Fanatics' Fingers

Two bits of information that came to my ears as I continued attempting to prepare for my seventh grade Catholic school class's first day, next week, struck me as symbolic. Hopefully they aren't yet representative.

My awareness of the first tidbit is light on details. Apparently, anybody who volunteers to serve as a Eucharistic minister must undergo a Criminal Offense Record Investigation (CORI), which is a state-run background check for people — ostensibly — who deal with children. For those who don't know, a Eucharistic minister is a layperson who stands at the front of the church (or an aisle therein or elsewhere) and hands out the Eucharist to parishioners. That's it.

Now, I don't know whether this is a state policy or a diocesan policy, and I'm not saying that sexual predators ought to be able to take any post they desire in a church. However, unless this is a case of the Church's setting its own policies well beyond the law's requirements, the state is clearly overstepping its boundaries into religious affairs.* Furthermore, I'm not implying a secular conspiracy, but CORI forms have a blank space in which to write the position sought, and we ought all to become a little bit uncomfortable when the government begins compiling data on everybody who serves in such purely religious capacities.

The second tidbit is more concrete and, in my view, objectionable. The school's new principal has been going through the building in a thorough sweep of reorganization and redecoration, so when I noticed the absence of a picture, of Jesus looking over a valley, that often attracted my attention when I taught in the computer room, I asked the new computer teacher where it had gone. Apparently, it wasn't the impulse of fresh surroundings that had pulled the picture down, but rather a Title 1 grant.

Contrary to many of the stereotypes of Catholic schools, our student body includes children from such families as federal funds are meant to assist — completely in the spirit of the stated purpose of Title 1:

The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.

Is it definitional to "fairness" that a room be free of religious imagery? That would seem manifestly unfair to students from communities that consider religion intrinsic to proper education. If the purpose of a grant is to provide, for example, adequate computers for use by students who otherwise would have to make do with the 1995 donations of working-class parishioners, how is it otherwise than discriminatory to expand on that purpose to ensure that the walls pay homage to anybody except explicitly religious figures? (Incidentally, don't even atheists concede that Jesus was probably an historical figure?)

Certainly, the public has a right to direct its shared funds to shared goals and interests. But it is a perversion when those interests are conceived to reach beyond a tangible, shared objective in order to enforce the worldview of a particular segment of society — dictating by stealth that a central aspect of a community's life is cannot underlie their children's education. Ink would fly among all three branches of our government were any one governing body to offer grants with the provision that no figures representative of racial, gender, or ethnic identity contributed to the educational setting. How turned around we must be for religion — among the primary and most explicit areas in which our government is required to take no coercive interest — to be the one aspect of life that provokes government leverage for extraction.

* In an idealized, abstract world, I'd give states more leeway in deciding their own boundaries between Church and State, but it is simply unacceptable for infringement of the latter on the former to be the only allowable prerogative.

Tuesday...

I will post entries this afternoon. Promise.

And Back to Blogging

Apparently, I accepted my new job about twenty-four hours too soon, because I wound up having to go to a professional development assembly this morning. The first speaker was a Jewish child psychologist who told a story about his childhood in Israel and the Yom Kippur (in 1973, I think) when members of the military were being pulled out of synagogue to go fight for the nation's survival. Although it involves an intriguing overlap of stereotypes, I couldn't even begin to guess the unstated reactions of the New England Catholic school teachers in attendance (besides, "Boy, it's hot in here!").

I then spent a few hours thanking God that the teacher for whom I'm filling in is so organized. Pretty much all I have to do planning-wise is to match her schedule notes with various books, worksheets, and so on. (And read the materials and, oh yeah, teach the children.)

Once the "school day" ended, I still had a full day's worth of editing to do. That's going to be my schedule for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for most of the school year, with writing (including blogging) slipped in where possible.

Back to Life

Except among those who are wealthy enough to make of life a whim, pianos are a sign of stability and long intentions. Young singles or young couples who are likely to move every year or so as circumstances require are well advised to avoid having to lug the things around — searching for specially licensed movers and such. Among older families, whom time has worn, the piano sits in a corner of the living room, furniture rather than an instrument, and often the scratches of children long grown and disrepair begin to show.

Well, after a decade of separation, my piano has found its way into my home again. Considering the likelihood that, having purchased our house, we'll stay here a while, my parents thought it worth the expense to forward. Three movers hauled it in, strained exertion after a five-hour drive, and now the gap in the living room has been filled. There's something about a home — or any building — without a piano. Maybe it's a lack of ballast.

Our two-and-a-half year old has already begun the habit of practicing (I suppose it could be called) for about a half-hour each day, although she gathers the minutes from between play and meals and television shows. Her rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" isn't quite harmonious, but in her case, it's the voice that endears. For melody, I taught her how to hit one note at a time; she doesn't seem concerned about which one or what order. But music has entered her life as a thing of stability, of a long view, even if only in the background.

Also this weekend, I took a last-minute opening at the school attached to my church, holding the seat of the seventh grade teacher. Young as she is, she'll be spending the better part of the next year battling illness. Keeping that as a reminder will surely aide in perseverance while battling any children's reluctance to learn. Hopefully, I won't find my prayers for her recovery tainted by self-interest, as facilitating escape.

Nonetheless, even with circumstances' dark tint, it's a hopeful thought that, for the first time, I'll be able to support my family. Call it sexist, if you must, but there's something about a man who can't do so (or couldn't, if required) that isn't unlike a house without a piano. Many fine and admirable homes lack pianos. But I'm glad that mine is no longer one.

Weren't There Two Towers?

Honestly, I might have missed it, but I don't recall seeing a similar introduction for a piece about the Democrats' convention as to Scott MacKay's piece about the Republican one:

Forrester Adams went to Ground Zero yesterday afternoon for the first time. He left shaken, as does almost everyone who views the ghastly concrete scar in lower Manhattan and remembers the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

"At first I felt quiet and somber and all," said Adams, of Columbia, S.C., as he thought about the horrors that claimed the lives of 3,000 [people] when hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center towers. "Then I really started feeling ticked off, defiant.

"I hope they build it back bigger than it was before," said Adams. "I feel we need to make a statement. I think that is so important, to show that these people can't break our spirit."

Adams is voting for President Bush.

Minutes later, Susan Brennan of Stony Brook, N.Y., on nearby Long Island, walked away from Ground Zero. She saw the same barren construction site, the same cross of rusted steel girders, experienced the same eerie silence in the middle of one of the world's noiseiest cities. She remembered the televised images of the twin towers engulfed in smoke and flame.

Brennan is voting for John Kerry.

"I feel much less safe now than after 9/11 ," said Brennan, adding she had purposely stayed away from the scene until yesterday. "We are just creating more terrorists every day with this war in Iraq. Bush is a madman . . . he is just so belligerent."

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, the long shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks hangs over the confab and the 2004 presidential election. As go the people walking away from the site in yesterday's scorching New York heat, so goes the nation's voters.

One would think that long shadow would reach the liberal, indecisive, and relatively dovish John Kerry, as well.

The Mad Villain Rips Off His Mask

It's starting to seem as if having gone so far out on a credibility limb in support of John Kerry has given news folks a taste of honesty, and they like it. I mean, this post from Ramesh Ponnuru is simply jaw-dropping:

Doug Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, sent out a press release on the latest partial-birth ruling. Here's an email he got in response from Todd Eastham, the North American news editor for Reuters: "What's your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?"

Yes, yes, it's Reuters, and we all know what that means, but Mr. Eastham has just rendered nearly worthless any reportage that his company might offer on matters pertaining to abortion. And I'm surely not alone in believing that all he has done is to express what many of his peers wish professional ethics permitted them to say.

Personally, I'm thrilled to have the obvious laid out so candidly, and it's fascinating to watch. Still, waiting for the public to catch on can be frustrating; meanwhile, the scornfully presented misinformation continues.

ADDENDUM:
As Hugh Hewitt puts it, with reference to a separate incident:

But poor, embarrassed Jim Boyd has performed a service, even in his humiliation. His exposure as a blustery, bullying and ultimately bittter hack is another warning sign in a month of such warnings to old media. The rules have changed. The monopoly is broken. You can't ignore the truth or the people who publicize it, and if you slander them, they have the tools of both rebuttal and exposure. As I wrote last week, it takes a considerable amount more talent, learning and drive to succeed at the highest level of the law than it does to be a time-serving fast food outlet for cliches of the left at a largely ignored editorial page of a second tier paper. Boyd mixed it up with the wrong guys, and even if his friends won't tell him the truth, he must already know that his paper saw what he did and gave the Powerline men another column as a result.

BY THE WAY:
I've learned not to expect major blogosphere coverage of news mistakes and/or bias related to matters of abortion. One might call it a bias about bias.

The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week

The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "Spitting Distance," by Janette van de Geest Van Gruisen.

