NRO has afforded me the privilege of sharing with its readers my answers to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' guiding questions for Catholic voters.
Even as a relatively long opinion column, my piece is obviously not complete; it's just an overview. Each question alone requires — deserves — not just an essay, but an entire extended discussion (such as St. Blogs has from time to time on various topics). To be honest, some of that effort will have to be expended reorganizing the questions. They seem organized according to political categories, which cut across the essentials of faith and practicality that must be addressed.
Well, let's get the conversation started. We've got two days...
(More realistically: two years.)
ADDENDUM:
Some discussion has begun at Amy Welborn's blog.
In response to my October 14 post addressing Noah Millman's divorce versus same-sex marriage argument, I received a response from an anonymous reader that I thought worth sharing, not the least because it illustrates that people out there are thoroughly thinking this issue through — even, surprisingly — those without blogs:
Millman takes up on the issue of homosexual marriage along the lines of Andrew Sullivan, to wit if one isn't willing to work to end unilateral divorce one is a hypocrite for opposing homosexual marriage (and presumably for opposing polygamy, polyandry, group marriage, marriage of children to adults, incestous marriage, interspecies marriage, etc.).My analogy for this (feel free to use it if you wish without attribution) is simple: assume that half of your house is on fire, and the rest of it isn't burning yet. Is spraying gasoline on the part not yet in flames a good idea?
Yes, the 60's/70's era experiment with unilateral divorce has been a disaster. The evidence was there as early as, oh, 1978 or so. However it in no way follows that legalizing homosexual marriage, and polygamy, and polyandry, and incestous marriages, and 40 year old 'chicken hawks' marrying their 14 year old toy-boy-du-jour, etc. is going to mitigate the damage done.
That damage is real and it is quantifiable. Study after study after study over the last century or so has shown that boys who grow up without a father in the home will find an adult male role model. It's arguably wired in to the brain. That's why in the old days, when a man died leaving children behind, especially young children, any and all decent men rallied 'round to help the widow with the children and especially with the boy(s). Uncles were expected to pitch in, as were co-religionists, lodge / fraternal order members, and so forth. Because it was common knowledge that absent at least one, and preferably many, positive male influences, the boy would likely "take up with a bad crowd" or otherwise "go bad". It was simply accepted that a woman could not raise a boy to manhood without men helping her; call it primitive, call it tribalistic if you will, but it was known and furthermore was true as we can see to our sorrow nowadays.
Some amount of the crime in inner cities is a direct result of lack of decent men in the lives of boys as they grow up. That's quantifiable, within some error bounds. Reduce divorce and the number of cars stolen, the number of armed robberies committed, the number of deaths from druge overdoses and turf wars, etc. will decline to some degree, over a generation, because there will be fewer shiftless young men who do not have the impulse control to keep from sticking up a stop 'n rob, spending the money on crack and shooting some other shiftless young man for the heck of it.
It is known via countless studies that sexual molestation of children is higher in stepfamilies. Fathers with stepdaughters do not have the same bond as they do with daughters. What can we expect to happen in polygamous marriages? Nothing good, I warrant. Children who are sexually molested are damaged emotionally, some for the rest of their lives. This can also be quantified, although it is more difficult. Given the lawsuit in Utah that is ongoing, which cites Lawrence to justify polygamy, and given the language of Goodridge, there is no way to stop the poly's from their goal once homosexual marriage is imposed. There is one more thing: polygamy tends in time to produce a notable excess of young men who have no chance at marriage. The Mormons were fortunate indeed to have that bad cultural artifact taken away from them after only a couple of generations or so; in time, it might have destroyed them either from within due to societal breakdown, or from without if they attempted to send their excess young men out on expansionist efforts. I suspect that more than a few of the Islamic jihads of the first 1000 years or so were due to young men deciding to raid for brides. China is facing this in the next 20 years thanks to their one-child policy. We don't need this here.
We stand on a precipice. Any society requires a certain, not always knowable, percentage of decent, honest, people to function. If too many people within a society become emotionally and/or intellectually damaged to the extent that they cannot function above the level of a small time street thug, it become impossible for that society to continue to carry on in the same way. The evidence is clear: once homosexual marriage is forced upon us, other deviations will demand and get their 'rights' as well. This will lead inexorably to an increase in sexual molestation, emotionally stunting childhoods in bizarre families, and a general decline in the competence and (dare I say it?) morality of the society. At some point in the not very distant future, it will become ever more difficult to raise a normal human being to be a productive adult, be they power-company lineman, mother, teacher or neurosurgeon, or anything in between. Then the lights will start to go out...literally, in some places, because of an excess of incompetent drones whose only skills are varying forms of social parasitism.
Millman takes a very short term view. The house is on fire, yes, and needs something sprayed on it, but not the tanker full of gasoline he (and Sullivan, and others) advocate.
Marc Comtois has posted thoughtful explanations of his intended votes. Firstly, I have to say that I'm glad to be in a different district. Marc's choice for U.S. Congress is incumbent Democrat Jim Langevin or Republican challenger Chuck Barton. In a state that no national Republican strategist counts on for numbers, I simply couldn't pull the lever for Barton, and here's why:
On social issues, Barton differs from most conservative Republicans."I am very moderately pro-choice," he said. "My belief is that (abortion) is a very difficult, personal issue that the government should stay out of." And Barton, an Episcopalian, said that he would "probably" not vote for Bush's proposed constitutional amendment that marriage be exclusively between a man and a woman. "I'm not going to fall in line with all national Republican stances," he said.
In contrast, Langevin is on the National Advisory Board of Democrats for Life. In the state government, Rs are needed just to derive any benefit from the friction of a two-party system — not so at the federal level.
Marc also goes through the spending bills on the ballot, and I have to admit that he's done his homework better than I have. Still, I consider my vote little more than a protest gesture, and moreover, I think if we're going to get Rhode Island government under control, people are going to have to learn that we can't allow our representatives to spend on everything but the basics and then go back to the till crying about how essential the basics are. To be honest, it strikes me as a con.
We need money for roads? Put up toll booths so people can see their income draining. Let people truly face the prospect of having to go forty miles out of their way because there's no money left to fix a bridge. Funding requests on my ballot get NOs down the line. Rhode Island is so deep in the blue that there will be plenty of opportunities to vote for infrastructure investments before we've managed to bring some parity (and sanity) to the statehouse.
As you may have noticed, I've gone ahead and signed up with BlogAds. In the various blog rankings, Dust in the Light has been climbing steadily, and while the post-election season will probably bring a general blogosphere dip in traffic (although I think folks are overguessing it), my individual activities are starting to look promising for keeping the numbers up.
If you've something to hawk to the audience of a Catholic conservative artist writer New Englander type, please consider taking out an ad. If you fall on the consumer end of the spectrum, please take a look at what the sponsors have to offer; I do intend to be responsibly discerning with respect to the ads that I accept.
You'll have to take me at my word that I don't think it matters one way or another, but I'm not convinced that this is bin Laden. The nose is a little different (although the tape's blurry), but more strikingly, he looks too, well, bin Ladenesque. The guy's been in hiding for years, knowing that the United States is after him, knowing that we pulled Saddam from his rat hole, and he takes the precaution of what... growing his beard a bit and losing some weight? I'm not defending any heavily vested opinions, here, but al Qaeda's had an awfully long time to dig up a look-alike.
Whether it's bin Laden or not, though, al Qaeda's got a mixed message to resolve. After all, we Americans — quaking at the thrice-uttered "guilty" — are still absorbing this:
The magnitude and ferocity of what is coming your way will make you forget all about September 11th. ... After decades of American tyranny and oppression, now it's your turn to die. Allah willing, the streets of America will run red with blood, matching drop for drop the blood of America's victims," the man, calling himself "Azzam the American," says on the tape.
And now the head guy himself (or a reasonable facsimile) comes out of hiding with what sounds almost like an apology:
It never occurred to us that he, the commander in chief of the country, would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone, because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important. ...I want to talk to you about the reasons behind these events. And yet I — and I'll be honest with you, that the moment that we took the decision — let me say to you that God only knows that we never thought about attacking the towers.
So are Americans all "guilty, guilty, guilty" and doomed to a bloody "magnitude and ferocity," or did 9/11 take more lives than intended because Bush forgot his superhero cape back at the ranch?
PROEM:
If you have an issue (so to speak) with the layout of this page, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
As one might expect from a thinker uber alles, Ramesh Ponnuru takes a circumspect approach to Andrew Sullivan's reasons for coming out for Kerry. He disagrees with Sullivan, to be sure, suggesting that a better way to spur Democrats toward adopting the War on Terror as their own would be to defeat them, this year, and hope that they put up a more palatable candidate next time around. But then he adds a paragraph on behalf of single-issue voters:
A number of critics have raised the question whether Sullivan is being a "one-issue voter," who is letting his strong opposition to the FMA determine his positions on other issues. He denies it. Perhaps the same-sex marriage debate has colored his view of Bush and Kerry: Can any of us really say with 100 percent confidence why we believe all the things we do? To be Breyer-like for a moment: I can't say with 100 percent confidence that I wouldn't cut Kerry more slack in other areas if he were pro-life.
