If Steve Schmidt is for same-sex marriage, can Senate Republicans be far behind?
Well, yes. We don’t expect establishment Republicans in Washington —
or establishment Democrats, for that matter — to suddenly endorse gay
marriage. But in a possible sign of the momentum of the gay-marriage
movement, Mr. Schmidt, who was a senior adviser to the Republican
presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, last year, is promoting gay
marriage this afternoon.
Today, Mr. Schmidt, who also served as a top Bush aide, discusses
the subject with the Log Cabin Republicans, a group that supports gay
rights. According to CNN, he will call on conservative Republicans to
drop their opposition at a lunchtime speech in Washington.
Mr. Schmidt, who has a sister who is a lesbian, plans to say that
there is nothing about gay marriage that is un-American or that
threatens the rights of others and that in fact it is in line with
conservative principles.
“There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex
marriage,” Mr. Schmidt plans to say, according to speech excerpts
obtained by CNN. “I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist
that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one’s
liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage.’”
[I posted something a few days ago about Catholic-convert Tony Blair's comments on the magisterial position on homosexuality. This is from the April 18th edition of The Tablet:]
Mr Blair also asserted that most Catholics disagreed with the Pope
when it came to homosexuality. "If you went and asked the congregation,
I think you'd find that their faith is not to be found in those types
of entrenched attitudes," he said.
A seasoned observer of Vatican affairs reported that these remarks
had caused consternation in Rome because they were understood to imply
that Mr Blair knew the Catholic world better than the Pope. "What
really annoys people is the arrogance of dictating to the Pope and
saying that his liberal class, liberal angle is more in tune with
Catholics than the Vatican," said the source. There is a "huge tension
between [Blair's] socially liberal politics and the Church he has
joined - he has to square the circle of his views and his religion." A
spokesman for Mr Blair told The Tablet this week that: "teaching and
doctrine does evolve and is elaborated over time by successive
generations".
Martin Pendergast, a steering group member of the Catholic caucus of
the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, who coordinates twice-a-month
Masses for London's lesbian and gay Catholic community, thought Mr
Blair had been right. "Tony Blair has simply echoed the views of many
ordinary Catholics in this country, particularly those who have lesbian
or gay family members," said Mr Pendergast. "As on many other
contemporary issues, the Vatican becomes more and more isolated in its
rhetoric, even from many of its priests and bishops."
James Alison, a Dominican theologian who has written on gay issues,
said: "It was a breath of fresh air for it to be said in public what we
all know: the Catholic faithful are by and large much more relaxed and
friendly about gay people than is our clerical structure."
I disagree with a lot of what Judith Warner writes, but her observations about gender roles during adolescence are worthy of some serious reflection, particularly as Catholics struggle to: 1) articulate exactly how gender differences matter, and how they should not matter; and 2) figure out how to support a healthy understanding of gender in our own children:
The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today’s poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy’s guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive. It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained?
. . . . the strange thing is, this isn’t just about insecure boys. There’s a degree to which girls, despite all their advances, appear to be stuck – voluntarily – in a time warp, too, or at least to be walking a very fine line between progress and utter regression. Spending unprecedented amounts of time and money on their hair, their skin and their bodies, at earlier and earlier ages. Essentially accepting the highly sexualized identity imposed on them, long before middle school, by advertisers and pop culture. In high school, they have second-class sexual status, Pascoe found, and by jumping through hoops to be sexually available enough to be cool (and “empowered”) yet not so free as to be labeled a slut, they appear to be complicit in maintaining it.
This question has been addressed on MOJ here and here. The answer may be technically "no" because "no candidates have been formally submitted." But, according to the London Times, the answer is "yes" - three candidates have been rejected in the informal vetting process, including Caroline Kennedy and Doug Kmiec.
UPDATE: President Obama would be well served, IMHO, by selecting a pro-life Democrat MOJ blogger as Ambassador to the Vatican.
Readers of this blog know that I have expressed skepticism about justifications for excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. At the same time, I find much of the rhetoric offered in support of SSM to be unhelpful and unproductive, to say the least. Exhibit A is today's speech by New York Governor David Paterson, who unveiled his proposal for SSM and made it very clear what he thinks of anyone who does not get on board:
Anyone that has ever experienced degradation or intolerance would understand the solemn duty and how important it actually is. Anyone that’s ever experienced antisemitism or racism, any New Yorker who is an immigrant, who has experienced discrimination, any woman who has faced harassment at work or suffered violence at home, any disabled person who has been mocked or marginalized, understands what we’re talking about here. We have all known the wrath of discrimination. We have all felt the pain and the insult of hatred. This is why we are all standing here today. We stand to tell the world that we want equality for everyone. We stand to tell the world that we want marriage equality in New York State.
