Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 136

Face Of The Day

Erika Turner (R) and Jennifer Melsop (L) of Centreville, Virginia, become the first same-sex married couple in Arlington County during a ceremony, officiated by the Rev. Linda Olson Peebles (C) of Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlingon, outside the Arlington County Courthouse on October 6, 2014. The U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will not hear the five pending same-sex marriage cases, paving the way for gay and lesbian marriage in 11 more states. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Mum From Republicans On Marriage Equality

Little surprise at this point:

As of Monday afternoon, Sen. Mike Lee was the lone GOP member to issue a statement. His home state of Utah was one of the states where a marriage ban was overturned by an appeals court and the state is now moving forward with allowing same-sex couples to marry. Lee called the Supreme Court decision to not review the appeals “disappointing.”

Steve Benen finds much of the same – but there’s one big exception:

I checked the websites for the House Speaker, House Majority Leader, House Majority Whip, and House Conference Chair, and combined, the four Republican leaders said a grand total of nothing. The same goes for the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Campaign Committee, and the National Republicans Senatorial Committee, all of which published literally zero words on the subject.

But at least their silence demonstrates how politically dead this issue is now, a far cry from the demagoguing of the 2004 election and the Prop 8 campaign of 2008. Timothy Kincaid likewise sees the muted reaction as “a sign that while the fighting isn’t over, we’ve already won”:

[T]he usual voices of the anti-gay extremists have been loud in condemnation. But where are RNC Committee Chairman Reince Preibus? Surely this merits a moment of his time. And as for House Majority Leader John Boehner… well perhaps he’s too busy to comment today. He’s on his way to San Diego to raise money for a gay GOP congressional candidate.

Sure they may both say something about the denial of cert. They may even remind us that they “personally uphold the traditional definition of marriage” or something of the sort. But gone are the days of blistering retort or angry denunciation.

But wait – there’s at least one big turd in the GOP punchbowl sounding off late in the day:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Monday slammed the Supreme Court for declining to hear appeals on lower court rulings that overturn same-sex marriage bans, calling the justices’ move “tragic and indefensible.” “By refusing to rule if the States can define marriage, the Supreme Court is abdicating its duty to uphold the Constitution,” he said in a statement.

And yet:

“This is judicial activism at its worst,” Cruz said. “Unelected [circuit court] judges should not be imposing their policy preferences to subvert the considered judgments of democratically elected legislatures.”

Judicial activism is the worst, unless it’s judicial inactivism.

Are The Protesters Really Speaking For The People?

Eric X. Li criticizes Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests for going after the wrong target, arguing that the territory is more democratic today than ever before and that economic stagnation and inequality are the public’s real concerns:

Empirical data demonstrates the nature of public discontent, and it is fundamentally different from what is being portrayed by the protesting activists. Over the past several years, polling conducted by the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong has consistently shown that well over 80 percent of Hong Kongers’ top concerns are livelihood and economic issues, with those who are concerned with political problems in the low double digits at the most.

When the Occupy Central movement was gathering steam over the summer, the protesters garnered 800,000 votes in an unofficial poll supporting the movement. Yet less than two months later an anti-Occupy campaign collected 1.3 million signatures (from Hong Kong’s 7 million population) opposing the movement. The same University of Hong Kong program has conducted five public opinion surveys since April 2013, when protesters first began to create the movement. All but one showed that more than half of Hong Kongers opposed it, and support was in the low double digits.

But Alvin Y.H. Cheung emphasizes that the movement is about much more than the economy:

Hong Kong’s current system of governance has aptly been described as “the result of collusion between Hong Kong’s tycoons and Beijing’s Communists.” Half of Hong Kong’s legislature is made up of “functional constituencies” representing “special interests.” The end result of this is that the 1,200-strong Election Committee that currently chooses Hong Kong’s Chief Executive disproportionately favors corporate interests. …

The Umbrella Revolution is the result of this. It is a warning of the comprehensive breakdown of confidence in Hong Kong’s governing institutions – it reflects growing public disillusion with the institutional means of making their voices heard. The momentum of the protests reflects that disenchantment.

Meanwhile, Christian Caryl wonders why the protest leaders’ Christianity hasn’t gotten more press:

This is myopic. In its origins, Christianity is a product of the Middle East, making it just as “western” as Judaism and Islam. Modern-day Christianity is thoroughly global. The Catholic Church may have its headquarters in Rome, but nowadays the vast majority of Catholics live outside of Europe and North America. Evangelical Protestantism is expanding rapidly in Latin America and Africa — and Christians there see themselves as servants of God, not as “agents of the West.”

