The Catholics are attacking

Or at least some of their bishops are. According to the New York Times piece,

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a proclamation on Thursday calling for every priest, parish and layperson to participate in a “great national campaign” to defend religious liberty, which they said is “under attack, both at home and abroad.”

Oh, please.

What the bishops seem to be upset about are recent governmental pushbacks against Catholic institutions' strict adherence to Vatican policy prohibiting support for abortions and birth control.

Hey, bishops, I have a solution for you: if you don't like government policy, stop taking its money.

The vast majority of us aren't thrilled with your church's stance on managing human reproduction. Specifically, we think your heads are up your supposedly celibate asses when it comes to birth control. A lot of us are also unhappy that you give moral cover to extremist Protestants in the anti-abortion camp: you prate of the preciousness of life while they shoot doctors trying to give poor and underprivileged women the choice you fail to see is necessary in the real world. We're trying not to judge you by the company you keep, but when the company is that despicable, it's hard not to think your moral compasses are way, way the hell off course.

Your implicit assertion that Catholic morality is the only kind worth defending is arrogant, to say the least. The doctrine of papal infallibility doesn't carry a lot of weight outside conservative Catholic circles, and the sooner you come to terms with that fact, the happier we all will be. What's that business about rendering unto Caesar?

If you want Catholic strictures to be more widely respected, try not shoving them down everyone else's throat. Protesting governmental actions that seek explicitly to fulfill the promise of religious freedom by ensuring that no religion's principles are elevated to a place of privilege in the nation's laws just antagonizes the rest of us.

Do I really have to point out the disturbingly close parallel between your ill-advised campaign demanding greater freedom to exercise your faith's doctrines in the public sphere, and the sustained movements elsewhere in the world to make Sharia law the law of the land? Are you really that clueless, or do you think we are?

The bishops doth protest too much.

(The title of this post refers to a ditty by Pop-o-Pies from 1981. You can hear the song on YouTube.)

Sometimes listening is enough

I have smart friends. And I love that they're smart.

The thing is, smart people not only listen when you talk to them, they respond. And being smart, they have comments and suggestions and ideas and they're eager to share them.

Most of the time, that's great. Most of the time, that's what you want. (Most of the time, that's what I want, anyway.)

Sometimes, though ... sometimes you just want to say something and not get feedback. You don't want analysis. You don't need analysis. You also don't need advice, or probing questions, or amusement, or horror, or really any reaction. You just want them to know something, something about yourself.

For instance, I'd love to tell a few of them that I have been getting way too involved reading a certain pop culture creation's fan fiction of late. In particular, I've gotten hung up on the more tragic stories, ones that revolve around the deaths of one or more of the main characters. I don't know why, though a few hypotheses are swirling around my head.

What I do know is, the emotion these stories are stirring up, while not "happiness", is not unwelcome. The stories are filling a need I didn't know I had. They're making me think about my life in ways I haven't before. (Perhaps I'm experiencing catharsis. I wouldn't know.)

Yet if I were to bring this up with my friends, they'd become concerned for me. They'd assume this minor obsession was a symptom of something worse. They'd feel it was incumbent on them to help, to analyze, to advise, to investigate further.

Maybe I'll want just those things, too, somewhere down the line.

But not right now.

Right now, I'd just like to be able to put the information out there, just so they know a little more about me, without them trying to solve me like a malfunctioning car.

Sometimes, I'd just like them to listen.

R.I.P. Earl Scruggs

I debated about making note of Earl Scruggs' passing. I'm as familiar with "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" as anybody, but that hardly constitutes being a fan. Yet Scruggs was a giant in his spheres of music (which went beyond strict bluegrass) and it seems only right to acknowledge the loss of a legend, especially when I'm such a sucker for the plaintive touch a well-plucked banjo can add to an ordinary song. R.E.M.'s "Wendell Gee", for instance, is all the more memorable because of the rippling, gentle banjo that slowly dances around the bass line. Scruggs deserves as much credit as anyone for popularizing the banjo so it could find a place in genres beyond bluegrass.

Spaghetti sauce

A while back I saw chef Scott Conant recommend not only finishing one's spaghetti (or any pasta, really) in the simmering sauce just before or as it hit al dente, but also taking a little of the water in which the spaghetti was boiled and adding it to the sauce to thicken it so it would coat the spaghetti better. I'd tried following this tip before, but hadn't noticed the difference. It turns out that for about two quarts of sauce, about a half-cup of the starchy water does the trick, sort of. The result is a little gummier than I'd like, but I put that down to overcooking the pasta (again) and adding just a bit too much cooking water. I'm still experimenting, but it's getting better.