A Horrific Catalyst for Change

Whatever their immediate reaction might be, abortion activists ought to have, at the very least, extremely mixed feelings about federal judge Richard Casey's striking down of the partial-birth abortion ban:

Before anyone gets ready to picket Judge Casey's chambers, take a deep breath. Judge Casey is an honorable and humble man who understands his place in the legal cosmos. "While Congress and lower courts may disagree with the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions," he concludes, "that does not free them from their constitutional duty to obey the Supreme Court's rulings." In other words, chalk another one up to the Supreme Court. Whether he ultimately read their decisions properly or not, Judge Casey was not going to stretch their law to fit his personal convictions.

So Casey's ruling — that a morally abhorrent and gruesome method of abortion is protected by the constitution, our country's most sacred legal document — demonstrates how much ground has been lost since the Supreme Court first engrafted a right to abortion into the constitution in Roe v. Wade. And with as many as three or four current justices possibly retiring in the next presidential term, it shows how much longer the slide can be with the wrong decision in November.

As Shannen Coffin suggests, a deep breath is in order, but one during which to form a more accurate assessment of the situation and redirect the rage. Even Coffin's description of Casey's description of the procedure makes for nauseating reading, and abortion activists are tying all abortion to it, both legally and, with the emotional weapon that they're handing the other side, strategically.

Perhaps one could go further and suggest that they're exposing to attack their entire approach to construing the Constitution. "We can't even ban this?" the question will become. "Then something is wrong either with the Constitution or with the method by which it is interpreted." Oh yes, this is going back to the Supreme Court, either now or in the near future, and that gang will have either to tiptoe through a minefield of its own making in order to contradict Judge Casey's understanding of what precedent requires, or it will have to begin dismantling the precedent.

ADDENDUM:
Just an extra note, here, to shake my head and gag at the idea that some people defend this procedure. How monstrous do you have to be? (And, yes, that extends to other procedures.)

Define Fault and Abuse...

An exchange in the comments to this post brought to mind a disconnect between theoretical discussion and real experience. The following dialogue is culled from several comments:

Who's Polarizing Whom?

While waiting my turn for a haircut, about an hour ago, I perused a Time magazine (opportunity for waiting-room chuckles). One of the articles was a typical equivalence piece: Michael Moore on this side, Rush Limbaugh on that side, we're a polarized nation.

Well, the very first item from Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus today hits a related note, and I was so stunned by it — stunned, incredulous, amazed, but subtracting a degree or two of surprise from those words' meanings — that I had to stop reading the column and react:

The New York Choral Society was scheduled to sing at the Republican convention. They were to sing patriotic songs — "From the Halls of Montezuma," "Anchors Aweigh" — in honor of America's armed forces. Nothing too partisan. Nothing partisan at all.

But the Society has backed out, because — well, its members are left-wing, and they can't stomach the idea of appearing at a Republican convention.

Do Republicans and (more specifically) conservatives have to begin fielding their own regional choirs? (Perhaps a religiously affiliated group would have been smarter from the outset.) Our nation is polarized, indeed, but perhaps conservatives wouldn't be excessively partisan to suggest that one side deserves a little bit more of the blame than the other.

The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week

The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "from Ambushed," by Anne DuBose Joslin.

Tolerance in, Tolerance out

Although it's a broad veer from the specifics about which I was writing, and although the person to whom I was responding (Jeremiah Lewis) is by no means a secularist, Ben Bateman's comment to my first post about the Roman Catholic requirement of wheat in the Eucharist raises an interesting area of thought:

You've got a good point on the secularists' urge to redefine and reduce everyone else's traditions: Communion bread can be anything that looks vaguely bread-like. Marriage can be any coupling of two human beings. We can recognize no distinction between adoptive parents and biological parents. Procreation means maximum numbers of babies. Homosexuality must not only be tolerated, but normalized.

Wasn't there a story a few months back where either California or the feds were trying to punish Catholic churches or hospitals for refusing to provide employee benefits that include birth control? And wasn't there a story about the State of New York trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions?

There's a common thread here, but I can't quite articulate it properly.

Given the totality of Ben's previous comments, here and elsewhere, I'm somewhat suspicious that he's being facetious in professing an inability to articulate a common thread. In essence, it's that secularism has become a form of religious fundamentalism itself, and in its "neutral" disguise, it is crowding out all theologies that disagree. Others can nominally believe in that God thing... as long as they don't insist on behaving as if He really exists, particularly as long as they don't insist on founding public behavior on that belief.

The particular threat of creeping tolerance lies in the power of what can be seen — without denying their goodness when rightly applied — as the three fronts of a perfect storm:

1. Political: the ideal of individual rights and freedom.
2. Moral: the ideal of respecting others' differing moral conclusions, treating them as brethren, and evangelizing through compassion and understanding.
3. Visceral: the core of the secular faith, which although intellectually developing out of the other two has come into its own enough to abuse its forerunners. In intellectual terms, it permits one to believe that we can intuit all truths, or that truth is whatever we intuit it to be. In emotional terms, it gives license to believe that what feels good — in whatever way it feels good — is right.

As these three fronts have coalesced in modern times, the thinking goes something like this: a person wants to do something and convinces himself that there is no reason that he oughtn't. According to individual freedom, he has a right not to be forcibly restricted by law from doing it, and according to the code of "tolerance," others must respect his decision and not use any social, economic, or even personal means to force him to reconsider, even to the point of disallowing expression of disapproval.

Complexity enters the picture when one realizes that everything involves tradeoffs; one person's individual freedom inherently restricts other people's individual freedoms. Often others' freedoms are expressed as group rights — as in holding that the individual has a right to live in a group or society that adheres to certain principles. As Ben has suggested before (if I may paraphrase a comment that I'm too tired to seek, just now), group rights find their most fundamental form in the central principles to which we must adhere on a national level, involving the validity of our system of government (founding documents included) and some basic agreement about the structures of reasoned debate.

What has happened is that sensibility and emotion (visceral) are twisting and redefining tolerance and good will (moral) in such a way as to demand that the law guard against etiquette's being breeched (political). People who don't feel that others are sufficiently following the moral dogma of respect for differences — which really codes an ideological sameness behind superficial distinctions — are trampling on freedom in order to force compliance. To be fair (and charitable), most of them probably don't realize that they are doing so; they think they're just expanding the universe of niceness, and if we all just respect other people's space (in each other's own reality), then we can all live together and do everything we each want to do... if only those intolerant people will relent on the things that they want to do, which are very mysterious (superstitious, even) and not very gratifying.

Striving to step outside of the inescapable assumptions on which our worldviews are founded, and simplifying the sides into competing claims of rights, what is happening is that the breadth of activities that must be tolerated as individual freedoms for one side keeps expanding, while for the other side, it keeps shrinking. For example, we all should agree that homosexuals have a right not to be persecuted. Recently — and I agree with the result, if not the mechanism — they cemented their right to do what they wish, sexually, in the privacy of their own homes.

Now, however, the definitive expression of homosexuality itself is being broadened to require tolerance for same-sex marriage, to the extent that the public sphere not be permitted to make any distinction between such relationships and opposite-sex relationships. Denial of this tolerance — refusal to redefine the institution of marriage, for example — is pushed under the growing umbrella of "persecution," where it joins, in the partisan's mind, the continued resistance to the inclusion of sexual orientation within hate-crime laws (hate speech in some contexts).

Switch directions. Of course Christians don't have a right to force others, by law, to adhere to their particular religious practices or to persecute them for not doing so. But now they're coming under attack for allowing their religious beliefs to inform the way in which they wield whatever force they carry as members of society — whether in determining who they'll hire or what benefits they'll offer, deciding what projects they'll take on or what services they'll offer (as in hospitals), or judging the application of law to moral issues such as abortion.

As Ben alludes, the California Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic Charities isn't sufficiently religious to qualify for exemption from a state requirement that employers offer contraception if they offer prescription coverage; the Salvation Army of New York faces the loss of millions of dollars in city contracts unless it offers domestic partner benefits; similar stories increasingly pepper the modern landscape. Essentially, the definitive expression of Christianity itself is being constrained from including the right to act publicly according to one's conscience.

The range of life in which a religious person is allowed to act as if what he believes is actually correct is being constantly cut back. So, as the respect due to homosexuals moves from tolerance for their desire, to tolerance for their acts, to public recognition and approval of their relationships, the respect due to Christians is slipping back from tolerance for the public acts informed by their religion, to tolerance for their private-sphere decisions based on religious belief, to tolerance for their profession of belief. You can believe that God frowns on homosexuality, but you aren't allowed to conduct yourself as if that's actually true.

So, in that sense, Ben's expansion on my complaint about some people's treatment of the wheaten bread controversy is entirely appropriate. (It would be unfair to include Jeremiah in what follows, I think.) Catholics are free to believe that Christ is literally present in the Eucharist; they are free to believe that the Holy Spirit has guided the institutional Church in its deliberations about what its religion requires (although, of course, our humanity often gets in the way). But if the Church invalidates a girl's rice Communion (chosen in lieu of the available, and valid, alternative of the wine) because its institutional precedent suggests that Christ mightn't have been literally present in the Eucharistic simulacrum, well, that's just taking this belief thing too far.

The Redwood Review Poem of the Week

The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Lighthouse Keeper," by Ingrid Mathews.