I'll frankly confess that I've had isolated moments when the ebbs and flows of the political year have made me wonder whether I could support President Bush if he were more Arnold Schwarzenegger than Mel Gibson. But in the final analysis, Ponnuru's appeal to the natural tendency to struggle in our own measuring of issues overlooks four decisive points in the case of Sullivan and Kerry.
First is the naked transparency of the whole thing. Andrew Sullivan is — or was — a formidable political analyst. How is it, then, that he can swallow the huge pill of Kerry's campaign-year rhetoric about strength in the War on Terror, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, and still know to wink at Kerry's campaign-year rhetoric about his same-sex marriage position's being "the same as" President Bush's?
We need only look to Sullivan's record for illustration of how he swallows the "reporting for duty" nonsense. Allow me to quote an "outrageous argument" from March 1 that, based purely on his sudden anti-Bush (and anti-Mel) turn, I predicted that Sullivan would make:
A lot of the initial gutsy moves required to kick off the War on Terror have already been made. Once in office, Kerry wouldn't pull back on that progress, and what we need now is a President who will refocus international cooperation toward the group effort of the more-subtle work that lays ahead.
Before March was over, I'd traced that argument on Sullivan's part here and here. Now, here's a bit of Sullivan's recent New Republic piece:
Bush's comparative advantage--the ability to pull the trigger when others might balk--will be largely irrelevant. That doesn't mean it hasn't come in handy. Without Bush, Saddam would still be in power. But just because the president was suited to fight the war for the last four years doesn't mean he is suited to succeed at the more complicated and nuanced tasks of the next four.
My second point in response to Ponnuru relates to the first: if President Bush had changed his tune to support, say, abortion on demand, while Kerry was less so, I'm confident that both Ramesh and I would more honestly incorporate that consideration in our expressed reasoning. It isn't difficult to imagine making the argument that, as necessary as the War on Terror might be, it is more important that Western society be worth saving. It is the degree to which Sullivan has endeavored to make the War on Terror issue a plus for Kerry, rather than an unfortunate side effect that grates. Which relates to:
Third, Sullivan was never ambivalent about the War on Terror, or even about the Battle of Iraq. Indeed, the TNR piece is evidence that he still is not. But that's what makes the underlying single-issue-voter mentality that some perceive so objectionable. If one believes that the entire WoT argument on Kerry's behalf is contrived — and poorly, at that — then Sullivan is palpably risking catastrophic failure on a matter of life and death for the sake of the mere prospect of an obstacle in his rush for same-sex marriage.
For the final point, I'll return to Ponnuru's hypothetical shift in Kerry's platform. The fact of the matter is that the Democrats generally, and Kerry specifically, incorporate both the pro-abortion and anti-war perspectives. One can argue that this reality is merely a result of circumstances and how each party has coalesced, or one can sense that there's an underlying worldview that merges the two stands. I lean toward the latter. It is impossible to imagine one's reaction to a pro-life/anti-war Democrat presidential candidate, because it is impossible to imagine a pro-life Democrat of any sort becoming a presidential candidate. There is something that ties its devotion to abortion with the party's approach to foreign affairs.
For his part, Sullivan has a career invested in falling in a midway niche — as a conservatively inclined libertine. In that context, most of those who've been critical of Sullivan have been so not because he's a "single-issue voter," but because they feel that they've seen which aspect of his personality, when push comes to shove, rules over the other. When he finds he must lie down with one of two groups that he finds undesirable, which does he choose?
We all know now. And so dramatically was it revealed that one wonders whether it was ever a struggle, really. Conservatives certainly ought to be suspicious of Sullivan's attempts to drag an issue of remaining agreement with him as he wriggles away.
ADDENDUM:
Well, I see Mr. Sullivan has kudized me with his first-ever (direct) link to Dust in the Light. I won't reply at length, because we seem to be largely in agreement except where agreement is impossible. Writes Sullivan, "This notion that writers somehow exist in a purely rational world outside of human emotion, passion, sensibility and bias is a silly one." Exactly.
"Well, the great thing about a blog is that if you really care that much, you can see all the evidence splayed out in front of you." Yup, and as it happens, I've read Sullivan's writing on same-sex marriage (and related topics) from the past fifteen years carefully and with a reasonable degree of thoroughness. He may disagree with my conclusion, but I hold it honestly and derived it fairly. In fact, when I finished reading his book Love Undetectable — which I continue to recommend highly to anybody interested in him or issues around homosexuality — I questioned whether the thesis with which I'd begun wasn't uncharitable and wrong.
Going back through his blog archives, however, renewed my conviction, perhaps for the very reason that Sullivan now notes:
And the point of a blog like this is not to persuade everyone I'm right; but simply to show how one person can grapple with a variety of factors - personal, intellectual, historical, political - in coming to a simple conclusion.
Leaving aside the question of the Daily Dish's "point," Sullivan's plea skirts an important distinction. The piece in support of Kerry wasn't on the blog; it was on TNR. And my central complaint is that many of those who "really care that much" about his formative grappling see underlying agendas that aren't clearly acknowledged, either on the blog or in more polished pieces.
I do not know why, but for some reason, I'm suddenly optimistic about things. Full of trust and faith. Even though the mortgage payment due on the first of December — i.e., the poised hatchet — arrived in the mail today, it doesn't worry me. Something good is coming.
(Famous last words?)
Much pondering has finally piled up behind my inertial walls, and I've decided to go ahead and start a group blog for Rhode Island conservatives (actually, anybody who agrees that Rhode Island is too partisan and/or has to begin toning down its liberalism). The blog is currently in production, and I've already got one other writer signed on.
The plan is to offer broadly relevant commentary, but from a Rhode Island perspective. Each blogger will be able to choose his or her own content (within reason), but for my part, the local emphasis may give me a context in which to scratch my multimedia itch and to explore arts and tradition in my neck of the woods. (Not to worry, though — Dust in the Light shouldn't suffer in its own, unique mission.) Once things start rolling, I'll make some effort to promote it, and hopefully it'll eventually manage to provide not only a social/political benefit for Rhode Island, but also a financial/professional benefit for the writers.
The first order of business is to name the thing, and for this, I'm open to suggestions. As one (not very strict) guide, I plan to use the State Seal, which is the word "hope" over an anchor and some wave-like squiggles, as a focal point of the design. Currently on the table: Out of the Blue, Alternative Hope, RI Alternative, AltRI, Hope's Anchor, Anchoring Hope, Anchoring RI. Anything catch your eye or spark a different idea?
Finally, any Rhode Islanders who are interested in writing for the blog should feel free email me (use the link in the left-hand column). I'll want some samples; if you've already got a blog, send along a link. A brief description of your views, location, and occupation would be helpful, too.
ADDENDUM:
Well, wouldn't you know it. There's already a blog called Out of the Blue — and it's based in Rhode Island! (The blog is actually a rediscovery; I think I've even interacted with its writer over on Michael Williams's blog. But it must have slipped my mind.) Guess I'll scratch that title off the list.
Oh well. But congrats to Larry for his recent marriage, though!
ADDENDUM II:
I find myself partial to "Raising Hope," which seems appropriate on many levels.
As if homespun political clashes aren't enough to fear after the election, Chuck Colson implores us to remember the stakes of choosing the right leader:
I have come to the sobering conclusion that we are in greater danger of a nuclear strike today than we were during the Cold War.That being the case, can we really wait until an attack to go after the terrorists who perpetrate it? Or do we have to, instead, rethink the whole spirit of Just War arguments, accepting that preemption is the only humane and just solution in an age of terror to accomplish what the Just War doctrine proposes? Today we are dealing with an irrational enemy who knows it cannot conquer us, but will do everything in its power to destabilize us. Can we wait until the attacks—perhaps killing tens of thousands—or should we seek them out and destroy them before they have a chance to destroy us?
I agree with Lane Core; despite all hopes and prayers to the contrary, I'm not confident that a Democrat/Leftist hoard that has stoked its own flames to the heights that they've currently reached will be in a mood to wait out another presidential term when they lose:
Physical violence and outrageous lies: those are not the tactics of people who are confident they're going to win. Nor are they, I think, the tactics of people who are concerned that it's going to be a close race. They are the tactics of people who are pretty sure they're going to lose.And they are not, most importantly, the tactics of people who drop such tactics and go back to work or school when they have lost.
There's only a split-second hair's breadth of delusion between aiming a car at a politician and doing so without swerving at the last minute. It may be that electoral defeat will deflate the passions, but I tend to doubt it. Violence is more likely. Wild political attacks and unsubstantiated attempts to impeach President Bush would seem a safe bet. With so many people having hammered references to Nazis and the end of civilization into desperate, immediate rallying cries, they couldn't all just throw up their hands and go back to a low simmer.