Yes, it is undeniably true that many gays and lesbians have experienced discrimination, violence, and marginalization on account of their sexual orientation. But to imply that all opposition to SSM is coming from a place of "hatred" is inaccurate and irresponsible. It further polarizes a debate that is already deeply contentious. And when the governor of New York appears eager to engage in this sort of stark line-drawing, it does not bode well for the future viability of religious liberty. I believe that SSM will be adopted in the majority of states over the coming years, but the tone and substance of the political discourse used along the way matters a lot.
I've never read anything by her, but I thought that some MOJ readers might be interested in this:
Sightings 4/16/09
Destiny’s Child
– Thomas Zebrowski
In her recently-released spiritual
memoir, Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview with the Vampire,
writes that the mass appeal of her fantasy books may be due partially to the way
she has draped their otherworldly trappings over a conventional three-act
frame.Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession is
itself no exception.Yet the personal story she fits into this
familiar dramatic pattern is not so much the prodigal daughter’s, as the one
C.S. Lewis called “the pilgrim’s regress.”The accent is less on
sin and redemption than the loss and recovery of childhood faith.
The importance of origins to the
tale Rice has to tell is demonstrated by the convincing detail with which she
recreates and defends the pervasively Catholic culture of 1940s New Orleans,
underlined by the manifest stability in her lifelong conception of God and his
Church.According to Rice, her preliterate openness to a world of
sense experience in which “there was a profound connection between narrative,
art, music and faith” is at the root of her abiding religious “interests and
tendencies,” not to mention her knack for writing popular fiction about
supernaturally haunted lives.At the center of this incipient
world was the icon of Jesus Christ who, present in the Holy Sacrament and in his
Church, was able to call her back to Catholic faith after decades of hopeless
wandering in a professed atheism one feels she never fully inhabited.And as anyone knows who is familiar with the first two volumes of the
novelized autobiography of Jesus upon which Rice has audaciously embarked,
Christ remains for her the person proclaimed in the Church’s creeds and the
canonical New Testament, presented with literary embellishments yet without
significant concession to the skeptical conclusions of modern biblical
scholarship.
It thus comes as an amusing surprise
to discover that this deeply traditional and even nostalgic Catholic makes no
apologies for some of the most colorful sins of her waywardness – neither the
pseudonymously authored pornographic novels, still less the more pedestrian
eroticism and gender play in which she has drenched her mainstream fare.Just to make the point that she is not simply the anti-modern Christian
her old-fashioned catechesis set her up to be, in fact, Rice quietly reminds the
reader about her “transgressive” sexuality.Though her tone, to be
sure, is one of openness to correction rather than outright dissent, she devotes
a portion of the book’s closing chapter to discussing the reasons why she
remains unpersuaded by the Catholic Church’s teachings on women’s ordination and
sexual morality.
The long shadow cast by Rice’s early
impressions might help us to make sense of these apparent incongruities as
well.There is more than a hint here that the relaxed sexual
attitude Rice adopted contemporaneously with her college departure from
Catholicism came quite naturally to the same person whose “oversensuous mind”
had made her so open to the rich physicality of pre-conciliar Catholic
piety.And haven’t the more puritan strains of Christianity
always suspected a certain connection between carnal permissiveness and lavish
sensuality in worship?Of course, these tendencies were kept apart
and an elevated aesthetic maintained by an overarching awareness of original
sin, and a concomitant mistrust of the untutored passions, in the ordered world
in which Rice grew up.But there is some evidence that Rice
herself may have developed a weaker view of human corruption – an Augustine or a
Pascal could have some fun with her innocent-sounding notion that because her
fall from faith was “sincere” it must have been morally blameless.