No, I haven't been all that invested in the news lately. Although I did find it intriguing that Dick Cheney needed a heart transplant, since he seems to have been chugging along without one for over a decade.

John Dewey on faith and inquiry

A passage from philosopher John Dewey's A Common Faith (1934):

Understanding and knowledge also enter into a perspective that is religious in quality. Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation. It is of course now usual to hold that revelation is not completed in the sense of being ended. But religions hold that the essential framework is settled in its significant moral features at least, and that new elements that are offered must be judged by conformity to this framework. Some fixed doctrinal apparatus is necessary for a religion. But faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it. It does not depend for assurance upon subjection to any dogma or item of doctrine. It trusts that the natural interactions between man and his environment will breed more intelligence and generate more knowledge provided the scientific methods that define intelligence in operation are pushed further into the mysteries of the world, being themselves promoted and improved in the operation. There is such a thing as faith in intelligence becoming religious in quality -- a fact that perhaps explains the efforts of some religionists to disparage the possibilities of intelligence as a force. They properly feel such faith to be a dangerous rival.

Nearly eighty years on, and Dewey's point is still, er, on point.

The Dewey passage especially resonated with me since I recently finished An American Religion by Harold Bloom. It's curiously instructive to read the two back-to-back. Bloom is (was?) a curmudgeon in the deepest sense who grouses too frequently about political correctness, but he got in my good books by characterizing contemporary American religious fundamentalists not as "fundamentalists" but rather as "Know Nothings" carrying on in the destructively anti-intellectual spirit of those 19th century populists. I knew the anti-intellectual streak in American society went back a ways, but it still pulled me up short to encounter a serious thinker (Dewey) grappling with it nearly a century ago.

There have always been people so disoriented by the pace of social change that the only response they can muster is a reflexive and irreflective insistence on turning the clock back to a presumed better day. Technology being an accelerant of change, today's conservative response (and I mean "conservative" in its most basic sense as a desire to preserve what is rather than to embrace novelty for its own sake) worldwide is correspondingly sharp.

Does the conservative response have value for humanity?

It's tough to say it does. In principle, slowing our headlong rush to the future in order to take stock of who we are and what kind of world we're creating would be a great thing. However, too much conservative rhetoric is focused on elevating faith in organized religion over all else. Not only does that devalue and thus impair support for scientific research, but the accompanying siege mentality of many sects (of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, for instance) in these tough times contributes to a balkanization of humanity and increases strife between faiths to dangerous levels. Absolutely the last thing humanity can afford is a war over who has the keys to heaven (or Nirvana, or ...). And yet, that's where the apocalyptic rhetoric of many end-times clergy, echoed by their political henchmen (Rick Santorum, for instance), would lead us. (A lot of Muslims would argue that the U.S. has already led us there, with Iraq and Afghanistan as prime exhibits for the prosecution.)

As long as conservatives worldwide put their trust in holy writ rather than human intellect, conservatism cannot contribute to solving our problems. To the contrary, its regressive and anti-intellectual attitude will only make things worse.

Dewey knew that. Would that more of us today also did.

Limbaugh the unashamed

I've been busy, so by the time I heard about Rush Limbaugh's vicious attack on Sandra Fluke I thought it would be too late to comment (and frankly, redundant). Leave it to Rush, though, to keep the thing going by standing firm behind his characterization of Fluke as a "slut" and a "prostitute" who, in return for federally subsidized contraception, owed the taxpayers a free sex tape.

Standing firm, that is, until the advertisers started jumping ship. And kept jumping. Finally, enough of them bailed out that Rush had to make pretend amends.

"For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week," he wrote. "In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke."

Bullshit, Rush. You very much meant a personal attack on Ms. Fluke. You're just sorry that your reflexive hatemongering hit the fan this time.

Or rather, your employer is sorry (that you cost it advertisers). You aren't. You never are.

Whether it's racism or misogyny, you delight in playing to the basest, most hateful and most hurtful instincts in your consciousness. You claim hyperbole is needed to ensure that your audience is not merely informed (if that's the word to use), but entertained as well. Everything outrageous about your show is defensible, in your mind, as exaggeration for the purpose of humor.

But "slut" as you used it is not humorous. It's just vile. Most of us know that.