ADDENDUM:
It seems to me this represents another warning against voting for Kerry in the hopes of changing the Democrats and their supporters. A victory will vindicate the anything-goes campaign strategy and will add a juicy reward for the years-long hatred high of the liberal rank and file. As seems usually to be the case, appeasement is not a long-term solution.
Be sure to check out Rhode Islander Carroll Andrew Morse's TCS response to Sullivan and Hitchens:
Sullivan and Hitchens are correct in their assertion that winning the Presidency will give John Kerry and the Democratic Party a renewed seriousness about dealing with the security of the United States. But they are mistaken in assuming that a renewed seriousness will automatically translate into the pursuit of victory over terrorism. The office of Presidency did not make Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter, leaders honestly concerned about the security of the United States, serious about winning the primary global conflict of their era. John Kerry is the heir to that tradition.
Hitchens may be another matter, but I still think Sullivan's argument is getting much more serious treatment than it deserves.
Following the previous post, a link to Cox & Forkum's cartoon today seems appropriate.
Michael Berry of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, thinks the American Catholic Church should just shut up about politics:
Anyone not convinced that we need to reinstitute civics classes in our schools should read your Oct. 12 front-page article "Conservative Catholics push for Bush."A basic understanding of our Constitution should make one cringe at "an alliance of bishops intent on throwing the weight of the Roman Catholic Church into the election," or on reading that the Bush campaign has spent four years "cultivating" Catholic leaders and "hiring a corps of paid staff members."
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, of Colorado, who all but said that a vote for John Kerry is a sin, could be a poster boy for an effort to repeal tax-exempt status for churches.
Berry does us the service of offering an object lesson in how a Constitutional amendment intended to protect religious freedom transforms into manacles with which to restrict it. Of course, I haven't any knowledge of Berry's other opinions about matters of the day, but there are a few particulars about which I could speculate that surely aren't wild guesses. The media and United Nations conspiring to influence our election? Well, that's an important protection against tyranny. Another Supreme Court justice suggests that it's a good thing that our judiciary is increasingly taking note of legal happenings in other nations? Well, global community and all that.
The bishops take pains to explain how their faith ought to apply to something as crucial for believers as their vote in government elections? Slap those boys down! Can't have morality preached from the pulpit! The American way is, after all, to restrict the political application of religion to cynical references for rubes and vague feelings about the righteousness of giving handouts to the poor and environmentalists.
Continues Mr. Berry:
A more widespread understanding of the principle of separation of church and state is needed.
Amen, brother. I'm even starting to agree about tax exemption, which seems only to corrupt our thinking about what is and isn't appropriate for religious organizations to do.
One problem that arises when those whom a society allocates as professional watchers become relentlessly partisan is that entire storylines can be missed. Crucially important storylines pop up as incidents, here and there, and are allowed to slip away; without sustained attention, and not having the resources to become international reporters themselves, regular folks just lose the thread.
Well, by now you've surely heard about this:
Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
The idea of Russia's having a hand in cleansing Iraq before the war brought to mind my musing — at about the same time that Russian boots were quietly collecting sand in Iraq — that it would make for a good fiction plot to imagine the end of the Cold War as a ruse, to allow the Communists to work behind the scenes to undermine the capitalist West. In looking for that post, however, I also came across another, from April 2003, wherein I quoted a Telegraph piece by David Harrison as follows:
Top secret documents obtained by The Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders.Moscow also provided Saddam with lists of assassins available for "hits" in the West and details of arms deals to neighbouring countries. The two countries also signed agreements to share intelligence, help each other to "obtain" visas for agents to go to other countries and to exchange information on the activities of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qa'eda leader.
In retrospect, however, the espionage angle of that report mightn't be the most important. Instead, consider this:
Another document, dated March 12, 2002, appears to confirm that Saddam had developed, or was developing nuclear weapons. The Russians warned Baghdad that if it refused to comply with the United Nations then that would give the United States "a cause to destroy any nuclear weapons".
A quick Google search of the only direct quotation from the March 12 document gives the impression that most of those news organizations and bloggers who chose to mention it highlighted the information-cooperation angle in the context of U.S./Russia relations, essentially tacking the mention of nuclear weapons onto reports as something that seemed only of potential interest.
Note something else about the mere three pages of Google results: the only major media coverage, apart from the Telegraph, came from the New York Post and Fox News. For some perspective of how insignificant that coverage is, search for "Abu Ghraib."
Unraveling these threads becomes all the more significant if we add in James Robbins's suggestion that much the same dynamic has been at play in the search for WMDs:
So between the al Qaqaa explosives, the dual-use equipment, the Tuwaitha nuclear material, the missing chemical weapons, and the Syrian connection, it sounds like the WMD rationale is much stronger than most critics give it credit for. One can only imagine what Saddam would have done given the chance to put them all together.
Speaking of putting things together, the thesis that begs to be tested is just how tangential the various threads to this story really are. How huge of a storyline has been permitted to submerge, here, I don't know. But somehow I suspect it would be better to find out sooner than later.
A couple of weekends ago, my wife, daughters, and I met with her brother's family, including two more children who never knew the 1900s, as well as two of my sister-in-law's friends to traverse a jack-o'-lantern trail in Newport. As we crossed the street to the entrance, whom should I spot heading our way but Patrick Kennedy. Almost to himself, he said, "Oh, little ones"; the utterance was followed by a momentary blank look, as if his brain was loading the script for dealing with toddlers.
In that moment, I looked toward my wife, and her expression asked, "You don't have to say anything, do you?" I smiled.
But when I turned back toward my district's representative in the United States Congress, he was gone. Apparently, he'd spotted my sister-in-law's friend's W. hat and decided it prudent to veer away.
In today's Impromptus, Jay Nordlinger shares some notes from his emailbox regarding political buttons, and while some allude to dirty looks, nobody has mentioned political accoutrements' use as congressman-bane. For some wry bloggers, of course, that might be a reason not to wear any.
ADDENDUM:
Just to highlight one of Mr. Nordlinger's shared emails (brackets his):
"Jay, I live in the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco — Walnut Creek, to be exact. The Kerry-Edwards clipboard patrol is often soliciting donations at the local supermarket. I ignore them, except this one time. A very young, very pretty college-coed type asked as I passed by, 'Will you help defeat Bush with a donation?' I replied, 'No thanks, but I am glad to see some younger citizens getting involved in politics.' Since I'm over 50, I felt it was an okay remark, without condescension. Her reply was quick and chilling: 'Bush's concentration camps will be filled with the Jews, then the blacks!' Her eyes had become dark flint and her expression was pure malevolence. For only the third time in my life, I was left utterly speechless. [The letter-writer does not say what the other two times were.] I shook my head and walked slowly to the car. What in G*d's name had been poured into that young lady's head? Did she even know what she was saying?"I'm voting (for Bush) like my life depends on it, and sending the NRA another donation."
I've got Mr. Mom duty on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the time being, and either today or yesterday (sorry... blur), my heading-toward-three year old and I were watching Sesame Street. Thereon, Ernie wanted to play "the opposite game," but Burt protested that, every time he actually agreed to play a game with his roommate, said roommate called it quits and walked away.
Well, wonder of wonders, after Ernie had goaded Burt into declaring "Okay, I'll play!" by interrupting with the opposite of everything he said, the instigator was stumped. "Play?" said Ernie. "Gee, I can't think of an opposite for 'play.' Guess the game is over."
That's a clichéd interaction, in comedy, but it came to mind, today, after my wife relieved me of Mr. Mom duties, and I zipped through my Internet rounds. "I've got a new game," said Andrew Sullivan. "I'll make a ridiculous, translucent argument for my John Kerry vote, and the rest of you can treat it as if it isn't the nakedly contrived product of nearly a year of self-spin."
Perhaps the best line from a responding Burt came from John Hawkins — who, realizing that some people still take Sullivan seriously, offered readers a considered rebuttal:
[Putting John Kerry in office to fight terrorism is] like taking a gazelle, putting it into a cage where the only food is small animals, and expecting it to turn into a carnivore because meat is the only thing it has to eat.
Lileks is good, too, of course, with his rant being broadly applicable to a great deal of Democrat spin:
And let us shed a tear for those who believed it was necessary after 9/11 to knock off Saddam and establish a beachhead in the region 'twixt Iran and Syria, but later ran away shrieking like freshly skinned rabbits because it had somehow, by some odd turn of events, turned into a partisan affair. What scared them off? Who knows? Just happened, I guess. Somewhere between the brutal Afghan winter, the interminable quagmire of the operational pause en route to Baghdad — all 72 hours of it — and the devastating supposition that the turkey Bush presented on Thanksgiving may not have been the actual fowl consumed by the troops, we realized that the war was all failure and lies and failed lies about lying failures, and we can’t do anything and the Plan was wrong and Mission Accomplished, yeah right. Oh, and We Support the Troops.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at an email that Mike Adams shares today:
Based on the facilities that we have in (deleted), our recommendation and request is that both gendered bathrooms on the second floor of (deleted) be made gender-neutral. By this we mean that people of all genders be able to use either of the multi-stalled restrooms on the second floor. The urinals that are currently in one of these bathrooms will be shut down.