The same goes for China. The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life put the number of Protestant Christians in China at 58 million in 2010 — greater than the number in Brazil (40 million). The scholar Fenggang Yang calculates that China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian country by 2025. Western journalists may not be paying much attention, but that’s one mistake the Chinese Communist Party isn’t about to make. The Party regards religion, and Christianity in particular, as its greatest rival. It’s probably right to do so.

Peter Rutland scrutinizes the movement through the lens of nationalism and identity politics:

Since Hong Kong joined the People’s Republic 17 years ago, young people have been taught Mandarin in school (in contrast to the Cantonese spoken by most residents of Hong Kong) and have had much more direct exposure to Mainlanders, who travel to Hong Kong as tourists in huge numbers. This experience seems to be reinforcing the sense that Hong Kong citizens have a distinct identity and not just a different political system. In recent years polling data have shown a steady rise among those who see themselves first and foremost as “Hong Kong citizens” rather than as Chinese. As one demonstrator, Ashley Au, recently told a journalist: “We don’t feel like we’re a part of China, and I don’t feel Chinese.” This fact is now colliding with frustration over Beijing’s efforts to tamp down the space for political participation.

And Anne Applebaum mulls Beijing’s impulse to paint the protests as part of an American conspiracy:

To the truly authoritarian mind, “spontaneity” is impossible. The state can and should control all organizations. There is no such thing as a self-organized crowd. If people are sleeping in tents in Hong Kong’s central business district or Kiev’s Maidan, somebody must be paying them and directing them, and if it isn’t our state, then it must be someone else’s. I don’t know whether those who talk like this necessarily believe it (for the record, I’m guessing Vladimir Putin does but Hong Kong’s leaders don’t). The vision of foreign conspiracy is self-serving: If there is a foreign power directing the protest, then the government can legitimately destroy it. The conspiracy narrative has an explanatory purpose, too. If the Hong Kong protests are an American plot, then mainland Chinese can safely ignore it.

Follow all of our Hong Kong coverage here.

(Photo: A pro-democracy protester takes part in a protest in the Mongkok district of Hong Kong on October 6, 2014. Exhausted demonstrators debated the next step in their pro-democracy campaign as their numbers dwindled after a week of rallies, and the city returned to work despite road closures and traffic gridlock. By Xaume Olleros/AFP/Getty Images)

Marriage Equality For The Majority!

Silver calculates that marriage equality states now “have a collective population of roughly 165 million, according to 2013 census figures”:

That means for the first time, same-sex marriage is legal for the majority of the U.S. population. The 26 states where the practice is not legal have a total population of about 151 million. The Supreme Court’s decision may also lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming. Those states have an additional 25 million people combined. If they follow suit, 30 states and the District, totaling about 60 percent of the U.S. population, would allow same-sex marriage.

Burroway charts the progress made since the 1960s – a reversal few ever imagined:

A New Eugenics? Ctd

Last week, Michael Brendan Dougherty likened the termination of Down syndrome pregnancies to eugenics. But Noah Millman feels that Dougherty’s “fundamental objection … isn’t to eugenics but to abortion”:

[A]ssume that Down Syndrome worked like Tay-Sachs, meaning that you could avoid having a child with the condition by pre-marital screening. Would Dougherty oppose such screening? If so, why? Or, here’s another one: late childbearing significantly increases the risks of your children having Down Syndrome (which is why Down Syndrome births are up in spite of the high abortion rate). Would Dougherty say it’s wrong to take that fact into consideration when deciding at what age to start having children (and at what age to stop)? Would he say it’s wrong for public health authorities to let people know about that fact, and to encourage (via informational campaigns, not physical or financial coercion) women to have children somewhat earlier?

The point he’s trying to make:

Inasmuch as he objects to eugenic motivations, it’s because he worries that by definition any thinking about “better” children makes life into something instrumental, a product, and thereby makes abortion more acceptable. But I don’t think that’s a sustainable view; it makes perfectly normal planning for the future seem corrupt and wrong. Everybody wants their kids to be healthier, including being born healthier. There’s nothing wrong with trying to ensure that—unless there’s something wrong with what you are doing to ensure it, or unless your take your standards of what constitutes “health” to unreasonable extremes.

