known German love of animals, that Jews until recently were able, without being punnished, to torture innocent and defenseless animals. ...
Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, Germany has raised the battle flag of war against the eternal Jew. ... "but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
One doesn't know whether to laugh or vomit. During the part about suffering animals, the image is of laughing men. Other images are of maps plotting the Jews' infiltration of the world. According to the film, Jews are responsible for just about every crime. "The common language of international thieves comes not without reason from Hebrew and Yiddish."
The film, in short, creates an extended, mythic history of the perfidy of Jews, with sickly humorous juxtapositions of images and text, with lies stoking a paranoia such that annihilation is presented as a reasonable option. For Trey's "evidence," aligned next to the various statements and false statistics are comments from people involved with the FRC. All are out of context; many deal with demographics; many express opinions about behavior; many are indistinguishable from sources that can't be called anti-gay by any stretch. Here's another Nazi nugget:
Fifty-two out of every 100 doctors were Jews. Of every 100 merchants, 60 were Jews. The average wealth of Germans was 810 marks; the average wealth of Jews 10,000 marks.
That's aligned with Robert Knight of the FRC (from 1994):
Homosexuals are among the most economically advantaged people in our country. Research by marketing firms shows that as a group homosexuals have higher than average per-capita annual incomes ($36,800 vs. $12,287), are more likely to hold college degrees (59.6 percent vs. 18 percent), have professional or managerial positions (49 percent vs. 15.9 percent...
And here's the Providence Journal reporting on the first-ever survey — by a pro-gay group — of Rhode Island homosexuals:
81.1 percent have obtained a bachelor's degree or higher, versus 25.6 percent of all Rhode Islanders. ...77.2 percent work full- or part-time, versus 64.7 percent of all Rhode Islanders.
The specific numbers are debatable, to be sure, but the point is that citing them in the context of testimony that a group doesn't need special protections is quite another matter from citing them to instill fear and promote annihilation. Trey's source goes on like that. To Nazi claims that Jews essentially orchestrate global crime, the source compares quotes about pedophilia and sodomy. Included is a sentence from Robert Knight, saying, "Twenty-one states have laws prohibiting sodomy," which was true at the time.
Having reaffirmed the comparison, Trey offers a hypothetical:
A national media-exposed political advocacy group which has a prominent purpose (large portion of its web site and media appearances) of opposing Christian rights to marriage, employment protection, and discrimination. To oppose these rights to Christians, this group make many claims about them. Christians have an agenda to undermine the national and social structure and destroy the nation. They must be stopped. Christians are violent and cruel people and are known to physically abuse their spouses. Christians are a a danger to children and a very large portion of them are pedophiles, abusing their own children and others' children both sexually and physically. Christians are disease-ridden and spread diseases throughout the population. Christians are increasing in number and recruiting others to their peverted lifestyle when we should be converting them away from their vile beliefs and eliminating them.
Were I in the mood to joke, I'd suggest that Christians face such a group — the ACLU. Were I feeling philosophical, I'd suggest that, even in the extremity, Trey has removed the heart of what it means to be a vibrant and variegated society by conflating the elimination of beliefs and the elimination of people.
But the truth is that I'm exhausted by the impossibility of resolving even what ought to be a simple matter of observation. I'm exhausted by the amorphous meaning attributed to "discrimination" — by the idea that it could make me a Nazi not to believe in "employment protection" for homosexuals when, in all but very narrow circumstances, I don't believe in "employment protection" for anybody.
Look, the reason I didn't go through this the other day is that I have a strong suspicion that doing so publicly will negatively affect my job search, considering my region and the sort of work I'm looking for. Owing to distortions very much like those comparing the FRC to Nazis, it's all too easy for "right-thinking" people to quickly section off those who disagree. Maybe in some nuanced way I'm not a patent bigot, the hirer might concede, but perhaps the suspicion is enough to save the hour of an interview.
So, as I sit here, before wrapping up a day spent auctioning CDs to pay bills and sending letters and email to anybody who might be able to help me find work that will, in some tangential way, further my career rather than put it on hold, wondering whether I wasn't better off without a public platform, back when I could divulge my opinions only to those whom I trusted with the information, I empathize with Trey's concerns:
... the words used by the FRC demonize me, my partner and my daughter and by doing so increases the dangers we have to face as individuals and as a family.Until Mr. Katz and others recognize the hateful speech and rhetoric of demonization the FRC uses and calls for an end to it and acknowledges the danger it can and does pose for me and my family, then civil discourse becomes difficult if not impossible.
If they do not recognize the danger the FRC's rhetoric poses to me, then they become just another person who stands aside and says 'I didn't do it'.
I empathize more than he knows.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) is getting quite a bit of attention for some analysis that Iraq is harming the War on Terror. In fact, whether or not he meant this particular study, Al Gore cited the "think tank" in his already infamous tirade. Reading the full summary of the report (PDF), however, one gets the impression of a glorified opinion column. Consider the section on WMD proliferation:
Washington's leverage over both Tehran and Pyongyang has eroded, as the US found itself pre-occupied with an increasingly desperate situation in Iraq and as the Bush Administration remained deeply divided over policies towards Iran and North Korea.
This brings to mind a recent quip from Ann Coulter that, for liberals, "history always begins this morning." Does anybody believe that Iran and North Korea would currently be more inclined to eschew their nuclear ambitions, the "underlying motivations" of which the IISS itself says are "more deep-seated" than Libya's, if the United States had backed down on Iraq?
In fact, one must look at these situations at a skewed angle in order to find even tepid diplomatic progress to be a setback. For its part, Iran is doing nothing that's not habitual among rogue regimes if its "commitment to the October agreement [to disclose past nuclear activities, accept stronger IAEA inspections, and suspend its fuel cycle program] has been suspect." North Korea has long provided an example of the dubious nature of such "commitments."
Especially regarding North Korea, the IISS criticizes the American administration for moving forward — and succeeding in large part — with a strategy that it has held for years: refusing to engage in unilateral talks with the dictator. The broader version of this point strikes me as simply odd; continuing from the previous quotation:
As a result, the US ceded diplomatic initiative to third parties: to China in the case of North Korea and to Europe in the case of Iran.