Housable Income

Earlier this month (ages ago, in blog time), Charles Hill brought up the issue of "affordable housing." I've held on to the URL for so long because housing is a major issue in Rhode Island. As every informed citizen of the state knows, we are heading for an affordable housing crisis ("!"). As valid as the applicable numbers and conclusions may be, Charles's first commenter, the Proprietor, raises one of those unspoken angles that issues tend to have under their skirts:

The main thing to realize is that this has *nothing* to do with providing affordable housing. It is a way to bust zoning in exclusive communities so there is a more fertile field for developers to build housing.

Although I shudder to suggest it, in response to the New Jersian commenter, it may be that Rhode Island's system is a bit more corrupt. According to various conversations that I've had, affordable housing rules have been leveraged in attempts to bust the zoning rules even in some of the poorer, most "affordable" towns in the state. It has become a pervasive part of the culture, here, that people must grab all that they can, and that the government is an appropriate method through which to do so... on the sly and with altruistic-sounding rhetoric for cover.

Whatever the political struggles for finding the land, however, it's undeniable that Rhode Island has a problem. And Charles may point the way toward a solution:

At my income level, I couldn't possibly hope to live in a place like Lincolnshire. In a society with some measure of rationality, I would be urged to do one of the following: either improve that income, or go live somewhere I can afford. The town can't legally keep me out — probably wouldn't dream of keeping me out — but there's no justification for forcing a property owner in that town to sell to me, or to rent to me, at a price far below what he wants and can get.

There are two words in the phrase "affordable housing," and thus two sides of the equation. If, for example, Rhode Island could match the average annual wages of its neighbors, Connecticut and Massachusetts (PDF), the affordable housing crisis would disappear overnight. Prices that are exorbitant to the poor are reasonable to the less poor.

This represents a complex subject matter, to be sure. Holding population and available housing steady while everybody's income rose, for example, would surely cause housing costs to rise accordingly. Furthermore, any solution aimed at raising income levels would require a degree of subtlety and a long view often lacking in our government. One typically short-sighted solution is to increase the minimum wage, and Rhode Island's top-five minimum wage (31% greater than the federal minimum wage that most states follow) hasn't managed to increase our average income even above the country's mean line.

It probably isn't a stretch to suggest that the minimum wage is one factor among many keeping businesses out of our state and constraining the types of jobs that are created. Another Providence Journal piece about affordable housing reports:

Of the 20 occupations projected to add the most jobs between 2000 and 2010, only four -- registered nurses, computer support specialists, secondary school teachers and elementary school teachers -- pay enough for a median wage earner to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the state average rent.

A quick look at the list of the fifty fastest-growing occupations in the state reveals that almost all of them are location-specific. In other words, they increase only inasmuch as there is enough money in Rhode Island to make it worth doing more business here. In such cases, a region is the source of revenue, but not necessarily the destination, and with the exception of tourism and higher education, the money in Rhode Island increasingly tends either to circulate within the limited local market or to flow out of state. Emblematically, the two fastest-growing occupations are registered nurses and retail salespeople.

The latter — retail — tells a particularly worrying story when it is considered that the list of declining industries is almost entirely made up of varying forms of manufacturing. Companies are willing to sell in Rhode Island, but not to build here. Returning to the minimum wage, it's one thing to pay 2,481 retail clerks $6.75 an hour when the only other option is to let the state's retail market go untapped. It's another thing to place any other point of the company's operational chain in a state that demands low-level positions to pay $1.6 more per hour than in most states across the nation. Hiring 2,481 workers at that level in Rhode Island (assuming 40-hours and paid vacations) would cost the company an additional $8,256,768 per year.

As I said, this problem has only complex solutions, but it poses questions that people in all states must ask themselves. What are our priorities? Where do we have to compromise our desire to give everybody everything so that we don't make it impossible for more than a minority to get anything? Rhode Island, for one, can no longer afford its distrust of the free market and disbelief in the power and importance of individual responsibility. It certainly can no longer afford to let the recipients of public funds insulate themselves from financial realities as everybody else experiences them.

Here's where the various issues begin to come together. In Rhode Island:

• The average annual private-sector wage in 2002 was $33,240, or $2,770 per month.
• An "affordable" monthly housing payment from that amount (one-third) is $914.
• The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in 2003 was $989.
• The median monthly homeowner housing cost in 2000 was $1,205.
• The fastest-growing industry is Elementary and Secondary Schools, with 5,122 new jobs by 2010.
• The average Rhode Island teacher made $7,108 more than the average teacher for the nation as a whole during the 2002–2003 school year.
• 5,122 times $7,108 is $36,407,176.
• Not to mention benefits.
• $36,407,176 is the amount of extra money that companies would have to pay each year for 10,940 minimum-wage workers in Rhode Island, as opposed to somewhere else.
• In another state with the national minimum wage of $5.15, those companies will pay 10,940 employees a total of $117,189,280 per year.
• Minimum wage workers often represent second or third incomes for a given household.
• Companies don't just hire people at minimum wage.
• Rhode Island consumers are probably buying the products that those companies make.

Wheat in a Land of Milk and Honey

It's clear that Jeremiah Lewis and I aren't going to iron out our underlying differences of spiritual understanding discussing — on blogs — the ingredients of the Eucharist at Roman Catholic Mass. Therefore, I'm not going to get into the doctrinal debate with him. I do, however, respect Jeremiah's thought and writing, with which I more often than not agree, so I want to offer something by way of reply to his latest post on the issue.

He still hasn't argued against the tradition of requiring the Eucharist to be made of wheat in the way that Christ argued against the use of qorban to skirt around a Commandment. For all of his Biblical exegesis, Jeremiah manages no more than to suggest that Scripture doesn't provide any direct instruction that Communion must be accomplished with wheat bread. Well, fine. I'm certainly not going to jump into the midst of our differing approaches to the Bible. I will, however, note that one of the contingencies to which I made reference was belief "in the divinely sanctioned necessity of an institutional Church that collects and passes along the wisdom of thousands of years, under the direct guidance of God." The point still stands that the practices of the Church oughtn't be attacked as a proxy for the core beliefs if Christians are to work together in this crumblingly secular world — not to mention saving each other's soul.

If Jeremiah disagrees with the Catholic approach to religion — which is very thorough, very structured, and, yes, sometimes "highly involved and doctrinally complex" — then he ought to address that topic directly. Frankly, should he do so, I'll cede the right to reply to other Catholics who have more knowledge and experience arguing over the degree to which we can rightly presume to know what is and isn't important in the Bible and why and how. I suspect that the broader discussion will revolve around the "having it both ways" approach evident when Jeremiah writes:

This begs the question: does Scripture require us to imitate, to the minutia of each detail, the Communion supper as first celebrated by Jesus and his disciples? Be imitators of Christ: does this mean in every manner and every symbolic and physical action, or does this Scripture point to a life of spiritual obedience, likened to Christ's obedience to God in all things?

Well, do Catholics have to produce "minutia of each detail" to prove the necessity of wheat? Or do they have to let go of Biblical example to get at the real spiritual lesson? And if the latter, how do they determine what symbolism and physical actions spiritual obedience requires?

Even before we could begin hammering away at such questions, though, it seems to me that there's a deeper disagreement — one that may not be possible to resolve through discussion:

Yet Christ's power and redemption is not a physical, chemical process. The bonds of the physical were indeed broken when Christ rose again, defeating death and securing us a place beside the Father. Had Christ ministered and died in Asia, his Last Supper may very well have been a rice cake.

Isn't Christ's power and redemption physical? Did He break the bonds of the physical? Every Gospel but Mark tells of some form of physical contact on Jesus' part after the Resurrection. Indeed, Jesus' physicality was necessary to convince Thomas that He had risen. "Touch me and see," Jesus says in Luke, "because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have." He then asks for something to eat. The physical remains important. Does Jeremiah expect himself to be resurrected without some sort of chemical activity?

As for a Christ of the Far East, all I can say is that God surely could have become man in a land of rice. But He didn't, and I see nothing in Scripture that gives Jeremiah license to suggest that the time and place of Christ's coming was as inconsequential as the presence of gluten in the Eucharist.

Songs You Should Know 08/24/04

The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Nonchalant" by Mr. Chu.

"Nonchalant" Mr. Chu, Hard Rock
Stream (HiFi) Download from Chu's Next

The Mysterious Cures

I love this beginning (emphasis added):

At three laboratories here, separated by a taxi ride of no more than 10 or 15 minutes, the world of stem cell research can be captured in all its complexity, promise and diversity.

One of the labs focuses on cells taken from human embryos, another on cells from mice and fish, and a third from stem cells that have mysteriously survived in the adult body long after their original mission is over.

Those are the first two paragraphs of a piece by Gina Kolata in the New York Times. Upon my reading the blockquote that Glenn Reynolds reprinted for his readers, two thoughts came quickly to mind: 1) that the existence of adult stem cell research had finally been acknowledged by the mainstream media, and 2) that Kolata's facts about it disagreed with what I had previously thought to be the case:

One idea, the focus of about half the nation's stem cell research, involves studying stem cells that are naturally present in adults. Researchers have found such cells in a variety of tissues and organs and say they seem to be a part of the body's normal repair mechanism. There are no ethical issues in studying these cells, but the problem is in putting them to work to treat diseases. So far, no one has succeeded. ...

