A reader makes a point that isn't made often enough:
I am another gay man who has no problem with a church refusing to
conduct a same-gender marriage rite. What I don't understand is why
the conservatives/fundamentalists can't get it through their collective
skull that their insistence upon enforcing in civil law their
particular interpretation of theology is also an excercise in religious
discrimination.
The Unitarians have been marrying same-sex couples for
some thirty years, and likewise some congregations of the United Church
of Christ, the Metropolitan Community Church, and I'm sure a number of
other religious groups I don't even know. Why do the fundamentalists get to discriminate with the force
of civil law against the U/U, the UCC, and the rest? When did they get
the right to have their religious interpretation enshrined in civil law
at the unavoidably explicit expense of the others
' interpretation?
When did they get the right to be the government's de facto Department of Inquisition?
This struggle is not just between secularists and Christianists. It's also between Christians.
"...placed in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward towards the abyss," - Tocqueville.
"But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world
coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but
evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way."
In fact, there is another way, the way chosen by the Mennonites
and the Amish: to turn away from some, or even most, elements of the
modern world, rejecting them as tools of the Devil, and to live in
communities of like-believers allowing at most few contacts with
outsiders. Of course, in doing so, that community surrenders any
pretensions to remake society at large in their own image. They have to
settle for the old fashioned strategy of influencing others to their
point of view by persuasion, and let the Devil take the rest. I don't
think the theocons would ever settle for that, of course.
Agreed. I think that's where Rod is headed and I respect anyone who chooses it. But it is not a political solution for the whole. It is a spiritual one for the part.
Today a federal district judge ordered that five Gitmo detainees be released. Greenwald:
The five men ordered released today have been imprisoned in a cage by the Bush administration for 7 straight years without being charged with any crimes and without there being any credible evidence that they did anything wrong. If the members of Congress who voted for the Military Commissions Act had their way (see them here and here), or if the four Supreme Court Justice in the Boumediene minority had theirs, the Bush administration would nonetheless have been empowered to keep them encaged indefinitely, for the rest of their lives if desired, without ever having to charge them with any crime or allow them to step foot into a courtroom to petition for habeas corpus.
And Obama wants an apologist for this - John Brennan - at CIA? Has he lost his mind?
Yes we did. The true dimension of the revolution that Obama realized in American politics is now quantified. This changes everything in every future campaign, and has just as much resonance for media and fundraising in general. I don't believe that Obama would have ever been able to become president in the era before the Internet. And I don't believe the implications of that have yet to fully sink in.
A girl smiles as she plays around near temporary shelters at a camp for Internally Displaced People in Kibati, just north of the North Kivu provincial capital city of Goma on November 20, 2008. Hundreds of thousands of people living in the region have been displaced from their homes due to armed clashes in the region. This particular camp houses some 60,000 refugees. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty.
I am a 26 year old heterosexual, white male who is in the best
relationship of my life. She is a 26 year old Egyptian woman. We're
very happy and recently she met most of my family and extended family.
They loved her as well. We even hope to
marry someday. I am so grateful that I live in a country that would
honor that bond. As you know, it wasn't too long ago that our
relationship would not be recognized in many states.
That being said, I've taken the stand that I do not want to join the
institution of marriage until it is one that allows ALL loving couples
to join.
When even the Cheney-Addington fan writes the following, you have some idea of just how dumb and counter-productive Bush's detainee policy has been:
It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here. Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information. We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years, and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions.
Does anyone now believe what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have stated as fact: that their administration captured the right people, treated them humanely and brought them to justice? They failed on all three counts. They committed, to paraphrase Talleyrand, a crime and a mistake. We are all less safe as a result.
While you have always celebrated your attachment to conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott, your views often strike me being most closely aligned with John Rawls. Your discussion today about modernity smashing the social good into little bits could have been a passage out of Political Liberalism. You captured the essence of the book in this sentence:
"That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature."
Rawls found that in the modern world we've come to accept that the differences between comprehensive theories of the good embodied in various religions, cultures, and individual belief systems (i.e. the "deep statements about human nature") will never be conclusively resolved. They are too much contingent upon traditions, inherited cultural values, superstitions. The questions these theories purport to answer are fundamentally irresolvable--no one comprehensive theory is going to ultimately triumph over all the others. Consequently, all must recognize that their own comprehensive theories have no special claims any other people.
SurveyUSA writes that the prop 8 protests "have not changed many minds":
Of the those adults who tell SurveyUSA they voted FOR Prop 8, 90% of them told us recent rallies held by “No on Prop 8″ Protesters have not changed their minds about the issue. 8% say protesters have changed their minds.