In context, this is presented as undesirable; I'm not sure why the IISS believes the United States shouldn't work with allies in its diplomacy. It would seem to me to increase the options (e.g., good cop/bad cop). Indeed, just two paragraphs before, in describing Libya — presented as casting its shadow on the "limited progress" in the other two countries — the IISS declares it to have been "a brilliant success for British diplomacy." Not surprisingly, there's no mention of the role that the invasion of Iraq played therein.
It appears that ambiguously successful multilateral strategies are the fault of the Bush administration, but that such strategies are to be credited to the other nations when they represent clear advances. For an encapsulation of the bias from which this standard ensues, consider this bit of casual, unexplored prognostication:
Increasingly, the Six Party Talks [involving North Korea] look like buying time until a new Administration takes office in Washington in January 2005.
I'm sure Iran, North Korea, and countless despots, terrorists, and corrupt bureaucrats are, indeed, anxiously hoping for that electoral outcome.
A few months back, I managed to find some freelance work and was able to stop eBaying my CD collection away just before I got to the tier at which it would become painful. Well, the freelance project is over, with none to replace it, and I haven't yet succeeded in finding full-time work, so...
Please bid — and overbid:
Allman Brothers Band, Where It All Begins
The Band, The Best of the Band
Barenaked Ladies, Rock Spectacle
Barenaked Ladies, Stunt
The Beach Boys, Endless Summer
The Beatles, With the Beatles
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles, Let It Be
The Beatles Abbey Road
The Beatles, 1
David Bowie, Young Americans
Brad, Shame
Jackson Browne, I'm Alive
Jimmy Buffett, Son of a Son of a Sailor
Jimmy Buffett, Hot Water
Nick Cave, The Boatman's Call
The Chieftains, The Long Black Veil
Phil Collins, No Jacket Required
Counting Crows, Recovering the Satellites
The Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It...
David Gratzer suggests that the direction of healthcare in this country may be turning:
Given Maryland's tight budget situation, though, Sabatini needed to be imaginative — and frugal. First and foremost, Sabatini wanted to encourage businesses to buy insurance, making the option more attractive by making it more affordable. At the heart of his reform package was a simple idea: cut regulations. Insurance companies, he reasoned, ought to be able to offer small employers an inexpensive, no-frills health policy. Small business may fret the price of a Cadillac plan, but what about a Honda? Add to the mix malpractice reform and a crackdown on fraud, and he believes that more Marylanders will be insured. It's a bold agenda, and just last month Sabatini's efforts bore fruit when both chambers of the legislature approved a bill allowing no-frills insurance.
One can only hope that what we're seeing is the beginning of a shake-up of thinking, of some new ideas being put into play. Local AM talk host Dan Yorke was just talking about a new tax break suggested by the governor of Rhode Island, Don Carceiri that would introduce tax breaks whereby families earning less than $75,000 per year could deduct a certain amount of medical expenses that aren't covered by insurance, such as co-pays.
Yorke was focusing on the income cap (which apparently rules him out), and the governor has phrased the proposal in terms of helping people. But I wonder if the strategy mightn't count as a small side-door reform. Mostly the shift is psychological, putting the focus on healthcare as a personal expense, giving a relatively high limit for which to shoot ($1,500), considering the specific expenses included. Again, as a reform, it's miniscule, but it could betoken a change in attitude.
In fact, these two reforms made me realize that I haven't really been thinking about my contribution to the healthcare that I get through my part-time employer. This month, I started attempting to track every penny that we spend, but somehow, it hadn't even occurred to me to include taxes and healthcare in my pie graph. Now that I've done so, I see that health insurance, alone, amounts to about 10%, which, for a two-income family, is almost a full week of work for one person.
Short of finding an employer with a better program, there's not much I can reasonably do to minimize this deducted wedge from my wages. If healthcare were akin to every other cost of living, I could decide that the vision care program, for example, isn't worth the expense. If consumers were granted the ability to make such decisions more easily and directly, providers would have reason to price for incentive.
Granted, I'm predisposed to make these connections, and other people, upon making them, will conclude that somebody else ought to pick up the tab, but one oughtn't underestimate the power of new perspective.
The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "Three Women on a French Canal," by Heide Atkins.
Columnist Eugene Kane recently criticized Bill Cosby for the star's remarks about personal responsibility in the black community:
In recent years, Cosby seems to have eschewed his role as "America's Favorite Dad" in favor of "Black America's Favorite Curmudgeon."There are more than a few reports of Cosby acting cranky at public affairs, as he criticized black rappers, black actors, black people in general for failure to live up to his standards. ...
Still, there's always a sense of uneasiness whenever somebody like Cosby uses the same language some whites use to justify their racism. ...
Sometimes, beating up on defenseless people is just being a bully.
Well, Mr. Cosby gave Mr. Kane a call, and the resulting column raised my admiration for both men and offers some reason to hope that racial divisions and the problems that they help to perpetuate are on the slow path toward resolution:
So when the phone rang and it was none other than Cosby on the other end of the line, frankly, I was pretty intimidated.That didn't last long.
"Mr. Kane? First, what I want to say is this is not an argument, this is a discussion." ...
At 66 years old, Cosby said he had become frustrated at the dysfunction of some blacks, and the downward path many black communities have traveled. ...
A man who has donated millions of dollars to charity - much of that in the name of educating black children - shouldn't have to defend himself to someone like me.
Perhaps, however, Mr. Cosby's having done so will be a small furtherance of one role that he has played throughout his career — as a bridge between cultures. Hopefully folks like Mr. Kane — of all races — will see that the bridge goes both ways, and the views that Cosby is espousing aren't necessarily cover for racism when voiced by whites.
For our part, we can always benefit from reminders that others come to discussions with their own presumptions, and they aren't necessarily unjustified.
Eric Cohen takes a look at the latest push for more federal dollars to be granted for embryonic stem-cell research:
Stepping back, a pattern of facts emerges. Embryonic-stem-cell research is promising but so far purely speculative; the federal government in no way limits such research in the private sector; supporters of the research believe they can obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding in the next few years, as the creation of new stem-cell institutes at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin demonstrates; and yet, despite the ethical objections of a very substantial portion of the public, stem-cell advocates insist that Congress should compel every American to support the research with tax dollars, and to make that happen they inflate the promise and distort the facts surrounding the research.