I'm also not sure whether to despair or hope. It's sad that the question can even be asked with a straight face (no pun intended), but don't you find it at least conceivable that some not insignificant number of men who are disinclined to join the battle over marriage — for whatever reason — would decide that the "tolerance" movement has just gone too far the day they walk in what used to be a men's room and discover cardboard barricades on all of the urinals?
Here's Andrew Sullivan on Bush's recent comments in support of civil unions:
Who knows what to make of George W. Bush's statement today that he now favors civil unions for gay couples--although his party platform is against them. For what it's worth, I tend to think this is his real position, rather than a belated realization that his extremism on this matter has cost him many votes. But if it is his real position, why didn't he say so before? And how can he support the FMA which specifically bars the "incidents of marriage" for gay couples? President speak in forked tongue.
You know, I'm really beginning to rethink my belief that Andrew Sullivan is a conniving activist; he may very well have convinced himself right into delusion. That part about "a belated realization that his extremism on this matter has cost him many votes" is almost too much to take. Sullivan has personally done everything he possibly could, over the past couple of years, to paint everything having to do with preserving traditional marriage in Fundamentalist Red, and now he has the gall — the gall — continue behaving as if there is no dispute about what the FMA will do, let alone as if he isn't on the wrong side of the analysis.
In fact, I was inclined to allocate some blame to Sullivan's historically obscuring rhetoric for the fact that Michael Totten, writing on Instapundit, would declare Bush's statement a flip-flop. Totten subsequently updated with a link to Eugene Volokh's explanation of why he's wrong, but it is only through the deliberate avoidance of the discussion by folks such as Sullivan that people wouldn't at least know that another side exists. Here's one version, from February, of my explanation about why "incidents of marriage" won't prevent the creation of civil unions (see also here, here, here, and multiple other posts on this blog for more):
So, a legislature could pass a law giving a $10,000 down-payment gift to married couples. It could pass another law giving a $10,000 down-payment gift to civil-unioned couples. Yet, the judiciary could not introduce that same policy arbitrarily, and if it somehow found a right to $10,000 written into the constitution, it's extremely difficult to see why it would be limited to married people, or civil unions, or groups of people, or what have you.In this example, the FMA would restrict both the legislature and the judiciary from expanding that $10,000 marital perk to others on the basis of its being a marital perk. In the amendment's language, the fact that married couples are currently entitled to the money, of itself, cannot be construed to require that other couples or groups are similarly entitled. But a legislature, by its nature, isn't limited to discerning what the law requires or restricted from setting up parallel perks; a judiciary, by its nature, is.
These arguments have been around for years. I know: I've been one of the people making them for that long. If you haven't heard them — particularly if you've paid as much attention to the issue as Andrew Sullivan has — it's because you haven't been listening.
I think I'm ready for winter. Something about the chill in the air as I walked the dog bit pleasantly. Maybe I'm just in the mood for it to be a few months from now. When I used to spend my Sundays on a mountain in the Catskills powerwashing wood and styrofoam boxes out of which I'd spent part of the week selling fish to suburbanites, I imagined a drug that would leave me functional but completely unconscious until the spring thaw.
One year, just after the insane holiday season of a Tristate Area fish huckster, I left for Sunday's work so sick that it took me about twenty-five miles just to decide on a place to turn around and head back toward my bed. The boxes waited patiently.
That same year — whether the same week or not, I don't recall — I found myself alone on the mountain, everybody else having gone to a wedding or something. My equipment kept freezing together. The zipper on my raincoat became a gnarled rope of ice. Sweat. Sting. Snot. At last, all was clean, and it was time to load everything on my boss's truck. As I used a long, cold hook to drag my dozenth wooden box (of fifty-something) to the truck, the box caught in the heavy snow, and the hook's handle broke off. I fell forward to my knees.
I remember, at that moment, thinking that it would be bliss to snap — smash a few boxes and storm down the dirt road to my car and fly from the place. Maybe keep going until I cooled off... or thawed. But in that split second, another option came to mind: laugh. Laugh at the image of this pitiful man, on the cusp of his twenties, stomping around in the snow, all alone on a mountain, taking out his frustration on some rickety crates that he'd spent the day cleaning and repairing.
Breathe, laugh, have a smoke while looking out at the fantastic view, and then finish the job. The boxes mightn't fit right, because the lids were all frozen at angles and snow had caked on their corners. It would probably be dark and absolutely silent by the time I finished. But the job would be done. Life would go on, and I wouldn't leave the day having a mess to clean up at some future date — either with the boxes or with my boss.
So maybe wishing away the months is part of my problem. One can rage off the mountain, or one can get done what must get done and walk down.
ADDENDUM:
The little things aren't worth the rage. Wouldn't you say, Michele?
Ry's parents have always encouraged her in her relationships with men, provided they approved of her choice. When she was 16, she fell in love with her first boyfriend but was unsure of where to take things. Several months into the relationship, there were a couple of weeks, her parents recall, when she mooned around the house, talking around and about the relationship, seeming stressed out, uncertain, in need of counsel. ''Finally, my dad said, 'You should just go have sex with him,''' Ry recalled.
Okay, I did change one detail.
(via Marriage Debate blog)
Now, I'm not declaring that any views ought to be banned from the opinion pages, or even that any particular attitude of expression ought to be banned. I'm not denying that providers of argumentation ought to challenge their readers, sometimes even offering them the other side in unvarnished form. After all, once upon a time, the Providence Journal published a strongly worded piece of mine that its targets would surely find offensive. Still, I find myself wondering what the thought processes were that landed Harry Binswanger's assault on the Ten Commandments within that same paper's pages.
That said, excerpts can't capture the permeating turns of phrase designed to cast scorn toward the religious, and I'd prefer to take on Binswanger's ideas, such as they are. Read the full piece to judge for yourself whether it deserved publication. Here's the essence of the rhetorical case:
In sum, the first set of commandments orders you to bow, fawn, grovel and obey. This is impossible to reconcile with the American concept of a self-reliant, self-owning individual.The middle commandment, "Honor thy father and mother," is manifestly unjust. Justice demands that you honor those who deserve honor, who have earned it by their choices and actions. ...
The second set of commandments is unobjectionable but common to virtually every organized society -- the commandments against murder, theft, perjury and the like. But what is objectionable is the notion that there is no rational, earthly basis for refraining from criminal behavior, that it is only the not-to-be-questioned decree of a supernatural Punisher that makes acts like theft and murder wrong.
The basic philosophy of the Ten Commandments is the polar opposite of the philosophy underlying the American ideal of a free society. Freedom requires: a metaphysics of the natural -- not the supernatural; of free will -- not determinism; of the primary reality of the individual -- not the tribe or the family; an epistemology of individual thought, applying strict logic, based on individual perception of reality -- not obedience and dogma; an ethics of rational self-interest, to achieve chosen values, for the purpose of individual happiness on this earth -- not fearful, dutiful appeasement of "a jealous God" who issues "commandments."
Rather than the Ten Commandments, the actual grounding for American values is that captured by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged: "If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."
I like that last line. Apart from the circularity — rationality is sufficient to derive morality, because morality is rationality — how perfect a blind assertion of radical libertarians' central flaw!
The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Thou shalt follow no commandments! Presumably, that includes such "commandments" by which rationality and reason are defined. In that case, what could it possibly mean to apply "strict logic" in a world that bends to "the primary reality of the individual"? Petitio principii? Sorry, bub, not in my reality. Justice demands that I honor my mother and father because they've earned it? Well (the impulse-driven rationalization might go), they'd deserve honor if they'd just stop trying to rope me into helping them with irrational appeals to my status as their "son."
With a nod toward Binswanger's offense at the suggestion that his ideology is inadequate to construct a moral society, let's accept that murder and theft are wrong by definition. "Refraining from criminal behavior" is entirely rational in an "earthly" way; the question is, what behavior ought to be criminal? Sure, it's easy to see that murder is wrong, but what is murder and what is licit killing?
Preborn, or even pre-rational, humans can't express their desire to live, or even their awareness that they are alive. May they be killed? Some might argue that the elderly and disabled drain resources in order to maintain lives that they illogically consider worth preservation. Fair to say "no"? Maybe it isn't theft to commandeer the property of those who devote their resources to imposing on others' freedoms by asserting religious morality in the public sphere; maybe it's "justice."
As I've said of Binswanger before, in tangential context, the option he favors is essentially "unlimited minority rule." Such people have striven to layer abstruse concepts to disguise the conclusion toward which their ideology leads. But a "metaphysics of the natural" becomes an epistemology of determinism dictated by the powerful in the form of chosen values serving a rational self-interest that follows a strict logic that the rest of us are too dense to comprehend. In short:
Let me do whatever I want. To do otherwise would be unacceptably irrational, because there's no rational reason to restrict me.