As the two lines of research proceed along parallel paths, researchers say it is far too soon to bet on which, if either, will yield cures first. "It's not either-or," said Dr. Diana Bianchi, chief of the division of medical genetics at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston.

In line with the version of reality that I'd heard several times elsewhere, Wesley Smith described back in May some reasons why Kolata's assertions just aren't true. I suppose one could argue that Kolata's language implies cures already put into practice and available to the public, in which case she'd be right (technically), but anybody who had read only the her article would certainly be surprised to come across these tidbits:

The FDA has allowed a human trial to proceed that will use bone-marrow stem cells to treat severe heart disease. The experiment will be conducted at Texas Heart Institute in Houston. This approach has already safely improved heart function in 14 patients in Brazil, as reported in the medical journal Circulation ...

Dennis Turner of southern California was the first human patient known to have been treated by his own brain stem cells for Parkinson's. It is now a few years post treatment and his Parkinson's — which by now was expected to have substantially disabled him — has instead gone into substantial remission. Turner has been able to reduce his medications and rarely experiences significant symptoms of his disease.

Reading a bit farther into Kolata's piece, however, one notes that, although she's acknowledged that adult stem cells are found in "a variety of tissues and organs," she muddies the discussion terribly with the researcher whom she introduces as supposedly representing the adult branch of stem cell experimentation, Dr. Diana Bianchi:

But then she discovered that the fetal cells do not disappear when a pregnancy ends. Instead, they remain in a woman's body for decades, perhaps indefinitely. And if a woman's tissues or organs are injured, fetal cells from her baby migrate there, divide and turn into the needed cell type, be it thyroid or liver, intestine or gallbladder, cervix or spleen.

That's not what most people consider to be "adult stem cell research." Indeed, Bianchi isn't even sure that the cells that she's chasing are stem cells. In other words, these three labs hardly capture the stem cell debate "in all its complexity, promise and diversity." And I can't deny that the assertion that they do has the feel of deliberate distortion. So, although that huge swath of Americans who get their information only from mainstream sources might now be aware that such a thing as adult stem cell research exists (the apparent taboo having been broken), their conception of it is entirely wrong.

I wonder how much more difficult that will make it for conservative legislators to convince their constituents that embryonic stem cell research isn't the way to go.

ADDENDUM:
In posting Kolata's piece, Prof. Reynolds writes something that strikes me as odd:

And, since I don't believe that life begins at conception, the embryonic aspect doesn't bother me much either.

Then when does it begin? It's been awhile since I've taken any biology classes, but as far as I know, it's indisputable fact that an individual human being's life begins at conception. I can understand the argument that an embryo isn't sentient or fulfilled or some other sort of life, even if I disagree about the practical difference that the adjective makes, but it's clearly life — self-contained human life — isn't it, professor?

Rhode Island's Elite

David Sweeney, a retired lawyer with 30 years of experience negotiating teachers' contracts, has responded to a piece by retired teacher James Hosey, in which Mr. Hosey lamented that teachers' employment packages fall far short of the deals offered to — get this — CEOs. Putting aside the ludicrous comparison of, essentially, the educational workforce with the top, top class of the business world, Mr. Sweeney writes:

I don't know where Mr. Hosey worked, but every Rhode Island contract I know of contained "step increases" over 10 or 12 years. Teachers received an increase in pay for each credit earned toward an advanced degree, in courses paid for by the school districts. The workday consisted of less than seven hours, of which no more than four hours were spent in actually teaching. The work year was, and is, 180 days, and anything over that required additional compensation. Paid sick leave increased every year, and, amazingly, sick days taken by teachers also increased every year. Retirement, as taken by Mr. Hosey, was a combination of age and years worked, which permitted teachers to retire in their 50s and early 60s. ...

Former teachers who enter the real work world from the warm womb of the education industry are consistently shocked by the work demands of employers who must compete to survive. Unfortunately, these same people are teaching our children that everyone is "entitled" to all the benefits of a comfortable life, from annual pay increases to lifetime health care, without regard to individual talent or effort.

Hosey's home district, Cumberland, apparently has a relatively weak union, by Rhode Island standards. Consider these items from the personal experience that Hosey offers as "a point-by-point refutation" of a July 24 piece by Donald Hawthorne:

-- I was a teacher for 30 years; in that time, I never came close to a 12-percent raise.

-- There were no automatic increases in pay; our union had to fight tooth-and-nail for each contract as September approached, and the school committee relied upon Superior Court to order us back to work without one.

-- I never saw a longevity bonus.

One might note that the plea that the union had to "fight tooth-and-nail" for raises sidesteps Hawthorne's point, which had to do with the "just for showing up" nature of the raises that teachers do get every year, whatever show the union puts on. Marc Comtois, who is now the parent of a child in the Warwick, Rhode Island, school system, breaks down the numbers in table format.

As Marc explains, at least in Warwick, the annual raises scheduled within a given contract are deceptive, because each "step" — with advancement occurring each year, without regard to merit — increases annually. So, for example, while a first-time teacher for the 2000–2001 school year was scheduled to go from $30,348 to $33,467 (a very healthy 10% raise) for the next year, that teacher actually went to $34,722 (14.4%), because Step 2 increased. Marc also notes that, unlike Hosey's employer, his town does offer longevity bonuses, in addition to other merit-based increases.

More stunning, however, is Marc's side-by-side comparison of teachers' salaries with private-sector salaries. The disparity is huge, of itself, but compared with the national average, a visual representation makes for an extremely disheartening image for a semi-employed private-sector Rhode Islander such as myself. Note that, for the following graph, I dug up the 2002 data for the private sector (PDF) and the 2002–2003 data for teachers (USA and RI), which actually presents an improvement from Marc's previous-year data.

As Marc gives reason to realize, with his comparison of Rhode Island with its two contiguous states, Massachusetts and Connecticut, this chart isn't anywhere near the whole story. Rhode Island's tax burden and cost of living are high, relative to the rest of the country. As a percentage of income, Rhode Islanders pay 1.4% more in total state, federal, and local taxes than the nation as a whole. As for cost of living, I looked at one tangible expense, annual homeowner costs, for which Rhode Islanders pay 10.75% more than the nation as a whole. (Unfortunately, the latest data that I could find for housing was for 2000, and house prices have skyrocketed since then, doubling or more in some areas.) Here's a very rough picture of all of the above information lumped together:

The colored wedges, in total, represent the average Rhode Island private sector income (wages = $33,240). The white wedge is the actual-dollar amount of money that the average RI teacher has left over after taxes and housing above and beyond what the average private sector Rhode Islander has left over ($21,868 – $8,376 = $13,492).* In short, from this rough, limited picture, it looks as if the average Rhode Island teacher could almost afford to pay one additional family's housing costs, including mortgage, for the entire year and still have Rhode Island's average remainder left over. Here's the comparable pie graph for the nation as a whole.

And even that isn't the whole story. Rhode Island teachers get fantastic benefits, including absolutely free healthcare, on top of the career perk of a 180-day work year. (I don't know what the private sector's average work year is, but I'd be surprised if it weren't at least 220 days.) No wonder our retired teacher, Mr. Hosey, proclaims:

I would put my own head in a noose before I would ever again work in a non-union environment.

Unfortunately, as valuable and noble as the teaching profession may be, public union workers' employment packages have to find their funds somewhere, and in Rhode Island, that means hanging the rest of us.

* For the average teacher's remainder, I did remember to calculate and subtract the relatively higher tax slice, although I treated it as a flat tax.

Europe off the Stage and into the Theater

If you missed Victor Davis Hanson's column yesterday, be sure to read it today:

So it is also with some trepidation that we are seeing the inevitable end of the old, and the beginning of a new, transatlantic world, as troops on the ground at last reflect the reality of the past 20 years. And as we begin to leave Europe, as NATO mutters and shuffles in its embarrassing dotage, as cracks in an authoritarian and unworkable EU begin to widen, ever so slowly we here in the United States shall start to witness all over Europe both a new sensibleness — and a new furor.

Gut-check time is approaching. In places like Brussels, Berlin, and Oslo, in the next half-century citizens will slowly decide who wishes and does not wish to be an ally of the United States of America. Some will prefer opportunistic neutrality and thus go the Swedish and Swiss route. Others in their folly may ape French and Spanish bellicosity, and think isolating the U.S., selling weapons to the Middle East, or going on maneuvers with the Chinese might work. Still more may prefer to remain staunch friends like the Poles and Italians, realizing that, for all the leftist slurs about unilateralism, never in the history of civilization has such a powerful country as the United States sought advice and cooperation from weaker friends about the wisdom, efficacy, and consequences of using its vast military.

