So if I say Howie is an ugly little wuss who beats his wife, molests children and cheats on his taxes, and he gets angry because I say it, it must be true. ‘Cause people don’t get angry because you malign their character and tell hateful lies about them, do they?
The Wisdom of Doubt, Part III
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- “George Washington warned us never to `indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.’ ” —
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- “The Eleventh Commandment should be ‘Thou shalt not bullshit thyself about thyself.'” —
Every time people say that without religion there’d be no morality, I want a giant hand to reach out of the sky to shake some sense into them. While I don’t subscribe to the Christopher Hitchens “religion is the root of all evil” school, an objective look at human history suggests that religion doesn’t always inspire good behavior. In fact, a large part of the mass atrocity being perpetrated in the world today has some connection to religion. I’d say it’s time religious people stopped mouthing platitudes and give some serious thought to why that might be true.
Here’s a clue. Shortly before he was named Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said,
Having a clear faith based on the creed of the Church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards… We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
In response Julian Baggini wrote in The Guardian (April 20, 2005):
We have known for a long time that orthodox religion has a preference for black-and-white certainties, but this crude dichotomy between the absolute moral truths of the church and the so-called laissez-faire relativism of the modern secular world is crassly simplistic. …
… The black-and-white choice Ratzinger offers us is, therefore, a bogus one. The absolute moral certainty he claims the church offers is hollow, and the valueless relativism he claims is the only alternative a caricature of non-absolutist ethics.
If I may be so bold, I say Julian Baggini nails it. Moral absolutism and “valueless relativism” are just mirror images of each other. Ego and desire inflame the religious and nonreligious alike, to much the same result. A person can wear his Jesus T-shirt and holler hallelujah a hundred times a day, and still be an egotistical, desire-driven wretch underneath. And an egotistical, desire-driven wretch with religion is likely to use religion as an excuse to gratify his ego and desires.
Let’s consider the opinion of another Important Catholic Guy, St. Augustine (354-430). After all these centuries people are still arguing about St. Augustine’s seventh homily on the First Epistle of John. Here’s a snip:
See what we are insisting upon; that the deeds of men are only discerned by the root of charity. For many things may be done that have a good appearance, and yet proceed not from the root of charity. For thorns also have flowers: some actions truly seem rough, seem savage; howbeit they are done for discipline at the bidding of charity. Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good
Love, and do what you will. Wow, that sounds … relativist. But Augustine is talking about God’s love for man, and he is charging his listeners to manifest that love within themselves and let it dictate their dealings with others. It is that love, he says, that is the foundation of morality. A person who acts with love will do the right thing without having to consult the rules. Love, and do what you will.
Augustine continues,
Hear the Gospel: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But let no man imagine God to himself according to the lust of his eyes. For so he makes unto himself either a huge form, or a certain incalculable magnitude which, like the light which he sees with the bodily eyes, he makes extend through all directions; field after field of space he gives it all the bigness he can; or, he represents to himself like as it were an old man of venerable form. None of these things do you imagine. There is something you may imagine, if you would see God; “God is love.” What sort of face has love? what form has it? what stature? what feet? what hands has it? no man can say. And yet it has feet, for these carry men to church: it has hands; for these reach forth to the poor: it has eyes; for thereby we consider the needy: “Blessed is the man,” it is said, “who considers the needy and the poor.”
Of course, people bullshit themselves about love, too. How many times have you heard a religious bigot say he hates the sin but loves the sinner? And how many of these people, do you think, really love the “sinner”?
For this reason I ask monotheists in particular to stop thinking of their religion primarily as a belief system — a “faith” — and instead think of it as a discipline or a practice. I may be a heathen, but I’ve read the Gospels. Jesus actually said very little about what people should believe. Mostly he talked about what they should do.
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- Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. —
Jesus
- (Matthew 5:43-48, American Standard Version)
I say that if Christians forgot every bit of doctrine or dogma they ever heard and just practiced that, the world would be a better place.
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- If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. —
St Paul
- (1 Corinthians 13:1-2, New American Bible)
I’m seeing a pattern here.
Of course, people can’t flip a switch and love their enemies. It takes long, hard inner work. Once upon a time Christianity had strong contemplative and mystical traditions in which people worked to purify themselves of hate, ego, and pride — to become “poor in spirit.” That tradition seems to have mostly disappeared. What happened to it?