And thou shalt not be irrational.
I realize I'm being a little unfair to David Morrison by not emphasizing his subsequent comments about the death penalty. However, the following paragraph, from a post decrying the uneven religiosity of political candidates, struck me as pretty typical of this sort of equivalence:
Kerry: I believe abortion is wrong but I will press a pro-abortion agenda as President. Bush: As a society we have obligations to our poorest citizens and our senior citizens but I am not going to oppose a federal law that forbids the Medicare program from negotiating with drug companies for more affordable drug prices.
The Kerry line is clear: abortion is wrong, but not only won't I fight against it, I'll fight for it. The Bush line, on the other hand, dives into the mire of healthcare policy. Allow me to rephrase it in accordance with my considered conclusion about that particular matter:
As a society we have obligations to our poorest citizens and our senior citizens, so I am not going to oppose a federal law that forbids the Medicare program from making the pharmaceutical industry an all-or-nothing business and/or driving the prices so low that companies will exit the market.
As I understand, the law to which David refers still allows regional subdivisions of Medicare to negotiate as desired — just not as a single, government-created behemoth in the market.
Catholics, in particular, seem to have an underlying desire to see their moral sense as transcending politics, and one relatively simple way to enable that self-impression is to split the difference between any two parties or candidates. Unfortunately for that strategy, it will sometimes happen that one side is overwhelmingly preferable to the other. When that's the case, we might find it easier to insist on the existence of substantial disagreement, rather than wonder whether isolated incidents of conflict mean we've misjudged specific issues.
An inclination to equate clear and dire contradictions with intricate policy judgments ought to give us reason for pause.
ADDENDUM:
I didn't delve into the death penalty aspect, here, because it raises far more difficult questions, having to do with differences between various branches of Christianity as well as uncomfortable comparisons of magnitude and guilt with respect to death. Still, although I move further from support for the practice the more I consider it, some form of legalized death penalty still seems to me a matter of judgment — far more so than abortion, at any rate.
After all, when the second criminal rebukes the other that they had been "condemned justly, for the sentence [they] received corresponds to [their] crimes," Jesus did not contradict him.
Another beautiful game from Ferry Halim at Orisinal. Use the fan to blow the balloon to collect flowers in the wine bottle.
Yes, the balloon does end up somewhere. (The destination is part of what makes it beautiful.)
A reader email reminded me that readership has been growing at an increasing rate, yet I've been offering site-related notes less frequently. So: any new readers who find the layout of the blog difficult to read or distracting should try clicking "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column. That ought to improve the view.
As the readership of this blog marches steadily toward the professed circulation numbers of some lower-middle-market newspapers, I've begun to muse about those publications' exorbitant advertising rates. Even halving their price, just a few ads per week would buy down my desperate need to find more-profitable ways to spend my time. Craig Henry recently posted some interesting thoughts about the market for blogs:
Most people are not regular blog readers. The people who are reading represent the early adopters, the committed partisans, the info-junkies. They are, alas, only a small sliver of the news audience and electorate.The rate at which blog readership expands will depend more on the actions of current readers than on those of bloggers. As those readers put their personal credibility behind blog content, they increase the blog-audience in ways the best-written post cannot.
One problem, I've concluded, is that the "small sliver" is made even smaller in context. If I were to start a weekly newsmagazine, for example, I wouldn't initially shoot for the global audience; I'd build local support and then seek to jump to other markets. In contrast, the standard blogger seems to build his or her audience nationally first, which means that bloggers are operating — in a way that's relevant to advertisers — on a different scale. A thousandish daily readers would be a sizable audience if they were all from Rhode Island. Dispersed around the world — as cool as that may sound — your cumulative weight is quite a bit less.
In my case, I happen to believe that there's a market in Rhode Island for the type of alternative content that bloggers offer, even without honing it tremendously around "Rhode Island issues." Just having sympathetic local perspective on national issues can be a powerful comfort. Particularly considering personal experience, and that described in the periodic emails that I receive from my fellow citizens, of feeling isolated in this midnight-blue state, the audience will certainly be receptive. The difficulty is in reaching it.
I've been trying to brainstorm creative, cost-efficient advertising methods. The standard ad placements are too expensive, and frankly, I'm not sure how effective they are anyway. Advertising on other blogs, on the other hand, reaches the diluted audience that I'm hoping to focus regionally. I've been considering getting stickers or t-shirts or something similar and handing them out. I'm open to suggestions, if anybody's got them.
(Of course, it'd be helpful if I could find the time [meaning "money"] to spruce up the rest of Timshel Arts. Such goals as artists and bloggers have seem unpleasantly circular: one needs money to set aside the time to take actions that will bring in money that will increase one's time. I guess the silver lining is that things can build organically when once good fortune strikes.)
I've been meaning to link to a post by David Morrison about public displays of religion:
What strikes me about this controversy is the way that the folks on the side of hiding or banning the expression of religious faith appear to have assumed that human life or the human person can be split in this fashion. A person of deep and sincere faith cannot fully live their public life as though their faith does not inform their opinions or actions and a human community cannot long survive when, collectively, it abandons the very beliefs which many if not most of its members hold.
Very often, lately, it has seemed as if the demand made of religious citizens is that, while they may come to conclusions based on their faith, they must devise some other, non-faith-based routes to the same conclusions before they can give them voice. Certainly, if something is true, one ought to be able to approach its truth in a variety of ways, and no matter the certainty that religious faith might bring, bolstering one's confidence with additional reasoning is always worthwhile.
But one gets the sense that secularists are succeeding in pushing the standard for opinions founded in faith beyond a simple preference for additional arguments. It is as if, in their view, the religious aspect must be overcome — as something that, a priori, raises suspicion about the conclusion. Nevermind that there are multiple sociological, even biological, arguments for the protection of the unborn, for example. If they lead to the same policy position as do a person's religious views, then they are somehow invalid. It is "forcing your faith on others." Back to David:
Another problem with this approach is that it effectively makes millions of Americans who live with faith feel substantially disenfranchised from a public life in which they are supposed to be represented. Their reaction to this feeling of disenfranchisement is often a withdrawal from supporting the public life and a subsequent weakening of the overall society in which we all, whether we live with faith or not and no matter what faith we share, have a stake.
There is, to be sure, another way to react.
Hey, when Ann Coulter is right, she's right. I laughed:
Among his other pointless carping about the war in Iraq, Kerry keeps claiming the military is overextended. His supporters claim Bush has a secret plan to bring back the draft. Whatever happened to all those gays who wanted to join the military? We haven't heard a peep out of them lately. How about rounding up a "Coalition of the Fabulous," Sen. Kerry? And what does his good pal Mary Cheney tell him about that?
I wondered:
The Party of Ideas is now equating Halliburton with Enron. The only surprise is that Edwards didn't throw in Watergate and Abscam just for good measure.As even the New York Times admitted the day after the vice presidential debate, "[T]here is no evidence Mr. Cheney has pulled strings on Halliburton's behalf" and "The independent General Accountability Office concluded that Halliburton was the only company that could have provided the services the Army needed at the outset of the war."
I cried:
On the basis of their own insane, violent behavior toward Republicans, Democrats demand to be put in the White House – so the violence will stop. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before the Kerry campaign announces that anti-Bush insurgents control most of the Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters, and that the sooner the U.S. pulls out of those quagmires the better.
I first became aware of Cliff May when he was the Republican on a show that pitted hyperpartisans against each other. The hyperpartisan Democrat — some former politician or other — ran out of arguments against the point that May was making and resorted to the weasel's undermining strategy of complimenting his opponent on how well he "does his job." The implication being, of course, that May's arguments didn't count, that they couldn't be sincerely offered, because his job was to spin, and he was spinning.
So, yes, there are such considerations to be made when reading a piece that he recently wrote about the confirmed case for war in Iraq, including the insistence that we can't yet discount the possibility of WMDs:
For another, because no one — including opponents of the war — knew that Saddam no longer had WMD stockpiles.And Gen. Michael DeLong, former Deputy Commander of the US Central Command, is among those who still do not believe it. "There was WMD in Iraq before and during the war," he says. "You have multiple-source intelligence. Also, from other Arab leaders -- as Tommy Franks [the general who led the U.S. operation to liberate Iraq] says in his book -- King Abdullah said Saddam has WMD. President Mubarek of Egypt said ... Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Other leaders who have chosen not to be named said the same thing. We had technical intelligence that saw the same thing."
What happened to those weapons? General DeLong recalls: "Two days before March 19, 2003, we saw quite a number of vehicles going into Syria. We could not go after them because we said we'd give Saddam 48 hours. A lot of (Iraqi) leaders went into Syria, and a lot of WMD went into Syria. We've gotten indications some went into Lebanon, and probably some went into Iran. ...We've done calculations that you could probably bury 16 Eiffel Towers or Empire State Buildings and never find them in the desert."
