Chuck Muth has a nice posting making fun of California religious-right zealot James Hartline, who is in a tizzy because the chairman of the San Diego County Republican Party spoke to a Log Cabin chapter. When Chuck, a genuine small government, libertarian-minded Republican, contacted Hartline to defend the San Diego party chairman, Hartline replied: "I will be supplying your email to my 2,400 Christians readers in San Diego."
Who does this guy think he is, Mike Rogers?
On the plus side, he was a major force in standing up against - and helping to bring peaceably to an end - totalitarian Communism in Europe. History will credit him for that.
Then there are the negatives. He brought to a screeching halt all liberalizing trends in the Church (and that's "liberalizing" in the old-fashion sense of extending liberty, not in the American sense of favoring bureaucratic governance). He stood four-square against women priests and birth control (including condoms that might have saved countless AIDS-ruined lives), and for mandatory clerical celibacy and stonewalling in the face of his Church's manifold pedophilia scandals.
And then there was his virulently reactionary view of gay people, exemplified most recently by his denouncing gay marriage as part of an "ideology of evil." A steady stream of proclamations issued by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope John Paul II sought to deny gay people our full humanity. Gay adoption was labeled "gravely immoral" and a form of "doing violence" to children (and this, as the Church tolerated and covered up countless child rapes by its "celibate" priests). Gay sexuality itself was dismissed, repeatedly, as "intrinsically disordered."
A willful, persistent insistence on denigrating gay people, our
relationships and our sexuality served to irreparably darken John
Paul II's legacy, fostering ignorance and inequality, and scarring
the lives of many worldwide who looked to the Pope for spiritual
guidance. That this should be the legacy of a religious leader
whose mission was to bring a greater awareness of God's embracing
light and love is, to put it bluntly, sinful.
Islamic, Jewish and Christian religious leaders
unite to condemn a planned gay festival and parade in
Jerusalem. And American fundamentalists are egging them on. This
could get very ugly, I fear.
Some people just won't learn: unprotected, promiscuous anal sex is not a healthy way of life. Case in point: Reuters reports that Rare Gay Male Sex Disease Enters Britain.
Does "society" bear some role for not heretofore
recognizing/celebrating same-sex relationships in a way that would
promote their stablilty? Yes. Does that absolve a large segment of
gay men in the developed world from not getting their act together?
No, it doesn't. This is a point Gabriel Rotello made a few years
ago in his "controversial" book
Sexual Ecology, which looked at the behaviors that made AIDS an
epidemic waiting to happen among gay men - and offered thoughts on
making gay culture "sustainable" instead of
self-destructive.
Tuesday's Wall Street Journal featured a page 1 story on
deaf children and cochlear implants (online only for WSJ
subscribers). These devices, which are placed in the bone behind
the ear to help profoundly deaf children perceive sound, are being
opposed by deaf activists:
Some steeped in deaf culture don't see themselves as handicapped and view implants as an attempt to "fix" something that isn't broken. They especially oppose hearing parents deciding to get implants for their deaf children, believing kids should make the decision themselves when they get older.
It's easy to dismiss the deaf activists, but what if the story were about gay children and parents who, for the sake of argument, at some point could give their kids a treatment to ensure that they would instead be heterosexual?
Being gay, of course, is not a physical impairment, but the deaf activists also think their status is just a different way of being, and that they are part of a deaf culture and a deaf community. And as surely as hearing parents are opting for cochlear implants, so too would most heterosexual parents opt to make their gay kids straight if they could. But such a situation would surely cause a loss to the richness of the human tapestry, so it's a good thing that being gay isn't as simple as being deaf.
Update: Columnist Cathy Young sends a comment
noting her take a few years ago in Reason magazine on what she
calls "the (incredibly offensive) gay/deaf analogy." That article
can be read here (give it a
minute to load).
If you haven't read Paul
Varnell's newly posted review of the book Queer Wars
by Stanford "queer theorist" Paul Robinson, take a look. I love
that Robinson attacks columnist Michelangelo Signorile for being a
"gay conservative" when Signorile writes one of the most scathingly
leftwing columns around (for instance, see his recent effort, "Log Cabin's Drug
Money: Shilling for Big Pharma on social security privatization").
But I guess the game for those on both the hard left and on the
hard right is that you can never, ever be extreme enough that
somebody won't try to make their reputation by calling you a
sellout.
The story of how "progressive" pro-outing activist Mike Rogers silenced popular gay-conservative blogger Gay Patriot is revealed by Christian Grantham of Outlet Radio. Essentially, GP had posted an item likening Rogers and his partner-in-crime John Aravosis to terrorists. Rogers then reportedly called GP's boss and secretary to complain about/harass him, and contacted the police as well, presumably to allege that GP was inciting violence against him. Since GP has a real job in the real (non-activist) world, he felt compelled at that point to give up blogging (the blog itself will continue under GP's associate, Gay Patriot West).
I admit that the description of GP's item sounds over the top
(but then, so is Rogers' own BlogActive site, and The Raw Story, with which he's
affiliated). And, to some extent, anonymous bloggers make
themselves vulnerable. But the alleged calls to GP's employer and
to the police seem typical of the pro-outing, take-no-prisoners,
slash-and-burn mentality. Many commentors on the left cheered the
attempted personal destruction of conservative journalist Jeff
Gannon, and they'll no doubt cheer the harassment and silencing of
Gay Patriot. That pretty much tells you what they're all
about.