Cohen's most useful service is to illustrate how putting aside specifics erases all possibility of an accurate moral calculus. It's one thing to approach the American people with the suggestion that the sacrifice of a few lives is almost certain to save and improve the lives of many. It's another thing if the reality is that a great many lives will have to be sacrificed in order even to prove or disprove speculation.
I'd oppose either proposition, but the distinction would make the difference for a substantial portion of voters, I'm sure.
John Derbyshire mentions a Wall Street Journal editorial. Explains Derb:
The main drift is, that the Bushies are so keen to hand off the whole shebang to the UN & get out, the admin is dancing to the UN tune... and the UN, or at any rate their man Lakhdar Brahimi, wants a Sunni strongman running the place. That shuts out Chalabi, who is (a) a Shia, and (b) a democrat. So Chalabi's gotta go.
I'm skeptical. Surely, I'm not alone — and am quite far from the teetering edge — as one for whom it would be much easier to find other things that are more important than voting come November if the administration is simply going to ignore all of the worrying festers of the U.N. and damn the people of Iraq to its whims.
This administration has done much to expose the corrosion of the United Nations, and I don't believe they'd hand control of Iraq over to it — even if the President is more cynical than I believe him to be.
I'm beginning to think that the objective, indicated in its name, of the American Civil Liberties Union is to unify all judgments of civil liberties under the control of a limited few. The organization is truly beginning to let slip the fanaticism according to which it operates:
The American Civil Liberties Union wants to take religion out of the Los Angeles County seal. ...At issue is the seal designed by the late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn that contains a tiny cross symbolic of the Catholic missions that are so much a part of the county's history.
In a letter to the supervisors, ACLU Executive Director Ramona Ripston says the cross is unconstitutional and has given them two weeks to act.
The ideologues who have taken control of the ACLU (assuming they haven't always had it) will not be satisfied until they have erased Christianity from American history. Eugene Volokh has more on the seal in question, including a picture. Personally, I think a county ought to be able to display religious symbols as religious symbols, but that's a fair debate, and one that can take its time resolving. But when a powerful, well-funded organization persists in picking through the documents, symbols, and monuments in every crack of the American governmental system, it's time for reasonable citizens to disavow the group.
The frightening part is that the L.A. county controversy is a parlay, for the ACLU, of success at changing public self-definition through raw intimidation:
The genesis of the spat began with a controversy about the city seal of Redlands, which contained a cross. Last February, two Redlands residents complained to the ACLU that the cross was a religious symbol. ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner wrote to the city that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared such symbols on government logos and seals unconstitutional.Redlands capitulated when faced with a lawsuit and ordered the cross removed from every city logo.
Here's more on that controversy, including a picture. The objection of two residents was sufficient to modify the shared symbol of the town. Civil liberties for two means that all process, all votes, all consensus is moot. Twist some matter around to phrase one's desire in terms of rights, and no democratic principle can stand in the way.
The only pertinent question is how we begin to wake up our neighbors to the creeping legistopoly.
Well, John Kerry has bowed to pressure to actually accept the Democrat nomination at the Democrat nomination convention. That would seem to undermine the strategy that Mickey Kaus had discerned (all emphasis in original):
The "non-acceptance" gambit is not about campaign money. That's just the cover story! (As if money spent in August made that much difference--a point Simon makes rather forcefully.) Nor is Kerry's seemingly suicidal plan to draw attention to himself by giving a series of high-profile national security speeches over the next 11 days anything but another clever feint. The proof: Just see if he actually says anything memorable! According to ABC's The Note, Kerry plans "town-hall meetings and discussions with military families, veterans, and fire and police personnel." Heh, heh. No network news producer is going to bump Iraq off the air for those proven coma-inducers! If it seems like the Kerry planners are trying to put Mark Halperin to sleep, maybe that's because they are.
But with a little imagination from the Democrats — and perhaps a little help from Bruce Springsteen — all hope may not be lost:
Democratic operatives are buzzing that the Boss has been talking about staging a free concert somewhere on Sept. 2, when President Bush is due to address the Republican National Convention.Besides getting out the vote, Springsteen hopes to provide "counterprogramming to the message the Republicans will be broadcasting," says a source.
If Springsteen were to stage a free concert in Boston during the Democrat convention, he might draw enough public attention away from Kerry to keep the candidate's shadow-politician opinion boost going.
Frankly, I'll take Michelle Malkin over Wonkette any day — and according to any measure of value that one might think to apply. Addressing the phenomenon of which the latter is an indication, Michelle writes:
This female Beavis and Butthead duo illustrate what normal Americans hate about the Capitol scene: narcissism, moral bankruptcy and self-congratulatory media-political incest. The Washington Post's legitimization of this shallow "story" illustrates something else: the mainstream media's perverted moral values. The paper's recent profiles and features of social conservatives drip with condescension and ridicule. Religious activists are portrayed as intolerant homophobes; Republicans as gun-toting rubes; abstinence promoters as freaks.But give The Washington Post two vain, young, trash-mouthed skanks who couldn't care less about what their parents think of their sex-drenched infamy, and the newspaper can't wait to help make them full-fledged members of the media elite.
It's never reported, but I'd love to see some kind of information — whether statistical or anecdotal — about the people who respond in the wrong way to media blips like the one that Malkin describes. This Washingtonienne chick (Beavis, presumably) has now established lower-echelon whore blogger as a potential perch from which to be struck by national media lightning. How many young women, do you suppose, will hurt themselves and those who care about them attempting to repeat the trick?
Lane Core, whom I so often cite, completes his second year of blogging today.
Here's hoping he goes for the full B.A. — at least.
The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Names of God," by Gary Bolstridge.
Sorry about the lack of posts, yesterday. I'm a bit off — like the weather, which is giving us October in May.
Apart from my lone entry and some comment and email writing, I spent quite a while writing an entry that I decided it prudent not to post. (Suffice to say that I find comparisons between the Family Research Council and Nazis specious, to say the least, but am not optimistic that arguing as much will persuade those for whom it is not obvious.)
Then, ironically, I ultimately found myself unable to post a comment to this post by Gabriel Rosenberg because of "questionable content." (I've included the comment in an addendum, here; note that I didn't try to embed the image in my comment and even attempted to include the link merely as text.)
In the evening, we finally managed, after several days of attempts, to watch part of Two Towers in preparation for viewing Return of the King. Our daughter had been refusing to fall asleep until well after the time at which any substantial part of the film could be taken in. Tonight, if she'll allow it, we'll watch the Battle of Helms Deep.