Of Men and Rice

Maybe it's being a convert with so much left to learn, or maybe it's the place in the religious discussion in which I'm called to stand, but it still tends to surprise me when people feel compelled to comment on the narrow doctrinal/ritual practices of other Churches, as Jeremiah Lewis has done here:

Given that [eight-year-old Haley Waldman] does know what Communion means and believes that Christ has saved her, what is the difference between a wheat wafer or a rice wafer? Is one clean and the other not? Is one more holy than the other? The Church has made it about the bread, not the body--exactly as the Pharisees had done with their Corban rules of holy washing, of clean and unclean foods, of daily life, of spiritual life.

When Jesus said "Do this in remembrance of me," somehow I doubt he was thinking "gluten-only bread, please". The Pharisees in the Catholic Church would do well to consider that.

Although Haley's mother is apparently mounting a campaign against the requirement that the Eucharist contain some measure of wheat, I'm not sure what makes this story worth the Associated Press's time to begin with. Perhaps both Jeremiah's conclusion that the recipe ought to be a non-issue and the self-assurance of religious insight by which he allows himself to cluck his tongue about the matter are so pervasive throughout our society, including in the media, that the story is salable.

For lack of time, I'm not going to pursue the thorough research necessary to trace the doctrinal conclusion about wheaten bread through history, but two points are relatively obvious to make. The first is that, even accepting that legitimate arguments could be made against the tradition, Jeremiah hasn't found them. The specific lesson of the passage from Mark 7 that Jeremiah cites has to do with spiritual cleanliness's being an internal quality, not something that can be ingested through a lapse in physical cleanliness. Jesus' other example, corban (or "qorban"), is something set apart for God, so the warning is against human rules that offer loopholes from Commandments. The reality that calling dibs for God, so to speak, isn't a legitimate way to avoid helping one's parents doesn't mean that nothing can be put aside for Him.

On the general matter that human traditions oughtn't supplant divine doctrine, well, the fact that one can teach "as doctrines human precepts" does not mean that all taught doctrines are human precepts. As Jeff Miller put it, those who invoke the Pharisees in attacks against the Church "tend to forget about the opposite of the Pharisees -the Sadducees who followed no rules but whatever suited them." Could a legitimate Mass be celebrated with popcorn and beer?

That leads to the second point: this is a doctrine that the Church takes very seriously. There are a variety of direct reasons for this; there are scriptural foundations, such as Jesus' use of wheat as a representation of the spiritual yield of one person's death (e.g., His); there are related historical ties to the Church, such as St. Ignatius's acceptance of martyrdom on the grounds that he was "the wheat of God." (The author of Pontifications suggests that the answer is as simple as recognizing that Jesus spoke the words "this is my body" over wheaten bread at the Last Supper and links to further discussion on Jimmy Akin's blog.)

Underscoring all of the reasons, however, is the belief in transubstantiation. If one believes that God is literally present in the bread — a God who, as man, declared himself to be the "bread of life" — and if, further, one believes in the divinely sanctioned necessity of an institutional Church that collects and passes along the wisdom of thousands of years, under the direct guidance of God, then one ought to be very reluctant to force or demand changes to satisfy personal difficulties. (Especially when there is a ready accommodation, such as receiving communion through the other species in which it is offered, wine.)

Many people, including (I gather) Jeremiah, don't hold such beliefs, and they are perfectly free not to. Nonetheless, in such cases, it seems to me that attacking the practice is really just a way to avoid discussing the weightier matters that reach our core beliefs about God and our place in relation to Him. Raising those weightier matters exposes, of course, the great many extremely personal conclusions, behaviors, and emotions that grow from our religious faith, so there is an understandable aversion to doing so, especially in the breezy medium of blogs. But in our secularized, deeply corrupted society, aren't we Christians more alike than different? If so, don't we owe each other the respect — the concern for each other's soul — of addressing the beliefs, and not the practices that follow from them?

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

I've got two longish posts that I hope to write before calling it a day (by my extended measure), but in the meantime, be sure to check out this week's edition of Lane Core's weekly Blogworthies feature for plenty of afternoon/evening reading.

Now We Need an Opposite Experiment

Spain is apparently volunteering to be (another) experiment in liberal government:

Spain's new government is pressing an ambitious social reform agenda that would put the historically conservative Catholic country on par with the most liberal nations in Europe. ...

The agenda appears to have the support of the public. A Gallup poll found more than half of Spaniards support same-sex marriage and think homosexuals should be allowed to adopt children. Two-thirds of the Spanish public support legalizing same-sex marriage, for instance, according to polls. Although the Socialists do not hold a majority in the parliament, most of the proposed laws are widely expected to pass because of support from other left-leaning parties.

I vote that the United States not pass any further liberal reforms until Spain has had a couple of decades to ferment.

A Needed Reminder

I'm reading at Mass tomorrow (or, more accurately, later today, which happens to be our fifth wedding anniversary), and the passage from St. Paul couldn't be more relevant:

Brothers and sisters,
You have forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as children:
"My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord
or lose heart when reproved by him;
for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines;
he scourges every son he acknowledges."
Endure your trials as "discipline";
God treats you as sons.
For what "son" is there whom his father does not discipline?
At the time,
all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain,
yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness
to those who are trained by it.

So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees.
Make straight paths for your feet,
that what is lame may not be disjointed but healed.

The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week

The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "from Stakers," by Mark Ellis.

Ganders Taking Ganders, or On Moral Sex

Whether it indicates that a fundamental principle has gone askew or that rhetoric must tilt to match a false conclusion, arguments on behalf of same-sex marriage seem often to mirror the object of their advocacy. The closer the marriage proposal is pushed toward the ideals of traditional marriage, the more the supporting arguments will manage to be just a bit off, and the points of distinction, in the resulting disputes, can be frustratingly difficult even to isolate, let alone resolve. Such is the case with the procreation -> contraception -> homosexuality line of thought that Jon Rowe pursues in the comments to my post on Governor McGreevey.

In his phrasing, however, Rowe may have left an opening by which to reveal the underlying gaps. Start with the last paragraph of the two contiguous comments to which I am responding:

The point that I am trying to make, "procreation" is a really weak place park a justificatory basis for sex. As Andrew Sullivan says, just because this is what sex CAN be about, doesn't mean that this is what sex MUST be about.

If by "park" Rowe means "rely upon exclusively," I happen to agree; in fact, I'd suggest that sex is at its best when it incorporates various justificatory bases. In terms of Catholic morality, in which I'll consolidate a broader ethics for my purposes with this post, sex becomes nearly sacred when it is both unitive and procreative, with the latter quality modified with "open to."

The former quality relates to Rowe's statement that "sex for the purpose of expressing love, cementing relationships, relieving stress, is legit." It would seem, therefore, with the possible exception of the reductive palliative of stress relief, that some common ground exists; indeed, Sullivan relies heavily on Catholic teachings, in this respect. Where the matter complicates for the traditional side, and where those taking Rowe's position insist on a narrow absolutism, is when a particular sexual act is not open to procreation; Rowe writes:

If the natural teleology of sex is procreation, then nothing could be more "unnatural" than contraception (according to this teleology). If we accept contraception as legit. as I think we should, then we necessarily accept that sex wholly cut off from its procreative teleology, i.e., sex for the purpose of expressing love, cementing relationships, relieving stress, is legit.

"Teleology" is one of those words that seem intended to distract one's opposition with a trip to the dictionary. If we understand, however, that "teleology" indicates a type of study, doctrine, or comprehension, then Rowe's use of it would seem to go further than he intends, and if it doesn't go that far, then it undermines his argument.

Catholics (or others) who pay attention to the various skirmishes as our faith evolves, including the determination of where it can evolve, will know that there's some debate about what constitutes openness to procreation. It is probably fair to say that the irreducible essence of the concept is that the sex must involve the two distinct sexual organs' being used in the manner in which they were designed to act as one, within a context — marriage — that emotionally and practically situates the man and woman to become one in the person of a child and unite all together as a family.

Note, though, that being open to procreation is not the same as succeeding at it, and the intra-Catholic debate centers around the degree to which a husband and wife can, by their own efforts, avoid success. Here, Rowe's notion of "procreative teleology" becomes useful, as the understanding of a purpose that sex must not contradict, even if it doesn't always fulfill it. Approaching the concept in this way, however, it becomes obvious that what Rowe has asserted as something that we must "necessarily accept" is, in fact, a question: Is contraceptive sex "wholly cut off from its procreative teleology"?

To say "yes," as Rowe does, is to conflate not only an outlook and an act, but also various methods of contraception, some of which do cause the act to contradict the outlook, and some of which don't. (See here for my description of the substantive difference between "natural family planning" and condom use.) Simply put, moral sex is that for which it isn't possible to separate the unitive and procreative aspects of the act, which is what makes sex that is purely about the restricted, two-person bond between the partners illegitimate. It would also make sex that is purely reproductive illegitimate. And this brings us to Rowe's supposed proof that procreation is inadequate as the exclusive marker of moral sex:

The strange thing is, polygamy and incest are procreative. So if procreation is our guide, those two forms of sex are fine.