Still, the question isn't whether May has ulterior motives for writing such a column; it's whether he makes any valid points. It has become a cliché to refer to "experiencing history in the making," but I don't think I've ever felt the truth of the phrase more than in the post-war argument over WMDs. Don't ever forget how quickly the storyline became that none existed. For a variety of reasons, analysis of the world as-is isn't often performed with an emphasis on exhausting all possible explanations, as well as others that might negate them.
At the very least, history will vindicate George W. Bush's decision, I'm confident. And it's hardly a stretch to hold that history may prove that we were wrong to declare ourselves wrong about some of its justifications.
I've got much to blog about, both links and musings, but I just can't get myself to it. First, I restarted the morning job search; then I started doing the editing from which I was distracted last night. In between it all, I've clicked the mouse around the Internet expecting... something. Not sure what. The upswing of a blessing in disguise, I guess.
Sorry for the lack of posts, today. Just as I was preparing to get under way with my evening work, the phone rang, and a huge wall fell on me. A brick one, interwoven from my faith to my household economics. Regarding the economics, things might be tight for a while. Regarding the faith, well, I'm glad I've managed to develop it as much as I have in the few years since my conversion.
Lileks recently dipped into the deeper discoursive pool of faith, wrapping up with a line about religion that I've committed to memory:
It's almost a spiritual version of George Carlin's law: anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.
The rhetorical application is made all the more delicious, of course, by the fact that it derives from George Carlin, of all people.
Why is it that those who place "tolerance" toward the top of their personality résumés seem so often not to understand what the quality actually entails? Being tolerant of another person — interacting with that person so as not to cause offense — means understanding his views and considering them in how and when one approaches sensitive topics. It isn't toleration, for one thing, to tell somebody whom you've hurt by poking a sore spot that you ought to be able to poke because he oughtn't consider the spot to be sore.
Another Jonah Goldberg emailer (a group that's beginning to become a candidate for its own NRO-moderated blog) offers the latest instance of what has been a common example, lately:
I think a better example would be if Cheney's daughter happened to be a convert to Islam or Judaism, and the Bush administration was pursuing laws that somehow limited the rights of religious expression. (I know we're playing with some way out there hypotheticals right now, but bear with me.) If Kerry pointed out that Jews/Muslims were human beings with the right to express their religious affiliation and pointed to Cheney's daughter as an example of that, would that be shameful? There's nothing wrong with being a member of a religion, and there's nothing wrong with being gay. The difference in opinion on this issue stems from whether people think being gay is shameful, embarrassing, or unfortunate in the first place.
Before addressing the point, we must clear up a couple of slips or sleights (whichever they happen to be). Note, first, the equation of supporting the codification of the status quo (traditional marriage) with pursuing laws that would do something that is not currently done (further infringement on religious liberty). This conflation is characteristic of the arguments of those who advocate for same-sex marriage: they act as if it wouldn't be a change, speaking as if the Federal Marriage Amendment would remove a right that homosexuals have historically enjoyed.
Note, second, that the emailer lists two specific religions in his analogy but names the affront as against "religious expression" generally. The difference may seem minimal, but the emotional tug of the thing changes if we correct for this problem: suppose John Kerry were a Muslim, Atheist, or even a Protestant and his daughter were notable for being a Roman Catholic. What would be the reaction if, asked about school choice in a debate, President Bush brought up her name in a response suggesting that Kerry favors anti-Catholic discrimination by excluding religious schools from voucher programs, insinuating that he and the daughter were united against Kerry? Or up the emotional ante: what if the moderator had asked about fuel efficiency, and President Bush had mentioned John Edwards's son, who died in a car accident, as a presumed supporter of large, solid automobiles? (Goldberg gives some other examples toward the end of a recent column.)
Getting back to tolerance, it seems to me that a person who is compassionate with respect to differences would avoid the arsenal of logical leaps, anachronisms in cultural reality, and (especially) fundamentalist insistence that all arguments must be approached as if that person's view were undeniably correct. Now, I don't know how the Cheney family handled Mary's coming out. I don't know what their Thanksgiving dinner discussions involve. Nonetheless, I can say that Jonah's emailer shows utter contempt for the other side and its ability to think in something other than black and white when he writes:
There's nothing wrong with being a member of a religion, and there's nothing wrong with being gay.
Is there no religion for which membership would be something wrong? More precisely, is there no approach to religion that could be wrong? Even just a sensitive topic within a family? Apparently, a great many part-time spokesmen for gay rights believe there to be something wrong with subscribing to a religion that believes homosexual impulses ought to be resisted and treated as an urge to sin. And apparently, that particular something is so wrong that to so much as leave the possibility open indicates hypocrisy, at best, and bigotry, at worst.
There's nothing wrong with having feelings of attraction toward people of one's own sex, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to define one's own view as objective reality. The difference of opinion on the former count stems from whether people think the attraction is contrary to what is evident in the way in which God formed us. The difference of opinion on the latter count stems from whether people are even willing to admit that that's what they're doing.
It's of dubious sagacity to take anything Andrew Sullivan writes as being more sincere than an activist's rhetoric. However, something that he wrote about the name-drop heard 'round the world raises an interesting point:
In many speeches on marriage rights, I cite Mary Cheney. Why? Because it exposes the rank hypocrisy of people like president Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney who don't believe gays are anti-family demons but want to win the votes of people who do. I'm not outing any gay person. I'm outing the double standards of straight ones.
Note the false dilemma: one must either support same-sex marriage, or one must believe that "gays are anti-family demons." With a single logical fallacy, Sullivan sweeps away any possibility that a person can have principled reasons for taking the President's position on the issue. Swept away, too, must be any comprehensible description of the Christian "respect for the person" approach.
There's simply no use engaging such people as Sullivan in discussion — which, I increasingly suspect, is sort of the point of what they're doing.
Dennis Prager makes well a point that bears making and remaking:
[The Democrats] say this: There are far more terrorists in Iraq since the invasion, and, therefore, the invasion was a mistake.Yet, in order to believe that the greater number of terrorists in Iraq means the invasion was a mistake, you have to believe one or both of the following -- that were it not for the invasion, the terrorists who are in Iraq would have been engaged in some peaceful work in some other country, or that they are newly minted terrorists who were perhaps selling shoes prior to the war in Iraq.
Someday (perhaps upon retirement), I'd like to put together a collection of positions that everybody knows are distorted for political reasons. John Kerry's position on same-sex marriage, for one thing. Jeff Miller recently found further evidence of another one:
"It would have eviscerated a woman's right to choose in the State of Florida,'' Silver said.So what exactly was being done to eviscerate a woman's right?
The law requires abortionists in the state to inform women about the age and development of their unborn child and provide them with a state-published pamphlet suggesting abortion alternatives.Oh my! Forcing mothers to know the age of the child which is about to be killed is just so tacky on the part of the government. We are all just suppose to play along in the deception that there is something other than a child in the womb. When it comes to knowledge about pregnancy - Mums the word. Especially since they don't want Mom to be the word. And then the evil government was also forcing women to know about alternatives to abortion and that they could be entitled to government benefits if they have their child. Knowledge is a dangerous thing and keeping women ignorant is a major part of the pro-abortion movement.
When signing up to support a woman's "right to choose," be sure to read the fine print — keeping an eye out for the "on the basis of select information" clause.
That's the question that crosses my mind when I read such letters as that which Mr. Benjamin Morton of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, sent to the Providence Journal to offer his fellow citizens a refresher on a certain brand of history, popular among elite academics. I've italicized a couple of choice sentiments:
Imagine historians in a world where Hitler had won World War II excusing him for the slaughter of millions by extolling his vision of gaining new territory for a superior race. The genocide of Native Americans claimed far more people than the Holocaust, but this is easily written off by the morally certain culture that carried out the atrocities.Contrary to Bowden's rosy picture, the United States has not ended war but, rather, made it more violent and prevalent. It did not end slavery until after much of the rest of the world did so. And it is still immersed in religious fundamentalism as groups bomb abortion clinics and try to bring back prayer in public schools.
Bowden's outright racism toward Native Americans and Muslims deserves the violent response now brewing across the Muslim world. This racism is not the answer to terrorism -- it is the cause. When I read words like his I fear for our world, just as much as when I hear a tape from Osama bin Laden.
Bowden's whitewashing of America's cruelty and his incitement to violence will bring both upon us.
Speaking of OBL, didn't one of his tapes say something about people's reaction to a strong horse and to a weak horse?
ADDENDUM:
By the way, remember when it was all the rage for Morton's ilk to say such things as, "Of course terrorism is horrible, but..."? Well, it occurs to me that they never — or rarely, at best — qualify their anti-Americanism in that way, as in, "Of course America has done some good things in the world, but..."
If my blog's traffic statistics matched a hypothetical line-graph of my stress-level trend, I'd be a very happy blogger, indeed. Posts to come... once I've managed to pull my shoulders down below my ears and can rotate my head from side to side again.