Before night falls, lack of sleep and a surfeit of frustration notwithstanding, today is a new day. Well, on with it.
ADDENDUM:
My comment to Prof. Rosenberg:
A couple of really quick (and perhaps sloppy) answers.The chart. Looking at the labels, one sees that the columns' height is "percentage of total births." It is this that has increased by two percentage points each year. The rounding of the table (I think it's the rounding) distorts the differences, but here's a quick idea of what it should look like (modified only from '94 on):
(click the image for the full-sized version)
The change from 1994 to 1995 was particularly affected by rounding; the difference was actually only 1.26, but 0.78 was added in the rounding. It might help to read Kurtz's piece, today, on NRO, and (I believe) he'll be publishing a more statistical piece thereon in the near future.I should also point out that in the CBS numbers an out-of-wedlock birth is one where the mother was unmarried 307 days before the birth.
— Yes, but you should also point out that the corresponding lag is true for children born just after divorces and deaths.it seems at times that Kurtz is arguing not that same-sex marriage will lead to an increase of out-of-wedlock birth, but rather the campaign for it will.
— Well, yes, he's been arguing that for a while, as have I. The concept of marriage that must become true in order for gay marriage to come into being is what hurts marriage, before and after the fact.
Last Saturday, on the Beltway Boys, Mort Kondracke voiced a common point of advocates for same-sex marriage. In effect: "How can 2% of the population affect the institution of marriage?"
A more specific manifestation is the untempered incredulity with which proponents react to the notion that SSM could affect traditional marriage and indicators of its health, like cohabitation, out-of-wedlock births, and so on. Congressman Robert Scott (D-VA) gave a perfect example of both the specific boundaries that the question is deliberately made to fit and the foreordained reaction during hearings on same-sex marriage in the Judiciary Committee (at about 1:02:30 of the streaming video). He phrased his question in various ways, but he never moved far from the restricted matter of whether "a present traditional marriage will be harmed if gays get married." When panelists answered "yes," although attempting to answer the more relevant institutional question, he laughed.
What the laugh indicated, above all, is that these questions are meant to be purely rhetorical. In Congressman Scott's case, the question was designed to be so narrow as to exclude all but a handful of easily addressable answers. In the broader — more intellectually fair — versions, it is supposed (perhaps gambled) that no adequate response exists or can be made with sufficient clarity to persuade the public.
Stanley Kurtz's new essay in the Weekly Standard, "Going Dutch?", uses the Netherlands as a case study by which to show how, indeed, the concept of same-sex marriage weakens the institution and, in turn, changes the behavior of heterosexuals:
A careful look at the decade-long campaign for same-sex marriage in the Netherlands shows that one of its principal themes was the effort to dislodge the conviction that parenthood and marriage are intrinsically linked. Even as proponents of gay marriage argued vigorously--and ultimately successfully--that marriage should be just one of many relationship options, fewer Dutch parents were choosing marriage over cohabitation.
As I've said before, it wasn't the 2% (or whatever) of homosexuals alone who pushed their cause this far, and it won't be solely them who bring about the repercussions. The actual influences will vary from culture to culture, but what Northern Europe provides is an example of the sort of mechanism at work. It isn't a matter of a given homosexual couple's sparking reactions in specific heterosexual couples, but of the approach that equalizes the two at the social level.
Approach seems to be a key factor to the position that a person takes. Opponents of same-sex marriage begin with a principle — that hasty fundamental changes to the idea of marriage will harm the institution — and look for evidence. Because their focus is elsewhere, proponents of SSM essentially respond to this point in reverse: insisting that the statement of principle can only follow from the evidence. In something as complex and amorphous as society, such a demand ensures that we are always searching backwards for what went wrong. A man doesn't step from the courthouse after final divorce proceedings and remark, "Huh, I guess this divorce indicates that I didn't value my marriage."
The more intellectually driven (and willing to discuss) among those who argue for SSM, such as Gabriel Rosenberg, will respond to Kurtz that homosexuals are parents. Without treading too deeply into the dispute about what is meant by "parenthood," one can observe that here, too, the direction of movement between principle and evidence is reversed; some homosexuals are parents, so they should be included in marriage.
But homosexual parenthood is incidental. Most of them are not parents, and only a debatable number have that desire. That they have children does not follow from their relationships. Fertile straights, in contrast, are parents in principle, and marriage aligns this biological reality with culture. Sterile straights who adopt become parents on a case-by-case basis and are, in a neutral sense, aberrations. Homosexual couples are sterile by default. Society can form policy that accepts a certain amount of irregularity. It cannot form policy in the hopes that a principle will adhere where it does not inhere.
The conflict of approach is part of a broader cultural difference and underlies a range of topics. (Evolution comes to mind.) Generally, when evidence begins to appear for the traditional principle, progressives' emphasis switches. They become much more obvious in the degree to which they were acting from belief all along, themselves. They make reference to the complexity of the issue and the probable existence of other factors; they declare that opponents can't prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. But that's only because the progressives will refuse to see it proven.
If we wish to discern, in advance, what proof is likely to emerge and what principle is likely to be formed, we do well to look for evidence in the way in which same-sex marriage is being approached. As persuasive as Professor Rosenberg's argument might be under certain circumstances, the practical reality is that those circumstances are not our own. Few advocates for same-sex marriage emphasize the benefit to children; that subtopic is, rather, handled as a rebuttal when the other side brings it up.
Still further, I don't recall reading a single account of a homosexual lamenting the impossibility of marriage because it affected his or her children. Even when children are present, the argument focuses on the adults and their rights and benefits. In the visible promotion of the issue, children are presented primarily to inculcate an impression of normalcy.
In theory, yes, gay parents could be folded into the secular marriage-parenthood equation, but so could any number of family arrangements. The simple reality is that this isn't the attempt being made. Evidence regarding the health of marriage is essentially irrelevant from the point of view of the push for gay marriage. Either its health is taken on faith or it is dismissed. This treatment is most obvious in the absence of hesitance in the name of principle — the urge to disregard Scandinavia rather than to wait for longer-term trends to emerge more clearly.
The divorced man leaving the courthouse makes his observation too late. If he and his spouse had been more deliberate in asking themselves and each other whether they valued their marriage back when the answer would have been "yes," the option of divorce wouldn't have formed as possibility.