But an 8 percent swing among Yes on 8 voters would have made the difference. Imagine if we had run ads with gay couples in them and revealed our conviction before the vote. This campaign could have been won. Our bad.
Today, for example, I’ve gotten emails urging me to "Save Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly Before It Is Too Late" and — one of my favorites so far — an offer to teach me how to "Obama-proof" my financial portfolio. Part of me still worries that this sort of paranoia, which isn’t new (wacky political newsletters of all political stripes were huge in the 80s and early 90s), but is now far more accessible thanks to the internet, will be used to unfairly discredit the right. So I’m a relieved to see that it’s tapered off slightly since the election. But I can’t help but be a little disappointed, can’t help but hope, in some small way, that it never fully goes away...
I have to confess I haven't read your books, but since "The Politics of
Homosexuality," I've tried to push you on those who can't seem to
articulate why they, as conservatives, object to civil equality. I imagine somewhere in your
writing though, you're coming from Benjamin's Angelus Novus. He's one of my
favorites, and with this post today, so are you.
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though
he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His
eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how
one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in
his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.
The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is
turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is
what we call progress," - Walter Benjamin.
Adrian Wooldridge admires a new class of journalists:
These journo-gurus have overturned two established hierarchies. The first is the billion-dollar management theory industry, hitherto ruled by business professors and management consultants who produced books and then turned those books into business fads. Alas, the books were often dismally written, the fads a recipe for disaster. This created an opportunity for those with sharper pens and more dispassionate attitudes. A recent Wall Street Journal ranking of management gurus, based on Google hits, newspaper mentions and academic citations, included two journalists in the top five (Friedman at two, Gladwell at four) and only one traditional management guru, Gary Hamel. The New Yorker is now a bigger generator of management fads than the Harvard Business Review.
Clearly, Al-Qaida is seeking to undermine the surge of popularity and enthusiasm for the Obama victory that has spread throughout the developing world, and particularly in Africa -- where Al-Qaida has strong vested interests in at least two ongoing military conflicts. There certainly are ways to accomplish this -- as was demonstrated by Al-Qaida's skillful use of imagery of Barack Obama at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. However, by indulging in divisive labels such as "House Slave" or "House Negro", Dr. al-Zawahiri has strayed from being merely disrespectful into being entirely disreputable and dishonorable.
I've gotten some queries as to why the U.S. and/or other Navies don't just retake hijacked ships by force. Well, there's a good economic reason why, for the last number of years, companies have preferred to pay ransom. Generally, companies prefer getting their ship and cargo back in one piece rather than risk destruction--and because the pirates, as of yet, don't seek to kill the crews (although there have been accidental deaths from bullet wounds during the initial takeover and a sailor on the Ukrainian vessel that was seized in September had a coronary)--there is no sense that the captured sailors are in imminent danger of death.
For a long time, I was kind of amazed by the libertarian rhetoric of the GOP, the way that somebody could argue for torture and corporate welfare and unchecked police powers and massive deficits and a global empire, and then follow it up with “Because I believe in limited government and the free market.” The cognitive dissonance wasn’t what bugged me (I’m cynical enough to take it as a given that politicians know how to lie) but rather that they would even bother appealing to the small government crowd that they feel free to screw over. I mean, aren’t we, like, a miniscule faction?
One negative observation: Judge Kennard was one of the four judges who found for gay couples in May. The motion indicates that Judge Kennard would have denied the petitions of the gay couples to be heard before the court on this matter. That may indicate that she does not think that the case has merit.
I've never understood the outrage about eHarmony. Yes, it's a dating website for heteros, and they don't match up queers and, yes, that smacks of discrimination. Hell, it actually is discriminatory. But there are tons of dating websites out there for homos—lots of which don't match up heteros—and as rights violations go, eHarmony was pretty piddling.
The Prop 8 legal battle will decide the fate of those already married in California. What do Californians think?:
59% of adults in California say the marriages of gay couples who married before the law changed should remain legal, according to this exclusive SurveyUSA poll conducted for KFSN-TV in Fresno.
Larison is right that they’re reliable and not influential. That’s what happens to political groups who join coalitions for negative reasons rather than any positive support for their platform or ideology. They don’t vote for Republicans; they vote against Democrats. Republicans only attract the religious conservative vote to the extent that Democrats are portrayed as—and, more important, to the extent that they actually willingly play the part of—the Boogeyman on the Left in the culture wars (e.g. the “Party of Death” who will sacrifice your First Amendment religious liberties on the altar of enforced acceptance of gay marriage). There’s a reason that white, married, Christian support for the Republicans began to surge in the late ’60s and ’70s, after all. That era saw the heating up, especially with Roe v. Wade, of the culture wars.