In yesterday's Corner, Jonah Goldberg posted an email from a Georgetown freshman who characterizes himself as an "agnostic nontheist" (an atheist wishing to cover his bets?) and who makes a hobby of attempting to construct morality without the use of a Supreme Being:
The linchpin is self-interest.Everyone does, for better or for worse, what they believe is in their own self-interest. However, us being more advanced cerebrally than animals, we've discovered that forming social covenants (i.e. government) that cause us to pledge to respect, in a variety of ways, the self-interest of others, is in all of our self-interests. Because, given the uncertainty of the future, even if we're strong today, we could be weak tomorrow -- or given our biological urge to procreate and pass on our genetic code, our offspring generations from now could be oppressed by those who are stronger in the future, if we do not form a society to protect their freedoms.
And thus, from self-interest, are derived concepts such as Fairness, Equality, Liberty, and Freedom.
In rapid succession, three responses followed. A sophomore at UPenn provides the first instinct of a theist:
Self-interest does not account for any of the most important things in life. Why do soldiers die for their country? Why would anyone die for anything, if self-interest reigned? A parent for a child? A husband for a wife? Sane people will acknowledge that these actions are "good". But they glorify a radical rejection of self-interest for a higher purpose.
Another reader incorporates the reality of self-interest into theism:
For me, the salient point is that God challenges His people to define self-interest in a new way, apart from secular standards of morality. If I act according to self-interest as God defines it, I will inevitably act against self-interest as the secular world defines it.
And yet another speculates about the dangers of an atheist regime:
He identifies precisely why I don't trust atheists: the only reason he will support my freedom is his self-interest, and I have rather less confidence than he does that his perception of his self-interest won't change someday to accommodate enslaving me. I rely for my freedom on those who believe that freedom is God-given, and will not take it away no matter how advantageous they would find the prospect.
These three are all great points, and as one who now, after conversion from my own version of "agnostic nontheism," Orthodox Intellectualism, finds them all correct and persuasive, I still must admit that they are not adequate. Our Georgetown student and many others who share his frame of mind will eventually think to reply as follows:
Human beings realized, at some point, that individual sacrifice was necessary for community perpetuation. It is in each individual's interest to admit that some individuals will have to sacrifice themselves to keep the society going. Therefore, out of self-interest, the members of the society conspired to cultivate an irrational morality — whether an unrooted emphasis on honor or some other higher priority deriving from the Divine — that helps the individuals with the misfortune to be on the front line to see their ultimate rejection of self-interest as actually serving it in a more profound way. (And of course, the powerful and privileged will rig the system to lower their odds, which also grants them leeway to question the irrational morality itself.)
Such a scenario has been easy to espouse, over the past centuries, as science has progressed apace while standing before a backdrop of majority Christianity. A problem arises over time, however, when more and more people figure out the game. And we're currently seeing the effects of this idea's escape from ivory towers.
Show me a laborer who would articulate a morality according to long-term self-interest. Show me a poor man who would respect the abstraction of property rights against his own needs and desires. Show me a soldier who would lay down his life in full awareness that he has merely lost the lottery in a necessary cultural illusion.
It remains in the interest of aggregated individuals, therefore, to cultivate a society that ensures some significant percentage of members who believe there to be more to life than self-interest. Over long histories, with the odds that the ultimate sacrifice will be required, the "more" advisably promises an afterlife payoff. To wit, it is in everybody's interest — even the intellectuals' — to behave as if God exists. Even if the atheists are right, in other words, it behooves them not to promote their view.
Now, accepting this argument, we have a choice to make — a choice that strikes me as purposefully unavoidable, even approached from infinite angles. Some people will look at a theist and say, "You desire meaning and immortality, so you have created God to answer your emotional need; I have understood this, so because I desire God's existence, I do not believe in Him." Some theists might reply that their desire for God is evidence of Him.
Just so, the individual and communal instinct to pursue self-interest, leading us to the imperative of belief in God, stands as evidence of His hand at work in our formation, as well as in the way that we, in turn, form our societies. Personally, I have come to feel that humankind will never discover evidence nor invent argument that demands acceptance of either theism or atheism. Still, God must either exist or not exist, without regard to our belief, and if He does, accepting that reality would be a matter of self-interest in countless respects.
ADDENDUM:
A power failure delayed this posting (requiring that I rewrite it in substantial part), and in the interim, Andrew Stuttaford raised the question of an "altruism gene" that ensures an instinctual morality regardless of its philosophical bases' stability. When such arguments branch into genetics, it has seemed to me that the ground on which theists stand becomes even more firm — although again we have the irreducible choice about faith.
Whatever the case, one could argue that our ability to "transcend" instinct is a defining characteristic of humanity. Women are supposed to have a strong instinct to protect their young, including in the womb, after all. Thus, we return to the need for a philosophy — a theology — that preempts our "transcending" the instinct to behave as if we will one day be judged apart from this life.
On Marriage Debate Blog, Eve Tushnet often manages to offer pithy, context-creating commentary when introducing links. For example, introducing a short Newsweek piece about children with homosexual parents:
[Stuff not mentioned: Criticism of existing studies of same-sex parenting; whether kids do best with a mom and dad; what thoughts these particular kids have about the mom & dad idea. There's also a cameo by creepy, bullying Christian teens, woo-hoo. --Eve]
Is it me, or does it seem that bracketed text often offers the gems? This is in marked contrast to those insidious parenthetical interjections, an example of which Dirk Johnson and Adam Piore offer in their Newsweek piece:
For kids of gays, the vast majority of them heterosexual (research shows that kids of gays are not more likely to be gay themselves), it can mean being caught between two worlds and feeling at odds with both.
That parens-slip manages to promote an idea that, at best, needs clarification. It is a flaw of the piece, as a whole, that it doesn't differentiate between children who live with homosexual couples and those who happen to have a biological parent who is gay. (The pictures are all of children with parent & partner.) If the "research" is of the second group, then although I haven't read up on it, I wouldn't be surprised if the statement were true; indeed, it might be possible to use that as evidence that homosexuality is not genetically determined.
If the research is of the first group — children living in homosexual households — then, although there's no decisive information, the statement is more wrong than right. One study, which is relatively old admittedly (1986), found that 23.5% of children of homosexual households were gay themselves; that's much higher than the general population. That finding is in line with multiple studies suggesting that, as Newsweek puts it, "sons and daughters of gays tend not to be as rigid about traditional sex roles."
One of my students complained, yesterday, when I informed him that, if he wanted back the remote control car that I had just taken away in the final minutes of the day, he would have to walk down the stairs with the class and then back up with me. Apparently, he had to walk home, and this extra bit of exercise would be just a bit too much, making him "collapse halfway home." Two relevant flashbacks:
In a fantastic rant, Michele Catalano pinpoints the moment when Western Civilization decided to smother itself to death:
You know when the world went to hell? When Coca Cola decided to teach the world to sing. The second that commercial came out, a death knell sounded across the playgrounds and schoolyards of America. Parents everywhere, suckered in by the feel-good lyrics and hand-holding sappiness of the commercial felt an awakening of sorts. All those who missed the hippie train of the 60's were going to jump on the Free to be You and Me train of the 70's, and ride it hard.
Ride it hard, but with fifteen layers of padding.
ADDENDUM:
In a confluence of thought and scenery, as I put this post together, I just happened to catch a bit of the lyrics of "Apple a Day" from David Wilcox's excellent CD Into the Mystery (of which I have an autographed copy):
When you get there life is easy
Winning every game you play
But every day is just the same
Nothing lost and nothing gained
Same old re-run on some child-proof stage
So they say: Vacation in Eden
Bring an apple a day
(Dust in the Light, where angry rants lay down with Christian folk-rock.)
Well...
I just noticed that I've currently got about two dozen items that I've bookmarked with intent to blog. Moreover, my net increase has been about four or five a day — that's over and above what I actually manage to comment on.
To quickly get two links off my browser window — and to distract y'all until I can write more substantially — I herewith recommend the short film Fellowship 9/11. If you've got fifteen free minutes, today, this parody of Michael Moore is an hilarious way to spend them. (Even just the quick snippets parodying his previous movies make the download worthwhile.)
Via Mark Shea, whose family could use a Christian fellowship of prayers just now.
In a reflection upon the ten-year anniversary of The Bell Curve, John Derbyshire runs afoul of the principles of our nation, I'd say, when he writes:
We Americans are averse to inquiring too deeply into human abilities, for fear that what we might find would contradict the founding principles of our nation, principles we naturally hold dear. In that sense, the human sciences are in their very nature un-American. Science doesn't care what you wish. You may wish that the sky were a crystal dome, or the earth hollow, or the living species unchanging through all time; science calmly, patiently, and irrefutably tells you that none of these things is the case.