Do we value marriage?
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Crazy Child" by me.
"Crazy Child" Justin Katz, Pop/Rock
Stream (HiFi) 
Download
Lane Core has been running a feature called "Blogworthies" every Saturday, including links to and excerpts from pieces that he believes worth reading, but that he either lacks time or additional comment to make posts on their own. The feature is always worth checking out, but this past Saturday's includes some particularly interesting posts.
Most folks will recall that Scheherazade was the tale-telling heroine of the story that framed The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. To recap, Shahryar, a fictional king, marries a new wife each night, only to execute each the following morning. Eventually, Scheherazade, the daughter of the king's vizier, marries the king and keeps herself alive by telling a story per night, each halting at a cliff-hanger to be resolved the following evening.
Well, I confess that I chuckled to discover that (a previous version of) the AP report about the video of that Iraqi wedding that the United States allegedly bombed was written by one Scheherezade Faramarzi. With the Abu Ghraib story running out of steam, the wedding has emerged as the media's next means of darkening the public's impression of our military and the next tale to spin in its attempt to keep opinions about the Iraq war low enough to harm the President in November.
Writes the latter-day Scheherezade:
A videotape obtained by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say U.S. planes later attacked, killing up to 45 people. On Monday, the U.S. military showed photographs to support its own case that the target was a safehouse for foreign fighters.The U.S. military says its investigation of the attack, which took place early Wednesday about five miles from the Syrian border, will try to reconcile the two different sets of images.
A certain Providence Journal blogger clearly has a firm opinion about which side to believe. ("It was possible for the military to deny this was a wedding until several hours of video shot by the hired wedding photographer... showed up.") For my part, I'm not so sure — and not just because my bias is to believe in our men and women in uniform.
This sort of production for the benefit of Western media wouldn't be without precedent in that region. (Remember the faked Palestinian funeral?) "Survivors" led the AP reporters to the site, and the reporters were able to identify "survivors" on the videotape of the wedding that supposedly preceded the bombing. Among the rubble, they found a piece of possible U.S. ordinance, which would be very easy to come by in Iraq, at this time. And a water tanker truck is visible in both the destruction video and the wedding video.
The more substantial, although not conclusive, evidence would be a match between the wedding band keyboard player and a corpse appearing in yet another video. But frankly, with respect for the dead and apologies if I'm wrong, I don't think it's the same guy (look at the noses).
I am, however, on the edge of my seat in anticipation of tomorrow night's tale.
Maureen Mullarkey's latest Notes & Commentary essay is "Two Artists Who Walked Away," reviewing Lee Bontecou at Knoedler & Company and Sarah G. Austin at Kimberly Venardos. (For additional samples, click the exhibition names.)
Marc Comtois quotes from a review of a book about American secularism:
For the past few years a friend of mine in the Midwest has been engaged in a war of words in the columns of a local newspaper. Every so often someone writes a letter to the editor claiming that the United States is a Christian nation and that, as the formula goes, "freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion." In response, my friend writes a letter pointing out that the Founding Fathers tended to be deists, not Christians. They saw God as, essentially, a watchmaker. He created the universe, wound it up and then stood back to let it run. If Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Paine had a religion, it was a faith in reason, not in the Bible.
Marc (an historian himself) agrees, for the most part, but insists:
...the true intent of the 'separation of church and state' was to permit citizens to practice their religion freely without fear of governmental prosecution. Implicit in this is the right to not practice any form of religion. The effort to divorce ourselves from the importance of religion to our national heritage may indeed point to the secularization of our society. . . Our Founding Fathers, whether they be Deists, Congregationalists or Catholics, would have never imagined that the clause 'separation of church and state' would have been perverted in such a way. Not in their wildest dreams.
To some extent, I think the sides in this dispute are talking to each other from separate boxes. I think I've done more reading and thinking than writing on this (see the end of this piece for some of the writing), but it has seemed to me that secularists cut out the half of the American deists' beliefs that is more directly relevant to our society today. Whatever their beliefs about God's involvement in this world, they largely seemed to believe in judgment and in soul, from whence derived morality and the presumption of an ethical foundation on which to place freedom.
In a sense, God was not just a watch maker, but also a gatekeeper. What modern secularists have done is to add to the idea that God doesn't meddle in our affairs the completely distinct and insidious notion that He doesn't care what we do.
A while back Rev. Donald Sensing took a look at the history of United Nations peacekeeping and nation building. He makes a point in an update to that post that I think is generally correct:
What those calling for the UN to take over the whole operation do not seem to grasp is that the UN does not share their agenda. By and large (but not completely) the American pro-UN advocates really have no vision for Iraq much different than that explained by the Bush administration. They just don't want Bush to be the one who brings it about.But they need to understand that the UN plan for Iraq is pretty much restoration of the status quo ante bellum, without Saddam or his terror regime, but also without the true freedom the Iraqi peoples deserve so richly. What the UN apparatus certainly does not want is an Iraq whose people are both economically and politically free.
Wesley Smith's piece, "The Wrong Tree," makes so important an argument that I've refused to let it fall off my To Blog list since May 13:
Fortunately, embryonic stem cells are not the only potential source for regenerative medical treatments. There are also adult stem cells, umbilical-cord-blood stem cells, and other cellular-based treatments that do not use embryos at all. Here we see a completely different picture emerging. Under-reported by the ESCR-besotted mainstream media, many of the diseases that embryonic cells are supposed to treat may be ameliorated with adult-stem-cell and related therapies far more quickly. ...The thrust of the research now seems indisputable: While certainly not yet a sure thing, and noting that much work remains to be done in animal and controlled human studies, barring unforeseen problems adult-stem-cell and related therapies may be potent sources of new and efficacious medical treatments in the years to come. Just as significantly, these therapies are likely to be available far sooner than embryonic-stem-cell treatments, since adult and related therapies do not appear to cause tumors, would not be rejected, and do not have to be maintained indefinitely in vitro, because they would come from patients' own bodies.
It's certainly possible that I've missed some of the coverage, but it seems as if there's a peculiar devotion to the more morally objectionable form of stem-cell research. If that impression is correct, it could be that this debate brings with it all the baggage of the Culture War. Or perhaps there's an element of insistence among a certain crowd that they can't be told what they are allowed to do. Or perhaps there's something more sinister at play.