It's true that bestiality, like homosexuality, is inherently non-procreative. So is sex with a pre-pubescent child (but not with a post-pubescent 13 or 14 year old: that passes our "procreation" test). But then again, so too is sex with a post-menopausal woman. So too is heterosexual oral & anal sex. So to is getting a tubal ligation or a vasectomy.

The first thing to note is that Rowe has illustrated precisely why contraception, even if accepted as "legit." in some circumstances, doesn't thereby legitimate pursuit of any particular benefit that non-procreative sex might provide. Whatever it might mean that "nothing could be more 'unnatural' than contraception," it remains true that all of the various activities that he lists are inherently contraceptive. By his reasoning, therefore, they would all be "unnatural," and with room to layer particular detriments on top of that quality.

Now, we could argue about the sex lives of grandmothers and never resolve our fundamental differences, but the point that I'm trying to make is that, other than providing those taking his side with a chuckle at turning the table on the traditionalists, Rowe's rhetoric is utterly irrelevant unless he (1) intends to argue that no justificatory basis is adequate to make distinctions about various sex acts or (2) is on his way to explaining why another basis would be a stronger defense to exclude acts that we presumably agree ought to be considered immoral.

If his intention is number 1, then he will quickly be drowned out by expressions of disgust at the possibilities. If it is number 2, then I'd suggest that he's embarked on an impossible quest. The only adequate justificatory basis is one that encompasses the totality of moral sex as traditionally conceived. To borrow and modify an image from commenter Ben Bateman, those seeking to remove the panel of procreation from the wall around marriage so that they can fit through seem conspicuously uninterested in truly explaining why the wall will remain standing, holey as it would be, or where a new wall can be built to preserve the institution.

The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week

The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "Hogmaney (New Year's Eve)," by Christine L. Mullen.

In a Sea of Snickers

I haven't had much to say about the Swift Boat Veterans and the media reaction to them, because it's in the high-profile blogger domain, and it's so obvious a call that I've nothing to add. See Instapundit for broad coverage; see Michelle Malkin's heavily trackbacked post for her first-hand encounter with the smoking and wheezing media spin machine in action.

As much as I've read on the topic, and as accustomed as we all are in the online world to stunning bias on the part of our better-paid counterparts in the mainstream, however, it's still a surreal experience to come across the coverage about which we're all complaining. Heading back from the post office, I just caught a brief ABC radio news segment related to the Vets, and the entire story — without mentioning what sorts of things the group is saying — was about how it might "backfire" on President Bush. ABC's official analyst George Stephanopoulos — yes, the former Clinton aide — described the dramatic moment at which John Kerry will turn to President Bush during a debate and say, "John McCain has condemned the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on me. Why won't you?"

To anybody who's keeping track of both sides of this aspect of the campaign, that segment is reminiscent of one of those cliché scenes in a comedy when the con artist doesn't know that everybody else knows what he's up to and keeps going with some ridiculous story. I can't help but wonder how many people laughing behind their hands the newsies can willfully ignore before they find it necessary to try to salvage their credibility.

Can they even stop?

Fester, Fester, Fester

I was just, finally, wrapping up a post that had taken me much longer to work my brain through than I'd expected or intended, but that I was glad to be posting so there would be something substantive at the top of the blog, when my wife's vacuuming blew the wrong circuit in this insanely wired house, and the computer blinked out.

My baseline level of stress is such that I could probably have avoided the whole thing by sticking the computer's plug in my mouth instead of in the outlet, and I'm sure my wife could have done much the same with the vacuum. Now, there would be a technology that would virtually eliminate Americans' dependence on foreign oil.

I've got some things that have to get done. Then I'll try to find the willpower to reconstruct that post... as I work and look for more work and address other demands on my time.

Gee Whiz

Sorry about the postlessness. I'm writing something about something for somebody, and the entire day just slipped on by (with stops here and there for baby feedings and noise investigations).

Maybe I shouldn't write professionally! It's almost like a teenager getting a job playing videogames.

The Redwood Review Poem of the Week

The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Sustenance," by Gary Bolstridge.

Elite Post-Modernism, Thy Posterboy McGreevey Be

Adjusting the picture of the modern world to incorporate the value given to otherhood and orgasms, one might come to see James McGreevey as the representative of a last minute coup against egalitarian progress. The white, male lawyer turned politician, with a BA from Columbia, a law degree from Georgetown, and a master's degree from Harvard, was nothing if not ambiguous in his coming out announcement. From the full text of his speech (linked by Patrick Sweeney):

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused. ...

Yet, from my early days in school, until the present day, I acknowledged some feelings, a certain sense that separated me from others. But because of my resolve, and also thinking that I was doing the right thing, I forced what I thought was an acceptable reality onto myself, a reality which is layered and layered with all the, quote, good things, and all the, quote, right things of typical adolescent and adult behavior.

Yet, at my most reflective, maybe even spiritual level, there were points in my life when I began to question what an acceptable reality really meant for me. Were there realities from which I was running? ...

At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.

And so my truth is that I am a gay American.

So, when a boy, he was in a state well known to males at that stage: confusion. At "points in" his life — not always, not hounding him at every step, weighing on his every decision, only at his "most reflective, maybe even spiritual" moments — he wondered whether he had run to, I guess, an unacceptable reality. Now, at 47, he has "decided" his "unique truth." At the risk of asking a question with an answer that is supposed to be obvious: by what definition is this man "gay"?

He's offered a number of allusions to the "gay narrative"; he's apparently had the implicated sexual encounters; he's made an assertion. But then again, there are those two wives and a daughter with each. He mentions loving them. His juggling of "truths" doesn't quite come around to an admission of having "lived a lie," as the saying goes. Would anybody (who is not intellectually chained to an agenda) be surprised if this manifestly corrupt lawyer-politician announced a different truth in a few years?

But let's exclude political calculation in order to think more generally. If traditions and community can box a homosexual into living the '70s, '80s, and '90s as a straight, procreative man — one for whom divorce is not apparently beyond question — why couldn't lust and a different community, as well as the differing response to infidelity when committed across "orientations" and the politically convenient "victim class" status, give a heterosexual the license to live as a "gay American" for a time?

This is why, as much as I might agree with most of her conclusions, I have to wonder whether it is accurate for IrishLaw to write, of McGreevey, "at least he's being honest." Now, for my purposes here, I don't wish to enter the field of topics ranging from other homosexuals' experiences to the proper course of action for McGreevey to take with his family (see the addendum below). However, in clicking through IrishLaw's discussion with fellow law students, I came across exactly the statement around which skepticism ought to begin to center. From Chris Geidner:

I do not at all think his adultery can be written off, however, as the same as a heterosexual man cheating on his heterosexual wife with another heterosexual woman. This is not because gay relationships are somehow different, but rather that the reasons -- as many former spouses of gay people could discuss -- why a closeted gay man cheats on his wife are different.

I submit that this asserted truth of sexual politics is pervasively accepted and known in our society. Moreover, it needn't be a consciously cut escape hatch for a midlife affair in order for it to have an effect. In a culture that has endeavored to diminish the inherency of the link between sex and procreation and to erase the stigma of sodomy and homosexual sex, the differing reaction to a particular form of infidelity surely factors into a man's mullings as he struggles with temptation.

That considered, step back and view the fullness of the picture of the modern aristocrat, appropriately tinted in accordance with the power of otherhood and orgasms. Doesn't it look like James McGreevey (if not the actual man, then at least the public perception of him)? Having benefited, imagewise, from his marriages, having fulfilled the instinctual demand to create future generations, having experienced the family-man life, this posterboy for elite post-modernism has opened the way for a subsequent life of renewed bachelorhood — and perhaps evaded public anger at his corruption, to boot.

ADDENDUM:
Obviously, one's judgment of McGreevey's proper course of action from this moment on is jumbled up with one's views on marriage, family, and even life. For Geidner, who uses the "living a lie" language that McGreevey did not, the ideal of honesty that the governor would be teaching his daughters by henceforth living as a gay man is a positive benefit to them, far outstripping any benefits that they might garner by his proximity and fulfillment of a traditional role.

McGreevey, to put it mildly, has complicated the abstract discussion by introducing a second marriage and giving each daughter a different mother. However, it seems to me that the bottom-line, can't-be-trumped reasons to treat marriage as sacrosanct — sickness and health, riches and poverty, and realizations of orientational otherhood notwithstanding — are twofold:

1. The children's subconscious sense of self. This means ensuring that the children (or, in McGreevey's case, at least his two year old) know that they were and remain the products of two parents equivalently, all bound in a familial love and mutual respect of needs that transcends any worldly conveniences, desires, and even sexual "identities."
2. The children's understanding of the significance of marriage. Geidner says that it is only through "honesty and trust," including the honesty of admitting one's sexuality, that "a true relationship" can be built, presumably implying that the children will not repeat the mistakes of their father. But, even accepting the standard storyline, there's more to the mistake than the orientational lie: there's the erroneous entry into a lifelong commitment. However much it might be true that the children will learn to privilege honesty and trust, doesn't the necessity of working through confusion and looking "deeply into the mirror of one's soul" before making promises to a spouse and children diminish if failure to do so, or realization of error, is an absolute excuse to void the spiritual contract?