I suppose certain points could be raised as evidence on that argument's behalf, although they'd be recent and superficial for the most part. It's indisputable, for example, that a certain feelgoodism has swept the land, but as is evident in our capitalism, Americans tend to consider success — at whatever — to be its own proof of human abilities. Many Americans like to believe, as Derb suggests, that "anybody can be anything," but in its purer form, the declaration is results-driven, and never divorced from effort. Work hard enough, the promise goes, and (perhaps more importantly) find your own path to an end, and you can achieve success in reasonable proximity to an ideal.
Tiger Woodses are a special breed, to be sure, but making them the disproof of the anything that anybody can be takes a narrow view of what we mean by "anything." The American dogma — and yes, it involves idealism — requires that one find a strategy for playing golf that fits one's unique talents and expend enough effort in practice to allow that unique approach to become decisive. The odds improve greatly, obviously, the broader "anything" becomes, whether clubhouse champ is adequate or, taking a different tack, starting/funding/running/covering a professional golf tournament counts as having "made it" in golf.
The distinction is foundational. I reply to Derb that the fact that human beings are differently abled is in no way contradictory to "the founding principles of our nation." Note what those principles state:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
The equal endowment is the rights. We are self-evidently equal, even as we are self-evidently not equally capable of any given task. Human abilities — endowments of brain, brawn, or bucks — are not the measures of value or of importance. This is why, beyond his odd hint that America's self-evident truth is just a wish about which science doesn't care, the contradiction that Derb cites does not exist:
Personally I believe that the contradiction between core American ideals and the results now pouring in from the human and biological sciences is resolvable, and that a properly scientific approach to the human sciences, and a widespread popular understanding of them such as Herrnstein and Murray attempted to promote via their book, would strengthen and improve our society, not weaken it.
The "contradiction" is not "resolvable" in exactly the same sense that the "contradiction" between science and religion is not "resolvable." These problems are not resolvable because they are not problems. In the American vision, which has, admittedly, blurred in recent decades, human equality supercedes anything that science could possibly tell us, just as God incorporates material reality and is felt mostly in the Why that science cannot touch.
It is a shame that the American intelligentsia smeared Herrnstein and Murray's book before their message could sink into the national psyche to help form a strategy for addressing disparities that may arise in the future. But the basic truth of the matter is that, while science can help us to identify and solve problems, the conviction that they are, indeed, problems must come from elsewhere.
Science, therefore, is only "un-American" to the extent that it presumes to tell us what equality means, not in a narrow context, but as a measurement of value. The reason that The Bell Curve met with such a heated reception was that the book's opponents believed its yardstick to offer a measurement of just that, value, rather than simply of intelligence. To their everlasting credit, the authors took the different approach of beginning with the American principle that all men are created equal and then looking to their research for ways to avoid Americans' forgetting it.
Well, it has always been a possibility that the singles movement would push for the various benefits offered their married acquaintances, but this certainly advances the progression a stage or two:
"If asexuality is indeed a form of sexual orientation, perhaps it will not be long before the issue of 'A' pride starts attracting more attention," New Scientist says.Activists have already started campaigning to promote awareness and acceptance of asexuality, it reports.
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network has an online store that sell items promoting awareness and acceptance on asexuality.
Among the items is a T-shirt with the slogan, "Asexuality: it's not just for amoebas anymore."
Only in a stunningly corrupted culture could those who are less inclined toward the sin of the age feel the need to campaign for acceptance. In the fashion of our day, some among these folks will surely decide that the law has no basis to discriminate against them in the various ways that it encourages people to pair up.
The reference in this post's title is, of course, to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The impression of Kerry as the King and Edwards as the Duke only grows stronger with each passing week — a couple of old-pro con men taking advantage of the young and a frightened minority as they endeavor to fleece rich and poor alike out of their money. You've surely seen it, but the hefty rotten vegetable that Charles Krauthammer tossed onto the stage today is worth another look:
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Even if you're inclined to overlook any number of outrageous comments from the Democrats, don't we have, here, some indication of what sort of leaders — what sort of diplomats, what sort of executives — this pair would be once in office?
Yes, I've noticed the increased interest in flu shots over the past few years. Yes, I know we're all supposed to be all a-panic over the vaccine shortage. But reading Michelle Malkin's personal experiences trying to secure a shot for her 11-month-old son made me wonder whether I've missed some significant turn of events.
Throughout this millennium, when somebody's asked me a question about flu shots, my unwavering reply has been: "Huh?" Flu shots? Shots for the flu? Don't we combat the flu with axioms — as in "feed a cold, starve the flu"? Michelle writes that the "shortage of the flu vaccine may lead to more deaths than the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Really?
That's an honest question. Back when I was a kid, was the nation suffering one flu 9/11 per year? I beg of you not to read anything more than a statement of fact in the following: I can name three people with whom my life has intersected who died on September 11, 2001. About a dozen who were close. I couldn't name a single person whom I've known who has died of the flu, or who has had a loved one die of it. That doesn't mean that nobody has, but the flu has never in my lifetime been an illness that carried with it the stench of death.
So, the question: am I being negligent as a father for not dropping everything to head to the pediatrician's office? Or do I get another year or two before not fighting over the rationed supplies marks me as an irresponsible parent stuck in an ignorantly blissful past when the flu was just an illness that made you glad that you had indoor plumbing and cable TV?
Right at the outset, let me say that I respect Noah Millman's thinking and writing. When I manage to read his blog, I find him always thoughtful and usually correct. Still, a recent post of his, arguing that "the fight to prohibit the redefinition of marriage as a unisex institution is deeply hypocritical," falls in the category of rhetoric that many conservatives find sufficiently persuasive to let a difficult practical decision loiter unto irrelevance.
To speak bluntly, Noah's is a dangerous, destructive argument to put forward without heavy disclaimers that some restrictions may apply — that the issue is beyond its reach when spilled from intellectual isolation into a society in which those who respect neither side of the intraconservative debate really do wish to institute their undermining policy. Consider, for example, the ease with which he slips by the entire same-sex marriage fight:
The only states that have even talked about redefining marriage this way have been forced to do so by the courts. The solution to that problem is to punish the courts - systematically, by reducing their power, and not in an ad-hoc fashion by exempting this or that law from review or amending the Constitution every time they rule in a way the people dislike. Believe me, they'll get the message; they sure did in the 1930s.
If you're a supporter of the Federal Marriage Amendment and you didn't just slap your head in astonishment that you missed such a straightforward answer, then count me among your company. We face a judiciary with nigh irresistible momentum toward implementing a liberal cultural regimen as the law, and Noah's solution is not to stand firm on a specific issue about which a significant majority is in agreement in the hopes of bending back the culture.
Rather, his solution is to maneuver through procedural abstractions that are at least two steps removed from any specific matter that has the emotional power to raise the average American's ire. Not only would he leech the public will for action, but he'd attract another politically imposing group to the other side, because the attack would be more directly against their interests: lawyers. Restricting the judiciary on huge cultural questions is one thing; directly assaulting the power of the courthouse is another.
While writing about divorce, Noah mentions that "we're talking about changing a culture, not building a machine." His phrasing is so true, and so relevant, that it's jarring that he does not apply the principle to the ostensible topic of his post. In the process of cultural change, the first step is to arrest an insidious trend; only then can we overlay a beneficial one. Failing to work in that direction risks wasted effort, wasted ammunition, and broadcast strategies. Reducing the judiciary's power, as a cause of its own, would trigger red flags among any number of groups that find the political landscape such that they can't outright support same-sex marriage, or that haven't realized the judicial implications of resistence to same-sex marriage.
And the redirected action would very likely be for naught. The component of his suggestion by which he would fortify marriage — tightening divorce laws — would only further motivate the juristic incubi. Citizens who wish to leave open the option of divorce for themselves and citizens who wish not to have a previous marital decision come under retrospective scrutiny are not the only parties with an interest in maintaining a culture in which divorce is easy and in which that ease requires further contractual protections. Add children into the mix, and the number of forms and legal challenges only increases. Divorce is practically an industry unto itself.
If we believe in the undeclared intentions of the judiciary, generally speaking, to redefine marriage, as well as the difficulty of depleting the power of that branch of government, is it rational to trust that the judiciary would leave tightened divorce laws alone? Couldn't quick divorce suddenly become yet another invisible-ink right in the Constitution? I would suggest that the distinct matters of activists judges and protecting marriage coalesce such that those who oppose the former ought to, first, throw their weight behind those who support the latter, not the other way around.
The same-sex marriage issue pits traditional conservatives against a radical movement that simply does not accept basic premises of governance, culture, or even of rationality that one might suppose to be common ground. Therefore, if we address each battle without reference to the fundamental differences (as Noah has done in separating judicial activism and SSM as issues), then that radical movement — which readily subordinates all to its driving intellectual and emotional needs — will roll right over those who stand against it in any particular.
Noah's prescription, in other words, fits neither the circumstances nor the opposition. Nowhere is this impression more bolstered than in his closing "open question" to Andrew Sullivan. In r