Don Feder understands that the inevitability of same-sex marriage is proportionate to liberals' power to force it:
That's ancient history. Today, liberalism is characterized by a sneering disdain for vox populi. The slogan of 21st century liberalism is: Shut up and do what you're told.Nothing better illustrates liberalism's betrayal of democratic principles than its embrace of judicially mandated gay marriage.
Under an edict from its high court, Massachusetts began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples this week. It was but the latest example of judge-ocracy supplanting democracy, and the most recent instance of liberal autocrats forcing their values on a cringing public.
Boot is not alone in declaring that the courts are "only slightly ahead of the societal consensus." Frankly, whether or not one believes that SSM is inevitable in the long term, the extent of Boot's claim strikes me as absurd, and only plausible if one is fully immersed in the mainstream media's total whitewashing of related issues.
I've been meaning to mention Jeremiah Lewis's journal-type entry about a visit to New York City, in particular, his description of Times Square:
Times Square was simply overwhelming--New Years on TV just doesn't cut the live experience. Imagine a river gushing through the streets, like what is depicted in The Day After Tomorrow. This is Times Square, only the river is made up of moving organic bodies--human beings, each one earnestly resting his or her eyes on the feet and back in front of them, each slightly overwhelmed in their own way.A person is never content in Times Square. The endorphic rush of images and sound is comparable to, say, being caught in the maelstrom of a well-orchestrated asteroid bombardment. It simply demands attention. But where's the payoff? Maybe it's just in getting out without having succumbed to abject worship of the gigantic video billboards. Honestly, I felt that was my great triumph in leaving Times Square behind and heading to the polar opposite of Central Park.
Perhaps it's because living just outside of New York made it "the city" rather than "The City," or because I was introduced to it so young, or because of the pre-Giuliani era in which that was, but it never held the magic that is evident when others write of visiting. People, a lot of them; buildings, big ones; filth and the smell. New York was always just a place, but bigger.
Marching blocks upon blocks to drop in on people to whom to hand demo tapes (that they, in turn, would drop in the garbage), I passed decked-out ladies who were just women in fancy clothes. The rough young New Yawkahs were just kids with screwed up ideas about what it meant to be young.
As the biggest thing within ten miles from home, New York was a night out. Sometimes the home of girlfriends, whose mothers shook with anger when they discovered that their daughters had gone all the way to New Jersey. For them, that was like another country. For us, being in New York was like being lost in the wrong neighborhood, not because of something unique about the city, but because people are animals, and the city had a lot of them.
Perhaps it's strange, then, that Times Square turns out to be the critical point in the universe toward the end of A Whispering Through the Branches:
With this resolution, Nathaniel plunged through the bodies that flooded the sidewalk around him and marched across the street, unthreatened by the racing traffic that seemed, miraculously, to sway its own course for his sake. In the space of a breath, and not a bit disheveled, Nathaniel hopped onto the concrete island in the midst of the pandemonium. Even the light around him seemed to have changed, even the smells. This was not the same world that had watched the sun disappear to the West. This world had hope. Nathaniel looked up triumphantly.
It isn't surprising that I would use the city as a literary device. We always used the city, we kids from the suburbs. It made us tough when we met people from far away. It put us in a different world from home. It gave us a place to go for the forbidden — alcohol (most often). All of which made it ours, in its way for us. Our experience was always drawing from it, never giving to it. In a different way than for those who only visit as well as those who never leave, it was ours.
But it wasn't ours, obviously, and deep down in that arrogant, fearful disdain was the admission that New York, just another place, defined us. Made us its. That City that others strain to describe — that must be "imagined" as grand metaphors? You don't know it like I know it, and I hardly know it at all.
Supporters of same-sex marriage have been making a big deal out of defeatist columns by Max Boot and Cal Thomas. Although the opposition's ploy gives a vague sense of spuriousness, the columns are, for different reasons, worth addressing.
In Boot's case "defeatist" may not be an accurate term, inasmuch as I don't know what his position has heretofore been. At the very least, it seems reasonable to suggest that he hasn't done quite as much reading from the side that he might or might not consider to be his own on this issue. In this, he can be forgiven, considering that pieces laying out the arguments are rare in the mainstream media, and that those arguments are almost nonexistent in ostensibly objective coverage of the debate. Still, it's disconcerting to find Boot essentially paraphrasing the points from the other side.
Opponents of same-sex marriages may have most of the public on their side for now, but they've already all but lost this battle.How do I know? Simply by looking at the arguments being advanced by both sides. Advocates of same-sex marriage speak in the powerful language of civil rights and liken their cause to that of African Americans fighting anti-miscegenation laws in years past. And what do opponents say in response? Once upon a time, the case would have been open and shut: Sodomy is a sin, period. Many people may still believe that, but that's no longer a tenable argument in our secularized politics.
The truth of the matter is that I've heard almost no opponents offer that as a response. In fact, probably a majority, including myself, have professed opposition to sodomy laws. Boot is correct, however, that many of us have made the marriage argument from tradition. His answer to it, though, with all due respect, is of the sort that I fielded in high school classroom debates:
They argue, first, that we shouldn't tamper with thousands of years of tradition that holds that marriage is between a man and a woman. But 141 years ago we tampered with an equally old tradition: slavery.
One struggles to articulate the difference between the primitive labor practice of slavery and the family structure of marriage to a conservative for whom it isn't obvious. Traditional marriage? Well, hey, we don't scourge thieves in the public square anymore! It seems the victory that Boot presumes to concede is much broader than simply of same-sex marriage; radical feminists surely feel vindicated in their equation of marriage to slavery.
Therein emerges the strange echo that underlies Boot's next point:
Their second argument is the slippery slope — first gay marriage gets legalized, then polygamy, pederasty, incest and who knows what. But this kind of reductio ad absurdum can be applied to just about anything. If liquor is legal for adults, why not for children? Society always draws the line somewhere.
And yet, embedded in his declaration, a few paragraphs before, that the opponents of SSM have "already all but lost this battle" is this very same unstoppable movement, whether he wants to see it as slipping down a slope or being pushed by an avalanche. "Contraception and abortion — once taboo topics — have been enshrined into law... On TV, characters used to say 'gee whiz' and sleep in twin beds; now they curse as if they had Tourette's syndrome and flash skin as if they were Gypsy Rose Lee":
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws last year. The Episcopal Church has appointed an openly gay bishop. Many newspapers carry the equivalent of wedding announcements for gays. Same-sex kisses, once shockingly daring, are now almost as common on TV as commercials for Levitra or Prozac. Given this seismic cultural shift, anyone who makes avowedly moral arguments against homosexuality now gets treated the same way homosexuals were treated only a few years ago — as a sex-mad pervert.
