I have to agree with Harcamone about the Hitchens-Taranto duel. I read the Hitchens piece and thought it was great cuz it’s more or less where I’m at. Then later I saw the Taranto piece and read it, and it forced me to re-think the whole thing. I couldn’t disagree with any of his points, especially what I see as his main point, that the religious right does not have undue influence, and is not being pandered to. But rather they are receiving the influence due them in a democracy, or maybe even a little less than is due them. And that it is the secular left that is being overly aggressive and high-handed and undemocratic, not the other way around.

Posted by Harcamone

Here are the links to Hitch’s and Taranto’s dueling essays. Hitch’s is thoroughly predictable, and gives no new or interesting slant on anything. He could have phoned his ideas in. He has said the same thing a thousand times, and so has everyone else on that “side” of the issue.

But Taranto is interesting. Far more interesting. Taranto has stretched his neck till he got his eyes in back of his subject. Hitchens can’t do that, smart as he is — especially on the subject of religion, where he turns tendentious, one-dimensional and very boring. It is the one area where I’m forced to see Hitchens as mediocre, and lacking in imagination.

Forget Hitchens in this matter, about which he has no more to say than a pot-head college student. He is not a serous contender for our attention — or ought not to be. Taranto has the ideas.

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Forget all this social crap. Conservatively religious Americans (who are not only Christians, as Taranto points out) cannot hold their line forever, whether it is against cultural acceptance of homosexuality or abortion, or whatever. Social progress is moving against them. Too many people have queers in their families. The right to abortion is like the right to vote, it can NEVER be taken away … not in the real world. We are NOT about to be plunged into the darkness of Theocracy, for too many people are online with NO restrictions on what they may read. You don’t even need a library card anymore.

And as Taranto asks in effect — who the hell is going to define, let alone impose, a Theocracy in this fractious spiritual chaos that is America?

And so what if not everybody — including queers — can get EVERYTHING they want? This is a bad thing?

We had a fun time at the blognashville dinner last night. You can see a picture of the dinner here (scroll down). Here’s a picture I took just outside the restaurant:

This great article by Christopher Hitchens, Why I’m Rooting Against the Religious Right, prompted the following exchange between me and my brother, after I sent him the link with a note saying, “You gotta love this article”. Hitchens begins with this quote from Barry Goldwater:

The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100%. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. . . . Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some god-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”

Jeff: Amen, brother. My only question is, have you only now just noticed that these maniacs are gaining a stranglehold on the Republican Party and exercising a veto power over Republican candidates, Republican leadership, etc.? My main response to this article is, duuh! Hitchens’ point about the contradiction between promoting a greater secularization and separation of religion and state in the Islamic world while playing footsie with lunatic theocrats at home ought to be devastating to national security oriented Republicans or Democrats. These religious fanatics on the right are threatening to cripple the moral authority of America in the world in a way very similar to the way Southern racial segregation damaged us after World War II as Third World countries and people of color won their independence from colonialism.

Nick: I think the point of the article is that if, indeed, the maniacs do gain a stranglehold on the Republican Party, it will be a bad career move for them and for the GOP. The statement by Goldwater is a pretty accurate expression of the American spirit, right, left, Christian, and non, and the GOP ignores this fact at their peril. It’s just that the Democrats have become so lame, on every issue, the Republicans can afford to indulge in this kind of pandering to the fundamentalist sliver, without paying much of a price.

Jeff: That not making the R’s pay a price does kind of get to me. Given how conventional and moderate the D’s actually are, you would think a few of them would know how to quote the Bible in a progressive way. And you’d think they’d have some idea about something that was worth selling and could be sold. It’s really discouraging to see the R’s fall all over themselves and the D’s get absolutely no traction from it, and that is entirely the D’s fault.

I recently finished the Penguin biography of Joseph Smith. It was interesting not only because of the bizarre Mormon saga, but also enlightening as to the incredible religious fervor that was extant at the time. It was extreme, and extremely popular, beyond anything imaginable today, murderous even. And yet democracy has survived, and the odds of our returning to such a collective consciousness are not even miniscule. They are zero.

I don’t hardly read Andrew Sullivan anymore. The power of the Christian right in America has been on the wane for years, and not only for years, but for hundreds of years. I’m not afraid of it, and those who wave it around as a bogeyman are just demagoging, as far as I’m concerned, even if it’s Andrew Sullivan.

As for the hetero-normal defensiveness, I have to confess I share it. I watched Before Night Falls again the other night. What a fantastic movie! How any liberal can defend Castro after seeing it, confounds me. But…, I can’t help feeling some sympathy with Castro’s desire to discourage the wild, hedonistic life-style of the Cuban homosexual community as portrayed in the movie. Of course he did more than discourage it, he brutally repressed it, and that is not only wrong, it is counter-productive, as Harcamone points out below. It seems to me that it must be allowed, but societally disapproved of. And that is exactly where we are at today in the U.S. And that’s fine with me. I feel the same way about pot-smoking.

Posted by Harcamone

Up to now, I had considered liberal fears of theocratic intrusion into public policy overblown, even a tad hysterical.

Andrew Sullivan shares your concern, Nick. See some of the stuff on his current front page relating to this.

Of course I take Andrew, and you, seriously. And I would fight to the death against even a slightly theocratic America.

But I also try not to forget to bring the salt-shaker to brunch with Andrew because I think he is too invested in homosexual- and other leftfield “normativity.” Remember our friend Randy, how comfortable he was with thinking of himself as a non-normal person? Andrew isn’t there, and never will be. He desperately wants the quilt of normativity to have more panels woven into it.