Rice’s personal misgivings about
some traditional Christian mores are far from being the focus of her lovely
memoir, even less central to it than a related belief about herself as a
“genderless” person, which she also traces to childhood.Yet they
fit in with our picture of her as a bracingly straightforward and unironic
person who has learned from experience to trust her intuitions.Indeed, the “tragedy of mind and heart” she memorializes in Called Out
of Darkness is partly about the consequences of her mistake to abandon
Catholicism, the first love and only meaning of her life, just because she
wasn’t intellectually prepared to reconcile her deep religious convictions with
what appealed to her in the secular world in which she came of age.Here, the prescient words of a youthful Paulist priest who tried
(counterproductively) to counsel her as her teenage faith wavered go straight to
the point:“For a Catholic like you,” he melodramatically
cautioned, “there is no life outside the Catholic Church.”From
the Gothic tales that brought her fame to the devotional literature she’s now
turning out, Anne Rice’s body of work bears consistent witness to this
fact.
References
Anne Rice, Called Out of Darkness
(Knopf, 2008).
For an excellent appreciation of
Rice’s writings on Jesus see, “In Defense of Anne Rice” by Patricia Snow, which
appeared in First Things:http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1297.
Thomas Zebrowski is a Ph.D.
Candidate in Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a former
junior fellow in the MartinMartyCenter.
---------- Sightings
comes from the Martin Marty
Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Jon Meacham, the sage of Newsweek, considers the question whether we are reaching the "end of Christian America" (here): "To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining [though still more than 75%] percentage of the American population." He notes, though:
Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe. . . .
. . .
America, then, is not a post-religious society—and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or a reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring. "All men," said Homer, "need the gods." The essential political and cultural question is to what extent those gods—or, more accurately, a particular generation's understanding of those gods—should determine the nature of life in a given time and place.
If we apply an Augustinian test of nationhood to ourselves, we find that liberty, not religion, is what holds us together. In "The City of God," Augustine —converted sinner and bishop of Hippo—said that a nation should be defined as "a multitude of rational beings in common agreement as to the objects of their love." What we value most highly—what we collectively love most—is thus the central test of the social contract.
Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. . . .
The headline is not *quite* right, but the story is worth reading. (I say it is "not quite right" because it is not clear to me that a commitment to gay rights requires eliminating religious-hiring rights for religious organizations.) Here's the conclusion:
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who supports same-sex marriage, said the Bob Jones ruling "puts us on a slippery slope that inevitably takes us to the point where we punish religious groups because of their religious views."
Both sides predict more litigation as gay rights bump up against strong religious beliefs.
Marc Stern, general counsel for American Jewish Congress, said: "When you have a change that is as dramatic as has happened in the last 10 to 15 years with regards to attitudes toward homosexuality, it's inevitable it's going to reverberate in dozens of places in the law that you're never going to be able to foresee."
More here (HT: First Things) on this "mega-cultural issue."
Anthony Williams, the former (Democratic) mayor of D.C., and Kevin Chavous, a former (Democratic) Council member, weigh in here in favor of meaningful education reform in D.C. Will the Administration listen? As the Washington Post explains, it should. Unfortunately, the Administration seems to be listening to the wrong voices:
It's clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents' needs, student performance and program effectiveness don't matter next to the political demands of teachers' unions. Congressional Democrats who receive ample campaign contributions from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers laid the trap with budget language that placed the program on the block. And now comes Mr. Duncan with the sword.
FORDHAM CENTER ON RELIGION AND CULTURE | HEADLINE FORUM
Matters
of Conscience When
Moral Precepts Collide with Public Policy
Tuesday,
28 April 2009 | 6 – 8 p.m. Fordham University | Lincoln Center Campus
Pope Auditorium | 113 West 60th Street
What happens when individuals or institutions are called upon to
cooperate with actions that they consider gravely immoral but that the law and
public policy allow?
Recent legislative and judicial developments touching on life,
death, sexuality, and family have stirred deep conflicts about moral and
religious norms.
Should “conscience clauses” protect individuals or institutions from being
compelled to cooperate with conduct that violates their religious or moral
principles?
Can protection for conscience be balanced against the rights of those seeking
morally controversial but lawful
services?
MODERATOR Russell Pearce, the Edward and
Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality and Religion, Fordham
University School of Law
PANEL Douglas Kmiec, professor of
constitutional law and Caruso Family Chair in Constitutional Law at Pepperdine
University Marc D. Stern, acting co-executive director of
the American Jewish Congress, and a leading expert on church-state issues
Nadine Strossen, professor of law at New York Law School,
and past president of the American Civil Liberties Union Robert
Vischer, associate professor at the University of St. Thomas Law
School