Note whom Boot cites for evidence: the Supreme Court. The Episcopal Church. Newspapers. Hollywood. The elite. To Boot, there is apparently no Culture War, in the sense that sides actually disagree in fundamental ways. Liberal elites push the boundaries and call it progress; the rest of us follow. It's the classic liberal view of conservatism — a temporary reluctance. The reaction to Janet Jackson's boob doesn't, apparently, exist in this world. The success of The Passion of the Christ is a matter of cinematic taste. Such events are little but the last spasms of recalcitrance, sparked when our betters turned up the controls just a little too much in our transformation:
Republicans would be wise not to expend too much political capital pushing for a gay marriage amendment to the Constitution. They will only make themselves look "intolerant" to soccer moms whose views on this subject, as on so many others, will soon be as liberal as elite opinion already is.
And despite all that has preceded this point, Boot writes — with the confidence of the opinion-page researcher — that "it's hard to imagine that legalizing gay marriage will make much difference in the lives of most people" and that homosexuality "always has been and always will be the preference of a tiny minority; most of us are biologically hard-wired for heterosexuality." Are those two statements what legitimates Andrew Sullivan's characterization of Boot as a "leading conservative"? That he declares our traditional lives inviolable and asserts that homosexuality remains unnatural for most?
I suppose there's consistency to be found; moral arguments don't apply to homosexuality, because homosexuality is simply a matter of biology. Building on that, what is unnatural for most can be natural for some, and it is immoral to restrain the natures of a minority merely because what they wish to do conflicts with the preferences of the majority. It's all written in our immutable beings — stenciled on our souls by God. That's the story, anyway. We'll have to wait and see whether "polygamy, pederasty, incest" can be in the natures of some, as well.
For now, same-sex marriage is a done deal, says Boot. "Since the ultimate concern of conservatives is to preserve the institution of marriage, they would probably be better off caving on gay marriage rather than acceding to the most popular alternative: civil union." Somehow, in a world in which it is in homosexuals' nature to marry, it is not in heterosexuals' to do the same. We must open the doors of marriage, because otherwise, heterosexuals will wade across the swamp to the less onerous citadel of civil unions.
Cal Thomas's conclusion is oddly consonant with Boot's:
"Pro family" groups have given it their best shot, but this debate is over. They would do better to spend their energy and resources building up their side of the cultural divide and demonstrating how their own precepts are supposed to work. Divorce remains a great threat to family stability, and there are far more heterosexuals divorcing and cohabiting than homosexuals wishing to "marry." If conservative religious people wish to exert maximum influence on culture, they will redirect their attention to repairing their own cracked foundation. An improved heterosexual family structure will do more for those families and the greater good than attempts to halt the inevitable. A topical solution does not cure a skin disease whose source is far deeper.
As the population within the marital walls increases, Thomas suggests, traditionalists' only chance of making a difference is to rush to mend the floor. What's stunning about Thomas's column is that he sees same-sex marriage as inevitable because it is a "cultural tsunami" that began with a "subterranean earthquake": "this 'wave' was preceded by a seismic shift in the moral tectonic plates." Yet, he advises as if marriage is the highest ground it will reach, before receding to sea level, the landscape irrevocably changed.
Although approached from positions of belief and rejection, respectively, Thomas and Boot's answer to the "slippery slope" is the same. Thomas has faith that traditionalists can build a platform, Boot that a line will just be drawn... "somewhere."
Yes, I agree that part of securing long-term victories is the ability to make advantages out of short-term defeats. Perhaps conservatives can capitalize on some thread in the same-sex marriage movement to swing public opinion toward stiffened divorce laws. We'll have to try, at least. But in their advice to redirect efforts, both Thomas and Boot imagine that we are stepping onto firmer ground — that the assault will not continue.
In all of the varying arguments, and arguments about the arguments, few have thought to point out an obvious factor: it wasn't the "tiny minority" of homosexuals alone who pushed their cause this far. Homosexuals do not control the Supreme Court, the media, Hollywood, or even the Episcopal Church. As far as I know, the politicians and town clerks who have sought to undermine their individual legal systems were not universally, or even primarily, gay. And yet, the "gay cause" has advanced.
Both of our defeatist conservatives refer to an inexorable "seismic shift," but my mind keeps coming back to Boot's example: "anyone who makes avowedly moral arguments against homosexuality now gets treated the same way homosexuals were treated only a few years ago — as a sex-mad pervert." Way back, before the rumbling earth rolled us down the slope, society used to lock up perverts and didn't think freedom of speech included theirs. What do we face further down?
I wonder what percentage of people in the United States and throughout the West aren't even aware that such a thing could even potentially be happening:
Over the last few months, the U.S. intelligence community has received new evidence a sizable amount of Iraqi WMD systems, components and platforms were transferred to Syria in the weeks leading up to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service. ...Through the use of satellites, electronic monitoring and human intelligence, the intelligence community has determined that much, if not all, of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons assets are being protected by Syria, with Iranian help, in the Bekaa Valley.
The Syrians received word from Saddam Hussein in late 2002 that the Iraqi WMD would be arriving and Syrian army engineering units began digging huge trenches in the Bekaa Valley.
Saddam paid more than $30 million in cash for Syria to build the pits, acquire the Iraqi WMD and conceal them.
At first, U.S. intelligence thought Iraqi WMD was stored in northern Syria. But in February 2003 a Syrian defector told U.S. intelligence the WMD was buried in or around three Syrian Air Force installations.
And I wonder what percentage, faced with irrefutable evidence, would simply declare it irrelevant.
Victor Davis Hanson thinks happenings have been odd lately:
What is going on? The months of April and May have been surreal — scandals at Abu Ghraib, decapitations and desecrations of those killed from Gaza to Iraq, and insurrections in Fallujah and Najaf. The shock of the unexpected has led to hysteria and cheap TV moralizing by critics of the war, fueled by election-year politics at home, apparent embarrassment for some erstwhile supporters of the intervention who are angry that democracy in Iraq has not appeared fully-formed out of the head of Zeus, and a certain amnesia about the recent dark history of the United Nations.