So do you, for that matter. The thing is, you can't afford to admit it. You'd also have to admit that your show's aim isn't to be humorous. You'd have to admit that your show's aim is to be inflammatory.

You'd have to admit that you mean every word you say, that you know exactly the effect each of those words has, and that you aren't sorry for any of them.

That honesty just might cost you your outsized profile in the national consciousness. And you won't risk that because as that profile goes, so goes your income.

And so the rest of us are treated to yet another tedious non-apology from you. Yawn.

At this point, I don't give a shit about Limbaugh's fake apologies (should he bother to give them). What I'd really like to hear is an apology from his listeners. They are the reason he's still on. What's their excuse for enabling his bitter spitefulness, if not that they share his hostility and bile?

The Ninth Circuit's Prop 8 ruling and marriage

In light of the last entry that talked about the word "marriage" and its civic and religious connotations, it seemed way past time for me to finish reading the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling on the challenge to the legality of California's Proposition 8.

The quick background on Prop 8 for those of you who might not have been paying attention: in 2008, California voters approved a ballot initiative, Proposition 8, that "amended the state constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry". Predictably, Prop 8 was challenged in court. Governor Jerry Brown and state attorney general Kamala D. Harris declined to defend the amendment, but Prop 8's original sponsors won the right to put up a defense. Eventually a U.S. district court ruled Prop 8 unconstitutional; naturally, that ruling was appealed and it wound up before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit. The panel issued its ruling two weeks ago, upholding the lower court by a 2-1 majority. (The proposition's proponents are seeking review by the Ninth Circuit en banc. In the meantime, same-sex marriages remain illegal in California as long as the issue remains "live" before the courts.)

The majority's decision is full of history and caveats and minute legal distinctions designed to reassure everyone that these three judges have stayed well clear of arriving at a conclusion regarding the legality of same-sex marriage as such. The majority found that

1. California once permitted gay marriage. Specifically, California courts struck down previously approved legislation that had restricted marriage to a man and a woman, and in the wake of that decision individual counties "issued more than 18,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples".
2. Prop 8 modified the state constitution so that same-sex couples could no longer enter into "marriage".
3. Prop 8 did not affect state laws that afforded "domestic partnerships" many (or perhaps all) of the same rights and benefits as "marriages".

The majority concluded that Prop 8's sole substantive effect was to deny same-sex couples the right to call their unions "marriages". It also concluded that denying the use of the word was a form of harm that was not permitted by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

I think the majority on the appeals court is wrong in its conclusion. I agree that the word "marriage" carries a lot of weight. But as I wrote in the last entry, what I'd like is to relieve it of that weight -- or rather, of the weight it carries in a civil context. Let there be no "marriages" from a civil standpoint. Call the joining of two people in a lifetime commitment to one another "domestic partnership" or "civil union" or "linkage" or something else. Leave "marriage" to churches and temples and synagogues and mosques, if they want it. Informally you can still be "an old married couple" but when it comes time to declare your filing status to the IRS, let the category be called "joined" or "bonded" or some other term that currently sounds silly and made-up, but with time will become the accustomed way for government to describe two people committed to one another for life.

It's worth noting the dissent of N. R. Smith, because I suspect Smith's reasoning is close to how the the U. S. Supreme Court's conservatives will think about the case. While agreeing with the majority that most of Prop 8's proponents' arguments are specious, Smith nevertheless feels that the actions of the legislature, or in this case the directly expressed will of the voters of California, deserves the fullest possible deference by the courts. According to the relevant legal standard, Smith contends, Prop 8 is constitutional if it can be "rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest". Smith does not say that Prop 8 is so related, nor is it necessary for that to be proven in court: the mere possibility suffices.

Smith's reasoning may sound odd, but it's at least as persuasive as the majority's confused reasoning about the worth of the term "marriage". Moreover, any excuse to defer to the will of a state legislature, and even better in this case, to the will of a state's voters directly expressed, will appeal to the Supreme Court's conservatives. I don't see the Ninth Circuit panel majority's reasoning finding much support among the Supreme Court's more liberal wing, though. It relies heavily on sentiment rather than precedent.

(Whether the Ninth Circuit agrees to an en banc rehearing, this matter eventually will find its way to the high court. When it does, look for the Court to resolve the Prop 8 debate on the narrowest basis, and if at all possible without touching on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. Even if the politically-motivated Scalia wants to make a statement against it, he'll have a hard time convincing other justices to join him: they will be wary of leading the public on a still-contentious issue.)