Meanwhile, a reader merges another thread – the one on child abuse:

Two pieces on the Dish in the past days merged in an uncanny way for me. First, there’s Dougherty trying to make some big broad point about eugenics out of people’s desire to avoid a personal tragedy by aborting Down Syndrome pregnancies. And yes, it is a personal tragedy more than anything else. My Down Syndrome sister is now 46, having lived considerably longer than the doctors in the late 1960s told my mother was the norm. The doctors’ advice then was to “put her in a home and forget about it”. In the end, my parents chose an unsatisfactory middle way of institutionalising my sister but remaining somewhat connected and bringing her home for holidays and such.

My mother, now 78, has never really recovered from that trauma. And trauma does indeed feel like the correct way to describe it. In a devout Baptist home, the sense of God’s wrath was tangible and frightening for an eight-year-old. The view from outside seemed to be that my parents had done something bad physically, spiritually or both, especially as my father was 34 years older than my mother.

If confronted now with the reality of a Down Syndrome pregnancy, I would not hesitate to support termination if my partner agreed. To lump this in with “eugenics”, free of reference to individual circumstances, is a gross distortion of what it’s really like and imputes notions of parental desire for “perfection” that do not enter into consideration.

Second, the extraordinary description of corporal punishment made me gasp, particularly because the “eugenics” claim had reminded me how the trauma of my Down Syndrome sister amplified my mother’s propensity for unrestrained violence. This was the mother that did not detect the repeated sexual abuse of a boy of five and six by a much older step-sibling, in spite of her skill in detecting all other manner of a child’s indiscretions. Indiscretions, real or not, that the mother would address through the delivery of raging, spit-flecked and red-faced beatings with sticks, belts, fists and coat hangers. These would be delivered until the blood appeared or until such time as the breathless howling was deemed to be genuine pain and not merely an attempt to get her to stop. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve achieved something merely by surviving this long.

The way the Dish pulls things together continues to demonstrate that the compartmentalised, neat-and-tidy manner that so much modern pontificating applies to assessing lives and to dispensing counsel is oblivious to the messy and messed-up reality of life. It does no one much good when we treat their choices as the linear outcome of some particular isolatable pathology. Yet that is precisely the way we continue to treat difference and suffering: there always has to be a clean explanation that permits judgments to be made and, on occasion, empathy to be expressed in calibrated doses.

Ruling Against Marriage Equality Was Actually A Bigger FD

Lyle Denniston digests the big news from this morning:

[F]our other circuits — the Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh — are currently considering the constitutionality of same-sex marriages. Of those, the Ninth Circuit — which had earlier struck down California’s famous “Proposition 8″ ban and uses a very rigorous test of laws against gay equality — is considered most likely to strike down state bans. If that happens, it would add five more states to the marriages-allowed column (Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada), which would bring the national total to thirty-five.

The reaction in those four circuits could depend upon how they interpret what the Supreme Court did on Monday. If the Court is not likely to uphold any state ban, either on same-sex marriage in the first place or recognition of existing such marriage, lower courts may see good reason to fall in line. The Court’s actions, however, do not set any precedent, so lower courts are technically free to go ahead and decide as they otherwise would. If they interpret the denials of review as providing no guidance whatsoever, then they would feel free to proceed without reading anything into what the Court has in mind. It is very hard, however, to interpret the Justices’ actions as having no meaning.

In Garrett Epps’ opinion, it’s now more difficult for an appeals court to reject marriage equality:

As long as cert. was pending, the lower-court opinions were in limbo. Meanwhile the issue is pending in the Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and 11th Circuits. Any panel in one of those circuits must now confront a huge weight of federal authority affirming same-sex marriage. True, other circuits’ decisions are not “binding”; true, the Supreme Court did not give any hint of its position. But that’s still a lot of contrary authority to move against. Any judge writing an opinion that bars same-sex marriage must explain why he or she is ignoring all the previous decisions.

That still could happen. The press has speculated that the Sixth Circuit may soon issue an opinion allowing state bans to stand. The Fifth and 11th are among the most conservative of the circuits. If one of them breaks step, then the Court will have to take that case. And it would seem to most observers that it would be granting to reverse.

Epps doesn’t believe that SCOTUS “will allow thousands of couples nationwide to celebrate marriages, change names, jointly adopt children, become legally one family—and then, in an opinion later in the term, baldly announce that their marriages are in jeopardy or even void”:

If the justices were later to decide against same-sex marriages, a number of the states where, in a few days, it will be legal, would be back at the Court asking for reconsideration. That would be, as Lyle Deniston of SCOTUSblog wisely wrote,“an invitation to legal chaos.” Beyond that, it would be an act of cruelty that I hope is beyond any five of the nine human beings who sit on this Court.