--Stephen H. Miller
[note: blogging on the run; some typos (censure/censor) corrected subsequently]
Update: From PoliPundit:
imagine the outcry if GayPatriot had been a liberal, and his antagonist a conservative.
There'd be protestors in the streets, organized by HRC, NGLTF and the ACLU.
Blogger
Dirty Harry weighs in:
Brace yourself bloggers. This is just the beginning. Lawsuits and criminal charges are on the way. Facts, free expression, and merits be damned. These folks play dirty. An art they've perfected.
But hey, when your side is "progressve" then nothing is out of bounds as long as it advances the path to the bright, shining day that lies ahead.
Update: Another
blog is silenced.
--Stephen H. Miller
Columnist Larry Elder notes that, at a recent White House press conference, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller posed a question in which she called deputy defense secretary (and Bush's nominee for World Bank president) Paul Wolfowitz "a chief architect of one of the most unpopular wars in our history." With minimal research, Elder shows that this is, factually, far from the truth (the Iraq War has a much highly support level than many other U.S. incursions), thus revealing Bumiller's query as "another editorial masquerading as a question."
Might I add that if she had phrased her inquiry as biased in
favor of the president rather than against, some of our liberal
friends would now be cheerfully investigating her sex life for
dirt.
More Recent Postings
3/20/05 - 3/27/05
Writing at TechCentralStation, Pejman Yousefzadeh questions
whether the existence of a separate Libertarian Party has
diminished the influence libertarians might otherwise have on both
Republicans and Democratic. He acknowledges that "when it comes to
elections, the Libertarian Party is at best a marginal contender,"
but given how evenly divided the electorate is, a possible strategy
might be:
to augment the influence of libertarians in public policy; invite Democrats and Republicans to bid for libertarian support with policy concessions to libertarians in exchange for libertarian votes. That way, libertarians could influence policy and serve as kingmakers for whichever party did the best job of attracting libertarian support on substantive policy issues.
It has long seemed to me that the religious right became a major
player precisely bcause it didn't form its own party and
run candidates sure to lose. Of course, the "kingmaker" strategy
assumes there are enough libertarian-leaners to make a difference,
but I suspect a lot of voters are "small 'l'" libertarians (or at
least "neolibertarians")
without labeling themselves - favoring government limited as much
as is practically possible to its core mission of defending life,
liberty and property (in Locke's phrase) and relying on freely made
transactions within a dynamic civil society to provide the
rest.
Okay, I looked around and there really isn't much gay news happening that's worth writing about- although I did find this Advocate story about a lesbian who fled the U.S. for Canada but is now returning (she'd "rather remain a disgruntled American queer. Free to be oppressed, free to be maligned, and free to be trampled upon, all in the name of political expediency," but is "ready to take up the mantle for positive change-not just for gays and lesbians but for all Americans") to be the perfect embodiment of the Advocate-gay worldview. It appears in the same online issue along with the expected knee-jerk vilification of Jeff Gannon.
So, I'll follow up again with Terri Schiavo, now being starved to death in Florida. Many of our commentors are enraged by my stance. Too bad. To paraphrase Lillian Hellman, I won't cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions. And when there's doubt, I won't hesitate to err on the side of life. But like the abortion battle, nothing can convince those who disagree; it's a gut issue. And my gut tells me that Michael Schiavo should no more get away with murder than O.J. Simpson or Robert Blake or, oh, never mind.
I will say that to those of our readers on the left who are
enraged that I could possibly support any position that Tom DeLay
might support (no need to think, just conclude that whatever
they favor must be opposed), I note that not all Democrats
are with you, either. As this piece in Slate
reports:
In the Senate, a key supporter of a federal remedy was Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a progressive Democrat and longtime friend of labor and civil rights, including disability rights. Harkin told reporters, "There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them, and it is hard to determine what their wishes really are or were. So I think there ought to be a broader type of a proceeding that would apply to people in similar circumstances who are incapacitated."
I don't agree with Harkin on most issues, but I do think this
makes the point that it's not only members of the great right-wing
conspiracy who oppose starving Terri Schavio to death. Of course,
some will still, I'm sure, conclude that both Harkin and I are
tools of Tom DeLay!
Update:
Chuck Muth writes, perceptively:
This intellectual and constitutional battle over the Schiavo matter is taking place almost exclusively among those on the right, with bona-fide card-carrying limited-government types finding themselves on opposite sides of the issue.
I'd agree with that. Some who oppose the congressional action paint it as a simple matter of federal encroachment on the states; it's not (simple, that is), if you believe the central responsiblity of government is, above all else, defending life and liberty.
Intemperate Update: On the death watch: Wouldn't it be more humane - and certainly more honest - to administer a lethal injection? But somehow starving her allows those responsible to obscure causality regarding their actions.
Is the Village Voice a Tom DeLay mouthpiece? Nat Hentoff has some eye-openers about Michael Schavio's behavior.
Final update: Cruel to the
end, Michael Schiavo denies her parents' request to be with
Terri as she died.
--Stephen H. Miller.