So, at least with Andrew, I think there are two issues he tends to conflate.

a] legitmate fear of theocratic ideologies, especially when they seem to be moving from the far fringes uncomfortably towards us.

b] unreasonable fear of the defensiveness of hetero-normal, and vanilla-normal, society.

Somehow I continue to believe that we are well innoculated against the worst diseases of a]. I trust the American people, I can’t explain why.

As for b], I can understand the longing to move past hetero-normativity. In my own private cosmos, I have no problem with this evolution, in fact I think I’m part of it.. But there is also the Public Space, and it’s there that I think we need to back off from the idealistic desire to repair the world (or tikkun, to use the talmudic word so beloved of Jewish “progressives”).

All things call forth their opposites. This premise has not been disproven, so I think everyone needs to be a bit careful. Including, of course, the theocrats. Don’t get me wrong. They do need to be opposed.

But here is an unwelcome idea — it might turn out that everyone is going to have to compromise on some important things.

I have been more than a little surprised at the intensity of the conservative response to the Terry Schiavo case, especially from a bunch of people I had always considered to be reasonable, like Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Peggy Noonan, etc. This absolutism about keeping protoplasm alive is akin to having one’s brain frozen and stored in a vault awaiting future scientific breakthroughs. The unanimity among conservatives seems to be almost complete. I don’t understand it. It seems perverse to me. Where does it come from? Is it an hysterical fear of death, or just fear of the slippery slope of euthanasia? As I get older, I appreciate more and more that we have evolved from the time when those who could no longer cut the mustard were sent out on the ice floes, but I have no desire to spend eternity in a petri dish hooked up to wires and tubes. I just don’t get it. I have long thought that Hemingway probably did the right thing. One certainly has to respect Hitler’s final decision. And I understand the Pope refused additional extreme medical intervention at the end. There is life, and there is death. Can’t have one without the other.

Posted by Andy

Up to now, I had considered liberal fears of theocratic intrusion into public policy overblown, even a tad hysterical. But the Schiavo case gives me pause. Not only the lunatics like Randall Terry parading outside the hospice, but the support of more or less respectable conservative commentators like Peggy Noonan, Limbaugh and Buchanan, Bob Novak and Fred Barnes, not to mention Sean Hannity, who has been devoting his widely heard radio and Fox TV shows to rousing the rabble and implicitly suggesting possible criminal villainy on the part of Michael Schiavo. Even “liberals” like Ralph Nader and the crassly opportunistic Jesse Jackson. And of course George and Jeb.

The “culture of life” folks made much of “Terri’s wishes,” as though they were somehow relevant after 15 years. Whatever her views before she was incapacitated, if in fact she had any–and of course there are conflicting accounts–it is impossible to know how she would have felt about her own vegetative condition. And the great preponderance of neurological evidence, including a CAT scan–disputed only by those with axes to grind, and not credibly–indicates that the cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness, was utterly gone. Despite the wishful thinking of her parents and their partisans she was incapable of thought about her own state or anything else, and the possibility of “rehabilitation” was a cruel mirage.

It is also difficult to reconcile the intense focus on “Terri’s wishes,” necessarily conjectural, with the views of her self-appointed advocates on related matters, most notably their adamant opposition to any decision by terminally ill people or their designated proxies to choose assisted suicide. Of course some people, including the Catholic hierarchy, consider it wrong to take any life (except perhaps in a “just war”). But the selective inconsistency does undercut their argument of individual choice in cases that suit their philosophical preferences. And it is passing strange that people who believe in a blissful hereafter would go to any length to postpone the inevitable reunion with Jesus, at whatever cost in earthly pain and suffering. Modern medicine, for all its miracles, is not God. And for those who believe in a Deity it would not be illogical to think that unnatural intervention, by means of man-made tubes and machines, even in hopeless cases, is not conforming to God’s will but thwarting it. It may seem callous to talk about costs in this context, but Medicare and Medicaid are under siege, much more than Social Security, and any legislated mandate to prohibit removal of life support without explicit written directions from a patient–as some legislators are proposing–would lead to a crisis dwarfing the altready dire situation.

As a conservative, I have long felt that judicial overreach is a real and serious problem. But in this case it was our elected legislators who overreached, and I can only applaud the principled, even courageous, refusal of the courts to bow to the egregious attempt by Congress and President Bush to intercede–apparently, by the way, in conflict with the popular will: The polls (and two referendums in Oregon) suggest that the general public is firmly opposed not only to such politicized intervention but to stringent limits on an individual’s right to choose death rather than a grotesque and often painful twilight, in thrall to the compassionate cruelties of medical technology abetted by religious fanaticism.

I have been relieved of the necessity of commenting on the Terry Schiavo case by Christopher Hitchens, than whom no one has or could write a more viciously hilarious summing up. The opening paragraph of Easter Charade, his article in Slate, is classic Hitchens:

The immediate crisis has apparently passed. But all through Easter Sunday, one had to be alert to the possibility that, at any moment, the late and long-dead Terri Schiavo would receive the stigmata on both palms and both feet and be wafted across the Florida strait, borne up by wonder-working dolphins, to be united in eternal bliss with the man-child Elián González.

Very funny article in the SF Chronicle today about what a bummer it is, all this democracy catching on in the Middle East. It’s making it hard to organize anti-war demonstrations. The article doesn’t intend to be funny, but I found it hilarious. Here’s a quote:

“(The movement) was on the verge of taking off again a couple of months ago around the inauguration, but then the Iraqi elections confused the picture, ” said Stephen Zunes, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco and an expert on both social movements and Middle Eastern politics. “It is pretty moribund now.”