Rick Hansen is on the same page:

The fact that the Supreme Court, without saying a peep, is letting court-ordered same sex marriages go forward in Utah is a huge deal. Now you may think that this could well be reversed once there is a circuit split, perhaps in a case from the 5th or 6th Circuit. But remember, there will now be all of these children from legal same sex marriages performed until the Supreme Court could decide to take a case from another circuit. The idea that Justice Kennedy would let that happen, knowing there could well be a reversal down the line seems unlikely.

Digby nods along with that:

There are already a whole lot of gay parents (always have been, they’re just now able to parent together) and a whole lot of laws that are necessarily being created to deal with that new circumstance. Aside from the obvious moral obstacle of breaking up happy families, there will be the complications of untangling many legal issues.

(Photo: Suzanne Marelius and Kelli Frame hold hands as they wait in line at the Salt Lake County Recorders Office to get a marriage license on October 6, 2014. Marelius and Frame are the first same sex couple in Utah to get a marriage license after the U.S. Supreme Court declined challenges to gay marriage making it now legal in Utah. By George Frey/Getty Images)

Cup O’ Quandaries

In his latest Ethicist column, Chuck Klosterman advises a camp counselor to let a Mormon teenager sample coffee, disregarding the parents’ wishes:

As an authority figure, you have an obligation to approach the camper and ask, “Are you aware that your parents requested that you not drink coffee?” You might follow that with a second question: “Do you understand why your parents don’t want you drinking coffee?” This seems like a prime opportunity to have a meaningful discussion that might affect the rest of his life.

But regardless of the teenager’s response, you should not physically stop him from consuming a beverage that is legally and ethically within his right to consume. It’s not as if you’re forcing him to drink coffee against his parents’ wishes or placing him in a position where there’s no alternative; he is choosing to do this, despite his spiritual upbringing. A 16-year-old has the intellectual ability to decide which aspects of a religion he will accept or ignore. He’s not an infant, and you’re not living in the town where “Footloose” happened. It’s the responsibility of a secular camp to respect the principles of any religion but not to enforce its esoteric dictates.

Coffee, of course, has also stirred secular objections over the years. Dan Piepenbring unearths the “rhetorically marvelous if scientifically unsound” advice of one J. M. Holaday, who strongly advocated against the beverage in his 1888 paper “Coffee-Drinking and Blindness“:

Children that are allowed to partake freely of coffee will become restless, fussy and noisy, half wild with mischief. They probably advance in their school studies with abnormal rapidity. But they hate work. At times they are indifferent about education. Their strength goes to the brain. They grow rapidly, but not aright. They develop into men and women three years too soon. Yet their eyes dance with angelic splendor, and their cheeks glow with vermilion, providing that they started in life with robust constitutions. If they began life with puny physiques, however, coffee will make them slim and ghostly, and their eyes and features flat. Coffee … gives a sentimental strength—the strength that pertains to runts. The best thing that can be said of coffee is, that it has a tendency, like opium, to make lawless persons tame.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

First up, a classic eggcorn from our friends at TPM:

The No. 2 official at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to speak Sunday at an event co-hosted by Concerned Women for America—a group with a long history of fermenting the “creeping Sharia” conspiracy theory.

And a quote from today:

The humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts.

More gems from the weekend: Rembrandt’s genius with intimacy; Nabokov’s amazing love letters; Facebook as a Kafkaesque “accusation aggregator“; a butterfly chart that flutters; an unforgettable portrait painted with microbes; the desolation of those who lose their faith; and the surprising short lengths of most addictions. Plus: a pretty wonderful devastation of Richard Dawkins.

25 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here. From a reader who saw me speak at Claremont McKenna College last week:

Thanks for all you are doing! Becca insists that you will like the pic attached – with our Dish shirts prominent. You spoke about having 30,000+ subscribers, but little hope for growing that number significantly in the near term. Here’s just an observation: we put this pic on Facebook on Tuesday night. The response from many of our friends has been “Who’s Andrew Sullivan?”

Most of those are people who should be seeing your work (and probably a few who would just think you’re another crackpot – yes, we know some of them too!) and, having seen it would subscribe. At the risk of committing the very sins you spoke about at CMC – monetizing every post a la Buzzfeed, etc – it seems that you need to find a way to market The Dish that goes beyond word-of-mouth from your dedicated fans.