Reading this piece by Rod Dreher is saddening to me. What separates Rod from many others on the right is his passionate sincerity. Even when he goes overboard, it's all real. He's not a cynic; and he grapples in ways many others on the social right do not with the fact of modernity, which makes the dream of cultural conservatives just that ... a dream. And not of the future, but of the past. Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.
To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently. Rod has read his Alasdair Macintyre. And - despairing (rightly) at the Catholic hierarchy's inability even to have a reasoned conversation about what is going on and at its own sexual and psychological dysfunction and sin - Rod has joined the Orthodox church, perhaps the deepest as well as oldest of all Christian communities. I respect all that - profoundly. My own wrestling with the conflicts between Thomist teleology and modernity came in my 20s, when Oakeshott and Montaigne threaded the needle and when the fact of my own sexual orientation forced me to a reckoning others can perhaps escape. (The result: "Virtually Normal.") My faith has been more private since and more informed by mystery, reticence and doubt. And watching fundamentalist Christianity and Benedict-style Catholicism react to the last couple of decades has only confirmed for me what I suspected in my early adulthood: that their solutions to the modern problem are not solutions at all. They are wild lunges at something they hate almost as much as they misunderstand.
If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own "objective disorder" to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.
But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.
From an amicus brief in support of Prop 8 filed by The Kingdom of Heaven World Divine Mission:
The Almighty Eternal Creator created all planets, including the earth and all living creatures, including human souls. Through elections and appointments, Global government leaders and officials are selected by the Almighty Eternal Creator to serve the people. The Almighty Eternal Creator is the sole owner of the earth and everything above, below, and in it. Global government leaders work under authority of the Almighty Eternal Creator. Therefore, throughout the world, government legislatures and people must make laws under the Almighty Eternal Creator's Laws. Global government leaders, judges, justices, and law enforcement officials must practice the sole owner of the earth's Laws in their daily practice...
Courts throughout the entire State of California, the United States of America, as well as world courts DO NOT have authority to reverse the Almighty Eternal Creator's Law that bans same-sex marriage...Gay and lesbian marriage and abortion are serious attempts to destroy the Almighty Eternal Creator's ongoing creation of human life on earth! If they do not change their sexual conduct and pay in full for damages caused while they are on earth, they surely must pay after their earthly lives!
The demographics are changing, and it's probably true that the proportion of voters who identify as conservative evangelicals -- white conservative evangelicals -- will decline over time. It's also probably true that white conservative evangelical identifiers
will become less focused on the cultural issues that defined our
politics in the 1990s and more focused on the challenges of
globalization, the environment and technology. That's the generational
ticking time bomb for single issue pro-life voters.
In a new addictive flash
game, you control a Mario-like Obama who jumps up to collect American flag
points and bounces on lipstick-wearing pigs. Watch out for the icy Bridge to Nowhere!
This site claims to be able to analyze a blog and determine its "type." I plugged the Dish in and it spat back this:
The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.
The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.
Take that, Patterico! Out of curiosity, I tried Reynolds:
Here's the explanation from the pro-marriage equality groups:
The lawsuits allege that, on its face, Proposition 8 is an improper
revision rather than an amendment of the California Constitution
because, in its very title, which was "Eliminates the right to marry
for same-sex couples," the initiative eliminated an existing right only
for a targeted minority. If permitted to stand, Proposition 8 would be
the first time an initiative has successfully been used to change the
California Constitution to take way an existing right only for a
particular group. Such a change would defeat the very purpose of a
constitution and fundamentally alter the role of the courts in
protecting minority rights. According to the California Constitution,
such a serious revision of our state Constitution cannot be enacted
through a simple majority vote, but must first be approved by
two-thirds of the Legislature.
As a legal and constitutional matter, I am not qualified to judge this, but it doesn't sound frivolous to me. As a political matter, I favor re-fighting this at the ballot box, not in the court.
Oh please. I worked for a video-on-demand company back in 2002, and even then "pizza on demand" was a cliche. It turns out that just about the first thing every shiny new broadband offering offers is....pizza delivery via your TV. I think the first time was 1994. It never went anywhere, though, because it turned out that ordering pizza by phone isn't really much of a hassle.