Geidner doesn't so much as entertain the possibility that somebody in McGreevey's position could remain married to his wife without being "a lying, closeted gay husband" (and father). Conveniently, that leaves out the path that I consider to be the moral, if most difficult, one. Namely, whatever one's sexual identity might be, entering into marriage and having children are, themselves, declarations of identity that, for the sake of progeny and public, stand above whatever epiphanies might follow.

If You Don't Deserve It, Give It to Me

About a year ago, Rush Limbaugh suggested on his radio show that what makes a certain segment of the wealthy espouse destructive liberal policies is that, deep down, they don't feel as if they deserve the wealth that they've got. Although, running through a mental list of top-tier actors and pop stars, one mightn't be inclined to argue against their feeling that way, it seemed to me a little too easy of an assessment, the way Rush put it.

Well, if subtlety of thought — or at least of expression of thought — was the deficit that I felt needed to be addressed before I'd accept the claim, Will Wilkinson has contributed the necessary amount, albeit from a different direction:

[John] Rawls' conception of desert leaves us with a picture of society where all the rewards have been spread around essentially by chance. Some folks are conceived under the lucky star of Pitt-like looks, Hawkingesque IQs, Gatesian trust-funds and Brazeltonian baby care. But most poor souls were born under uglier, stupider, meaner stars. Those of us who won the genetic and social lottery will naturally try to rationalize our great good luck. We will turn up our calloused palms and tell of the blood and sweat on our every red cent. Yet from the "perspective of the universe," in which self-serving appeals disappear into the vastness of impartiality, the distribution of rewards in our lotto-world appears entirely arbitrary. If a bag of money falls into your lap, that doesn't mean it's really yours.

Wilkinson goes on to argue that where Rawls went wrong was with his "claim that it is our 'considered judgment' that the consequences of our natural endowments are not deserved, because our natural endowments are not themselves deserved." Our considered judgment, which is ultimately determined by our horse sense (forgive the too-apropos cliché), is just the opposite. Ability and work do create desert. Thus derives our opportunity to play psychoanalyst of philosophers and limelight socialists: What skews them away from a principle that seems so obvious to the rest of us?

There are other routes to the same aversion, of course, than the guilty neurotic's conclusion that filmed dress-up oughtn't an emperor's fortune make. Some folks understandably like the argument that they deserve equivalent income because those who earn extra don't deserve extra. Others like the comfort of espousing socialism disguised as philanthropy. Others just take the ideological fashion without worrying about whether it's correct.

And then, if I may step a bit far out on the plank of speculation, there is the group from which those who devise the fashionable anti-meritocratic logic likely come. These are the people who believe that their merit has been overlooked. In a world in which such broadly accessible qualities as optimism, affability, confidence, and a willingness to exert one's self are the components of (quote/unquote) "merit," surely the very notion of merit must be ill conceived.

John Kerry Chris Muir Starts a Meme

Now, if Chris Muir's Day by Day cartoon were as widely read and influential as it ought to be, today's strip might be apt to start a pop culture meme.

(Of course, it would also help if more people actually followed politics as closely as bloggers do.)

Songs You Should Know 08/17/04

The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Farmer Joe" by Victor Lams. This song even has a cartoon video!

"Farmer Joe" Victor Lams, Pop/Rock
Stream (HiFi) Download
from Robot Love

Ah, Life!

Lane Core is to be congratulated for breaking into the big time. It's a bit of a change from his tabs on Kerry, but be sure to check out "School buses lined up for demolition derby," if only for a glimpse into the unique culture of Pennsylvania. The summer after my senior year of New Jersey high school, I was, well, not impressed that my girlfriend at the time was in the color guard for her school band in Eastern Penn, color guard not exactly being the vocation of cool girls at my school. But dutiful as I was, I went to see her in a band competition, and I was floored. Girls with flaming batons and such. High school must be a completely different experience in that state.

Speaking of breakthroughs and local culture, and considering that Lane's call for prayers apparently worked, this seems like a good post with which to update you about my travails. After having resolved, over the weekend, to take on a trade, I was sifting through some printouts of want-ads from local electrical companies when I was startled by the unusual sound of my business phone ringing. It was the editor of a local four-color-glossy magazine, at which I had applied for an entry-levelish position, suggesting that it might be more mutually beneficial for me to become a regular house writer.

I'm currently perusing some sample issues and noting ideas for potential pieces, as well as possible areas of focus, that I'll forward to the editor later today. It's too early even to assess my chances, but isn't it just like opportunity to stretch a deadline? Even if this one passes, it's increasingly clear that I'm nearing a tipping point. If only I had a few more months of resources to burn!

As it is, I'm like a bus driver trying to keep the thing running just long enough to withstand a few more hits on the household-expenses derby field.

(Hey, as a writer, it's my job to tie the various aspects of a piece together... I think.)

The Silence in the Searching

Perhaps I'm betraying a sort of naiveté in admitting it, but I found a short piece by Ramesh Ponnuru, related to stem-cell research, absolutely astonishing. As with the family featured in the episode of Primetime that I described last week, the Kallsen family found their way toward advocacy for embryonic stem-cell research when their children — two girls, in their case — were diagnosed with diabetes. They even went so far as to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with their congressman, Republican Mark Souder. And then:

Souder was "very, very gracious," says Kallsen. But he said that he supported adult-stem-cell research, not research that killed human embryos. The fact that embryonic-stem-cell research involved destroying human embryos came as news to Kallsen and his family. "Basically, it was a learning experience for us. We were not well informed about all of the issues. We're all pro-life and...we had not done enough research on our own to understand that if we were promoting embryonic stem-cell research that's the opposite of pro-life. We were so interested in finding a cure that we weren't looking at how it's done." Kallsen also now believes that adult-stem-cell research is more promising than he had thought at the time of the meeting.

I'm not faulting the Kallsens, but really: think about that. Think about the extent of misunderstanding, or only partial understanding, that must surround this issue if it is possible for those actively pushing for one side, in the year 2004, not to know the alternatives that the other side supports. More than that, imagine the perplexing gap of silence that people must perceive when they don't even know the opposition's reason for opposition!

The Enemy Underneath

As a general matter, I'm inclined to agree with Nicholas von Hoffman that one ought to be suspicious of bipartisanship, "because 'bipartisan' really means a put-up job, a behind-the-scenes deal, something in which the fix is in between the two political parties," as he puts it in the New York Observer. However, any consonance is snuffed out with his closing paragraph, which is stunning in its sudden revelation of the declaration toward which all that came before seems to have been built:

Much of the [9/11] commission's writing revolves around misunderstanding Muslims or presuming to understand Muslims on the thinnest of evidence when some effort might have been spent understanding ourselves. Less attention should have been paid to Muslim "extremism," which is hardly an undiscussed topic in the United States, and more devoted to Judeo-Christian extremism. Christianity is a one-god-one-truth-and-we-Christians-own-it type of religion. Leaving aside abstruse arguments over the separation of church and state, a more immediate danger to the peace of the world is an America whose policies are controlled by the intolerant spirit which lurks in this religion and from time to time dominates the civic life of its practitioners. You don't have to be a Muslim to wonder if the highly organized Christian elements in the United States hold the levers of power and drive policy. It sticks out all over this report, which seems to neutral, agnostic eyes as a battle plan by one religion to destroy another. That's all fine and well, but when holy wars are fought, there is hell to pay.

Ah yes, those "neutral, agnostic eyes," when this species of agnosticism clearly stands, if not as atheism, then as a strong faith that everybody else is wrong and oughtn't behave as if they might be right. This is not to say that I believe von Hoffman to have assessed the global culture war correctly. In fact, I'd suggest that his adherence to the dogma asserting Christian intolerance (while Islam is merely misunderstood) taints his analysis.

Chillingly, a correspondent happened to bring von Hoffman to my attention shortly after I'd come across Barbara Nicolosi's comments after researching for a screenplay about the Spanish Civil War:

The divisions in Spain which set up the war were very complex, but the real crux came down to secularism vs. Christianity. Fueled from the social Darwinism of the universities, the intellectuals in Spain went around for a few decades before the war insisting that religion was anti-modern and an enemy of progress. For many of these folks, "Christian" became a hated adjective, synonymous with ignorant. The greatest fury was directed against the moral authority of the Church. How dare the Church constrain anyone in any way with the outrageous suggestion that some things are good and other things are evil?!

In the elections of 1931, the secular side finally obtained some power, and within days, a disgusting and violent attack on the Church was unleashed. Over 100 churches were burned and gutted. Mobs desecrated cemeteries, convents, seminaries and religious schools. Priests, nuns, and anybody displaying religious devotion were assaulted.

Then, the laws started coming. A call was made for "complete separation of Church and State"...which, on the lips of secularists always means stomping all over the citizenship rights of religious people. The Church was forbidden to operate educational institutions. Church property that was not directly connected to the maintenance of the members of a religious institute was confiscated. No fault divorce was legalized. All cemeteries were secularized. (What is it with Spain and cemeteries? So much of the rage of the secularists was directed at cemeteries. They really got off on exhuming dead nuns and priests and desecrating the bodies. Something in the air maybe? Somebody help me...). There was other stuff too, like suppressing the Jesuits and withdrawing clerical wages.