He also thinks some folks have lashed out in their confusion, saying some things that they oughtn't have:
So let us calm down and let events play out. If it were not an election year, Mr. Kennedy would dare not say such reprehensible things. In two or three months when there is a legitimate Iraqi government in power, Mr. Friedman may not wish to level such absurd charges. And when the truth comes out about the U.N.'s past role in Iraq, both Iraqis and Americans may not be so ready to entrust the new democracy's future to an agency that has not only done little to save Bosnians or Rwandans, but over the past decade may well have done much to harm Iraqis.
Mr. Hanson suggests that apologies are in order. Unfortunately, admission of transgression would, by the very nature of the affronts, make it clear that apologies simply aren't enough, and for that reason, even the minimum is unlikely.
The extreme bias of Linda Borg's Providence Journal coverage of the now-famous Lee and Judi McNeil-Beckwith, the first lesbian Rhode Islanders to make a show of marrying in Massachusetts, is hardly noteworthy. Of a little more interest — in an inside-baseball sort of way — is that Borg's is the first Projo article I've seen that admitted that Attorney General Patrick Lynch "parsed his words carefully" for his "opinion" on the legal question of such marriages' validity. In a mild way, I wonder whether somebody at the paper read my previous complaints about its handling of Lynch's statement.
However, busy and stressed out as I am, the following is what made this latest bit of marketing-as-news worthy of a few moments for a post:
After waiting nearly a decade, the couple wanted one final blessing before they took the plunge. They wanted to make sure their marriage would be valid when they returned to Providence. And so Lee called Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch Tuesday and asked for his advice."He congratulated us, wished us well and said his hope is that we receive all of the benefits" of marriage, Judi said.
That makes Lynch's parsing seem somewhat less of a political balance and more of an activistic strategy. It's one thing to decline responsibility for a decision in such a way that others manipulate the statement to place responsibility where it does not belong. It's another thing to intend for that to happen.
This is a little old, but I wanted to note that Ramesh Ponnuru has, as promised, addressed the Virginia civil unions law:
A while ago, I said I would look into a bill underlying a dispute between Jonah and Andrew Sullivan. The latter said that Virginia had passed a law that made it impossible for gay couples to make certain contractual arrangements. He said that conservatives should denounce the bill, especially since many conservatives had suggested the use of contracts as a substitute for the practical benefits of same-sex marriage. ...The narrower reading seems to me much more plausible. The theory behind this reading is that confronted with the words "the privileges or obligations of marriage," a court or executive agent should look to the other laws of Virginia to figure out what those privileges or obligations are--and not try to derive some other meaning for them from another source. For the purpose of state law, the privileges and obligations of marriage are whatever state law says they are. The purpose of the law is to prevent any other state's decision about these matters from overriding those of Virginia.
Of course, Ramesh could have saved himself some time by simply linking to me. Hey, that's what we bloggers are here for.
Tom Coyne's piece about the Rhode Island welfare state, which I noted a couple of weeks ago, has drawn an op-ed response from Nancy Gewirtz and Linda Katz (no relation), of the Poverty Institute at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work. Because I share Coyne's assumptions, I thought it worth seeing whether the objections were valid, and what I found was evidence of how difficult it is to dig through the "rhetoric" and "facts" to figure out the truth.
Most glaringly, Gewitz and Katz only address some of the issues that Coyne raises, swinging into gear here:
Rhetoric: We have an expensive welfare system, which attracts more poor people than do other states' systems.Facts: In 2003 the percentage of the Family Independence Program (FIP) caseload that moved to Rhode Island from another state was the lowest it had been in nine years (5.3 percent of the caseload). Families also leave FIP at a much higher rate than the rate at which they come to Rhode Island: In 2003, 1,130 cases closed because of "out migration," while 747 opened from another state.
The FIP is Rhode Island's version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which each state administers according to its own policies. It is not the entirety of what might be considered to be Rhode Island's "welfare system."
In Rhode Island, FIP participants can collect cash handouts for five years. (Some states only allow two.) I can't find data on migration of poor people from state to state, so I can't comment on those numbers. And I'll assume that the TANF program is not such that families can just move to new states and restart the clock as their benefits run out. However, I will note that it is conceivable that some of the "out migration" (whatever that means), during the year that the U.S. economy began to turn around, is attributable to folks who went elsewhere to work, either when the free money was about to run out or earlier, but transferred their TANF info just in case.
Mr. Coyne's reliance on the National Association of State Budget Officers' (NASBO) report, which ranks Rhode Island third in total cash payments, is problematic. In this category, the report erroneously includes Rhode Island's expenditures for child care and Food Stamps -- costs not included for other states. Thus, Rhode Island's ranking is artificially high. The 2003 Rhode Island Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Act/FIP expenditure cited in the NASBO report is only 1.4 percent of total expenditures: lower than those in Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, and tied for 10th in America.
From what I gather from the NASBO report (PDF), the attempt being made is to compare the widely varying programs of the fifty states. Clearly, "erroneous" is opinion; it appears that some costs aren't included for other states because those other states don't offer comparable services. Rhode Island, for example, adds money to the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Now, one could say that this extra money isn't included for other states, or one could say that other states' expense for extra money is $0.
If I'm reading it right, according to the NASBO, 19 states give "cash" payments solely within the TANF program. Of those states, only seven pay more through this program than does Rhode Island (which spends more elsewhere), thus moving Rhode Island from third to tenth. Remembering that there are fifty states, that seems a whole lot of waxing to create a moderate shine.
So, first Gewitz and Katz cut out all assistance not included in the FIP. Now, they've whittled away assistance not specifically associated with the TANF. Next, they draw attention away from categories of recipients in order to proclaim the following:
Rhetoric: Rhode Island has the most generous welfare benefits in the nation.Facts: One could hardly call the FIP cash payment generous: A mother and two children receive $554 a month -- a benefit level that has not been raised in 15 years, reducing purchasing power by 40 percent. This family would receive more in four other New England states: $609 in Vermont, $618 in Massachusetts, $625 in New Hampshire, and $636 in Connecticut.
The folks not included in this analysis are those who have some form of other income. To understand why this matters, consider what looks to be