All ideas are welcome. Another subscriber from Claremont:

I was the guy in the grey suit and white hair. My daughter sat at your table. I’ve been reading the Dish since 2001 and actually contributed to you for 2 or 3 years before you moved to a different platform. (I subscribed for $40 just now.) She’s been reading your blog since high school. I spoke to many of the students in attendance. None of them ever read your blog or knew very much about you. However, they were intensely interested in the subject matter. That’s why they chose to attend. Very unusual to get a sell-out for one of these dinners unless it is a celebrity.

So, I just want to let you know that you are really on to something. What you had to say last night really connected with that audience of young people.

These trips are always a mix of exhilaration and exhaustion. But one thing I always discover: the passion of Dishheads. It’s the elixir of a blogging life.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Pope Francis leads a vigil prayer in preparation for the Synod on the Family on October 4, 2014 at St Peter’s square at the Vatican. By Gabriel Buoys/AFP/Getty.)

A Poem For Sunday

“To the Reader: The Language of the Cloud” by Chase Twichell:

Come with me to a private room.

I have a secret to show you.

Sometimes I like to stand outside it

with a stranger because I haven’t

come at it from that vantage in so long—

see? There I am beside him, still joined,

still kissing. Isn’t it dreamlike,

the way the bed drifts in its dishevelment?

Bereft of their clothes, two humans

lie entangled in its cloud.

Their bodies are saying the after-grace,

still dreaming in the language of the cloud.

Look at them, neither two nor one.

I want them to tell me what they know

before the amnesia takes them.

(From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been © 1998, 2010 by Chase Twichell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Suzanne LaGasa)

The Neocons vs Oakeshott

It’s long been a simmering intelllectual rift within the philosophy of conservatism – between the rigid disciples of Leo Strauss and the wayward offspring of Michael Oakeshott. My own choice of Oakeshott for my dissertation was one of the first moments when my “conservatism” was greeted with intense skepticism by the neocons I knew. The chill was palpable. He wasn’t interested in fostering the morals of others, which was, to many neocons, the only real purpose of religion at all. So it’s no surprise that in introducing a collection of essays, On Jews and Judaism, written by her late husband Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb connects his attachment to religion to his brand of neoconservatism – and not to the bohemian Englishman’s conservatism:

Religion, he held, is not just for the good of society; it is good for the individual, and not just for the sake of leading an ethical life but for the sake of a meaningful and soulful life. … His neo-orthodoxy is firmly Jewish, rooted in history and community, in an ancient faith and an enduring people. And so, too, his neoconservatism is firmly rooted in Judaism. In an essay on Michael Oakeshott written many years later, Kristol recalled the day in 1956 when, as an editor of Encounter in London, he found on his desk an unsolicited manuscript by Oakeshott entitled “On Being Conservative.” It was a great coup for the magazine to receive, over the transom, an essay by that eminent philosopher. Kristol read it “with great pleasure and appreciation”—and then politely rejected it. It was, he later explained (although not to Oakeshott at the time), “irredeemably secular, as I—being a Jewish conservative—am not.” Oakeshott’s “conservative disposition,” to enjoy and esteem the present rather than what was in the past or might be in the future, left little room for any religion, still less for Judaism:

Judaism especially, being a more this-worldly religion than Christianity, moves us to sanctify the present in our daily lives—but always reminding us that we are capable of doing so only through God’s grace to our distant forefathers. Similarly, it is incumbent upon us to link our children and grandchildren to this “great chain of being,” however suitable or unsuitable their present might be to our conservative disposition. And, of course, the whole purpose of sanctifying the present is to prepare humanity for a redemptive future.

Kristol’s inability to appreciate the deeper religious teaching of Oakeshott was not surprising. Few did for most of his life – my own dissertation was the first to insist upon it, and has been supplanted by Elizabeth Corey’s elegant work on Oakeshott’s understanding of religion and aesthetics, and even more by the recently published Notebooks, where religion is an obsessive interest. The idea that Oakeshott is “irredeemably secular” is almost laughable once one has read these.

If I were to point to one core difference between Oakeshott’s understanding of faith and the neocons’, it would not simply be the difference between Judaism and Christianity, but more that the neocons see religion primarily as a political and social tool, rather than as an insight into a present eternity. And it is neoconservatism’s use of religion that makes them in fact, the irredeemably secular ones. And, to the extent that some, like Allan Bloom, were actually atheists, cynics.