Spencer Ackerman nails it. It's the think-tank lunch:
Here I'm going to reveal an open secret in Washington. The best free lunch in town -- by far -- is at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. I remember a panel discussion on Iraq a couple years ago at which AEI wheeled out a massive amount of succulent, just-grilled chicken shwarma. Rice that had been seasoned. With almond slivers! The whole thing displayed a stunningly real Middle East expertise, or at least what a Washington Jew thinks passes for real Middle East expertise. And that is how you succeed in this town...
Are you ready for some straight talk, my friends? Ladies and gentlemen, you need to go back to your parent organizations and tell them to step their cook-game up. The CAP chicken-salad wraps? With mayo? From Corner Bakery or whatever-the-fuck? It's at least partially responsible for the decline of liberalism in the age of Bush.
I have to disagree. One of the biggest problems the intellectual right has had, in my view, is the cozy camaraderie of its think-tank culture. Those great lunches build friendships and relationships within the context of ideology. And so it becomes socially very hard to break with that ideology when necessary. The conservative intellectuals are too friendly with one another, too civil, too social. One reason why I've been able to stay relatively immune to the Bush era's groupthink is because I have almost no friends in the conservative world (and those I had ... well, only a tiny few remain). So I can take issue with people's public commentary with no social inhibition. The last thing liberals need in power is the same kind of chummy self-reinforcing but very well-fed cocoon that helped lead conservatives over the cliff.
Eat Chipotle at your desk, my ex-friends. And be rude more often.
"This is all funny stuff. But I submit that the true genius of lolcats lies in their tragedy. In one classic example, one cat is crying, and another is hugging it and saying, "Don't crai. We'll get cheezburger someday." It's sweet and poignant and wistful all at the same time. Life can be hard, it says, and we don't always get what we want, but even as we long for things we may never have, we draw succor from the reassurances of those we love. Sure, it's ridiculous that what the cat is yearning for is a cheeseburger. But the cheeseburger is not really a cheeseburger -- it's a symbol," - Jay Dixit, Salon.
You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform.
Jonathan Cohn is also excited. I find the idea of getting excited by Tom Daschle a little esoteric myself. But the liberals won this one. They get to have their thrill in whatever unlikely form it takes.
As homosexuality becomes less and less differentiated from conventional life, and there are more and more victories for gay normalcy and gay acceptance, there will likewise be less reason for a gay rights movement. And as gay people become fully integrated into the American experience as equal participants, the need for gay people to ally with any one partisan or ideological apparatus will shrink.
What do you think we've been working for for the last couple of decades? I'd love to shut down the gay rights movement. I hope to help do so in my lifteime. Freddie continues:
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia
itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do
battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer
fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed
world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems,
such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of
its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs,
the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon
images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming
habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national
political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.
The American Family Association puts out a DVD showing how homosexuals have a plan to infiltrate and take over every small town in America in order to construct a new Sodom to terrorize your children. Or something like that. Is it my imagination or has the far right, salivating over their three anti-gay victories in the last election, decided that fear and loathing of homosexuals is now the fundamental tenet of American conservatism?
Tocqueville understood the genius of American Christianity better than most Republicans today:
"I have no belief in the virtue or durability of official
philosophies, and when it comes to state religions, I have always
thought that, though they may perhaps sometimes momentarily serve the
interests of political power, they are always sooner or later fatal for
the church.
Nor am I one of those who think that to exalt religion in the eyes
of the people and to do honor to the spirituality of religious
teaching, it is good to give its ministers indirectly a political
influence which the laws refuse.
I am so deeply convinced of the almost inevitable dangers which
face beliefs when their interpreters take part in public affairs, and
so firmly persuaded that at all costs Christianity must be maintained
among the new democracies that I would rather shut priests up within
their sanctuaries than allow them to leave them."
These people will kill Christianity before they get to enforce by law the fantasies of their own neuroses.
On an awful lot of issues, the Obama foreign policy will end cutting to the right of Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which was already more center-left than left.
Perhaps Lieberman was more committed to the fight than his counterpart on the Obama campaign, Chuck Hagel, but any sense of proportion has been lost by the hysterics leading the anti-Joe lynch mob. And there are no pitchfork wielding Republicans intent on burning Chuck Hagel at the stake. There was hardly a peep from the right over his heresy because nobody cared.
Hagel didn't endorse Obama. And he has been anathematized by Goldfarb's friends and fellow apparatichiks. Jason Zengerle has more considered thoughts.
November 16, 2008 - November 22, 2008
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