What's next when "intolerance" becomes the marker of lessened humanity, a gap for the crowbar of restriction? I suppose defining "intolerance" is next, then defining it again, and again.

Lovers of Gray Demand Black and White

Since the American Bar Association's attempt to force its not-so-nuanced worldview on the rest of the country has come up, this would seem worth noting:

In order to permit Catholic and other faith-based health-care providers to remain religious while serving critical public functions, state and federal legislators have often provided "conscience" protection that permits religious-based health-care providers to opt out of programs or treatment that they find objectionable. For example, even though they often treat patients receiving Medicare or Medicaid, religious-based hospitals are permitted by federal law not to provide abortion services or referrals.

It is this core exercise of religious conscience — and the government's accommodation of it — that the ABA finds so objectionable. Citing studies with titles such as "When Religion Compromises Women's Health Care: A Case Study of a Catholic Managed Health Care Organization," the ABA argues that the religious practices of Catholic health-care providers, both individual and institutional, deny needed health services and information to patients, especially women. Its singles out certain Catholic health care-providers, such as Fidelis Care New York, a Catholic health-care system that provides Medicaid services to the residents of 33 New York counties — services that might otherwise not be available were it not for the faith-based outreach. What crime has Fidelis committed that merits the attention of the nation's bar association? It refuses to provide certain "family planning services" to its patients or refer patients for such services — services that contravene the core teachings of the Catholic faith.

Rolling Over Speed Bumps Can Be Addictive

Marty McKeever took the plunge and answered the question, "How will marriage be destroyed, and what part will gay marriage play?" The post was certainly worth Marty's effort to write, and it's worth others' effort to read. However, apart from recommending the essay, something that an opposing commenter, Scott, wrote tied with another aspect of the larger debate that I've been meaning to mention. The following blockquote spans two comments, at the ellipsis, the first part directed at Marty, and the second to another commenter, Jim Price:

If you do not like gay marriage, then don't marry a man. Instruct your kids not to marry the same sex. ...

Grit your teeth all you want Jim, in the end, I win.

Your morals aren't mine, you see, thats your problem. You see the world in black and white only. I'm smart enough to understand gray.

Whether or not you like it, I will be married, to a man and in the end you'll be a George Wallace footnote.

Its harsh but its the truth Jim.

You can type on a message board until your fingers turn blue but I will win, and you know what, heterosexual marriage will survive. I'm sorry you're not smart enough to see through the fundraising doomsday scenarios that you've been fed but keep sending those checks to James Dobson if it makes you truly happy.

You're a speed bump, not a wall.

The personal insults and active belittling of his opposition suggest to me a mindset that won't stop at the equilibrium of "you do your thing, I'll do mine." Indeed, most of Scott's comments to the post at hand include some reference or other (in aggregate) to "the unwashed simpletons in flyover country." The rhetoric may be of mutual liberty, but the language is of the sort that brings into question the worthiness of the other side to possess their share. To the extent that those people continue to have power in one form or another — whether influence or property — in a post–same-sex marriage world, it's easy to imagine Scott and his ilk thinking it not overbearing to impose correction of their errors.

For further exploration of this point, we can turn to no less un-stupid a person than Eugene Volokh:

But in any event, one should acknowledge that the "It doesn't hurt you, so why should you object?" argument omits an important point: The broad array of gay rights proposals would restrict the liberty and equality of those who oppose homosexuality -- and this array is more of a package deal than we might think, since the more proposals the gay rights movement wins on, the easier (generally speaking) it would be for it to win on other proposals.

We might be able to envision a regime of optimal liberty, where the rights of both homosexuals and those who oppose homosexuality are equally respected -- many libertarians, for instance, would do so by distinguishing restrictions on government action from restrictions on nongovernmental action. But even if we can identify a point that we ourselves endorse, that point may as a practical matter be politically unstable, so that if the gay rights movement gets to that point (wherever the point is), it will in practice end up also getting more, and cutting into the liberties of others.

The Marriage Debate blog post that quotes from Volokh's entry also links to his follow-up entries, which branch in different directions. It would seem that there are aspects of grayness quite apart from the dubious accuracy of Scott's assertions about heterosexual marriage's future.

Indeed, the claim of a reasoned complexity of perspective among those who advocate for further normalization of homosexuality is beginning to appear as an easily removed robe. And perhaps those opposing the process can be forgiven for wondering whether the American Bar Association let the cloak slip a little, and prematurely, when it proposed changing its ethics policies in order to ban judges from joining groups that "discriminate" against gays. As the relevant commission leader, Mark Harrison, put it, the object is to "make sure that judges aren't viewed as bigots." What groups would make such a view possible is up in the air. The National Guard? The Boy Scouts? The Catholic Church?

Volokh dubs it "pretty sad" that "[m]aybe we do have, as a practical matter, a choice between a regime that suppresses the liberties of homosexuals and benefits those who don't approve of homosexuality, and a regime that benefits homosexuals and suppresses the liberties of those who don't approve of homosexuality." Sadder still, in my view, is that society's choice between these two paths is appearing more and more likely to be made not on the basis of which tilt is ultimately better for future generations, in the complicated summation of effects, but which group has the power and will to force the wheel and make of the opposition a speed bump — rather than a legitimate marker of a speed limit.

The Thickets of the Thides

Let me state right up front — for the record and for any interested conspiracy theorists on the other side — that I remain an independent operator. Of course, I'm aligned with a general political movement and have developing relationships with specific players therein, but that alignment is entirely ideological and not a matter of vested interest.

That said, I imagine I'm not alone, as a hopeful writer, in awaiting with anticipation the day that thousands of words will be spent offering conspiratorial insinuations about my biography. When that time comes, I'll be able to play a pundit version of that Kevin Bacon game: Three Links to Gray Text on a Black Background. Here's how it works: Start with a reasonable and respectable person criticizing a conservative writer — say, Eric Muller continuing his assault on Michelle Malkin:

If you go over to Dave Neiwert's place and listen very carefully, you'll hear a slight "hiss." That's the sound of the last of the air escaping from the hole in the life raft currently supporting Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment."

So we follow the link and find:

For an excellent and quite thorough examination of Malkin's career after leaving Seattle, be sure to check out Matt Stoller's lengthy exegesis about Malkin and the people who are behind her.

Following the link, we find this tidbit about Malkin's publisher, Regnery:

The publishing house has John Birch society ties, the Birch society of course being the 1950s group so extreme in their right-wing ideology that they thought Eisenhower was a communist stooge.

And — perhaps because Stoller is so thorough, indeed — we find a link to our goal of gray text on a black background:

In the halcyon days, Welch's [John Birch] Society was allied with William Regnery, whose name appears on American Security Council (ASC) incorporation papers. The ASC was a domestic covert operations arm of the military-corporate complex, closely aligned with the JBS, Libery Lobby and other sons of the fascist revolution.

Jumping back into this fight was just about the last thing that I wanted to do, in my capacity as a blogger, but I was procrastinating, and various stops along this trail raised some points worth making. Because I'm wholly unqualified to address revelations about fifty-years-ago forerunners of the fascist allies of the military-corporate complex, I'll leave aside "The Early Days of the John Birch Society: Fascist Templars of the Corporate State" from Alex Constantine's Political Conspiracy Research Bin and continue backwards with Stoller's "exegesis."

What makes Stoller's August 7th blog post so interesting is the example it represents of the impossibility of discussion in the current, polarized climate. Consider:

As you can see from the chart on the left, Townhall is the Heritage's most direct channel to the public, with 25 million visits last year (and an ambitious community building strategy through Meetup, which so far has 27,000 members). Townhall.com, with its extremist rantings defending the Confederate flag, Japanese internment, neo-eugenic pseudo-science, racist behavior, attacks on liberals, and anti-Muslims propaganda, is often fodder for the even more extremist right-leaning community site, the Free Republic.

I guess when one starts with Townhall as "extremist," there isn't anywhere to go except "even more extremist." (Although, I'm very glad to hear that the folks over at Free Republic are sufficiently circumspect to only lean to the right... extremely.) Most of Stoller's list of "rantings" I would be able to address as points that liberals merely fail to understand, wondering aloud whether it is the simple fact that conservatives indulge in "attacks on liberals" that makes them extremists. But even in this short paragraph, we get an item that I am at a complete loss to understand, let alone rebut: "neo-eugenic pseudo-science." Doesn't Stoller know the history of Planned Parenthood? (Yes, I noticed the design of that page.)

The impossibility of common ground arises again and again in Stoller's piece, to such an extent that it's hard to respond without a sardonic grin. Take, for example, some dark advice that Stoller says the Heritage foundation gives to speakers:

As an aside, I should say that it will be very helpful, I'd even say essential, that you treat with respect people and ideas that you disagree with. Treat them as intelligent people whose only failing is intellectual error. When journalists call, be sure that you understand what the other side is liable to say abou