A few days ago I came across this essay by someone who claims to be a Christian pastor in Georgia.
I say the church should dominate. I say our church should dominate. If athletes work hard to chisel their body so they can dominate a court and cutthroat executives maneuver hard to dominate the boardroom, we should approach the mission of making disciples with the same intensity. There are no excuses.
Erwin McManus rightly points out that the Bible never teaches Christians not to be ambitious. It’s selfish ambition that we are to avoid. That’s the desire to get ahead so we can draw attention to ourselves, write a book or lead a conference. We’re not out to make a name for ourselves in this church thing–we’re out to make His name famous. We don’t want to dominate for our sake, we want to dominate for the sake of the mission.
Trust me; when people say “we’re doing this obnoxious thing not for ourselves, but for God” — they’re doing it for themselves. If not for material gain, it’s for ego gratification, or territorial marking, or something else selfish and ugly clanking about in their ids. They’re just bullshitting themselves about the God thing. Count on it.
I’ve said many times that Oak Leaf Church is not here to take people away from other churches. Our mission is not to grow by theft. We want to lead people that are far from God to follow Him with their entire lives. But can I be honest? What’s the point of a genuine Christ follower wasting away in a lame and lifeless church? A church that never challenges him? A church that never reaches people? A church that just exists for the sake of some pastor having a job?
This makes religion out to be something like a virus; it has no function except to infect the cells of other organisms and multiply. But what else could a church congregation possibly do except march around dominating the other churches? Like, maybe, work at perfecting the teachings of Christ? Nah, that’s lame.
Moral absolutism is hollow. It amounts to armoring oneself with some external moral authority. But if inside one is a swarming mess of issues and resentments and ego and self-bullshitting, that armor will be corrupted in no time. And the result is no more beneficial to mankind than ego-induced nonreligious bullshit. Believe me, I’ll trust an introspective atheist over a self-bullshitting “person of faith” any day.
“What is religion? Compassion for all things, which have life.” (Hitopadesa, Sanskrit fables)
The concept of “sin” is alien to Buddhism. Morality has its basis in Metta, “loving kindness,” as well as the teachings of Ahimsa, borrowed from Hindu. Metta and Ahimsa both call for the cultivation of sincere, selfless compassion for all living things. Going through the motions of charity aren’t good enough, although going through the motions might lead to the real thing eventually. I think Jesus, St. Paul, and St. Augustine were suggesting something along the lines of Metta. Pope Benedict seems to have missed that lesson.
A commenter to the first Wisdom of Doubt post, Ross T., provided a link to this essay by the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., about theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). It’s excellent, and deserves to be read all the way through. I’m going to quote some chunks —
Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor – not much of a background for national innocence. “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem,” Niebuhr wrote, “are insufferable in their human contacts.” The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).
What Glenn Greenwald said. Schlesinger continued:
Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. … In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature – creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
“Original sin” does seem to have gone out of favor these days, and frankly, it’s not a doctrine I thought much about even when I was a Christian. But maybe there was some purpose for it after all.
I like this part (emphasis added):
He helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes, Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of innocence and infallibility. “From the earliest days of its history to the present moment,” Niebuhr wrote in 1952, “there is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history.” For messianism – carrying on one man’s theory of God’s work – threatened to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human sinners.
Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley’s definition of a fanatic. According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic “does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He only knew th’ facts iv th’ case.” There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty’s will. “A democracy,” Niebuhr said, “cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war,” and he lamented the “inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history.”
Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of absolutes. Mortal man’s apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the “relativity of all human perspectives,” as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself “in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle.” In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called “compulsory godliness,” Niebuhr argued that “religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.” Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, “the worst corruption is a corrupt religion.”
This bring us around to the wisdom of doubt. In this sense, “doubt” is humility. It accepts not-knowing. For monotheists, it does not presume perfect understanding of God’s plans and our part in them. Thus, it is wise.
Trashing the Joint
Remember back when Republicans claimed (falsely) that the Clintons had trashed the White House? And GOP were all over cable news and talk radio with wild accusations, nearly all of which were found to be false by the GAO?
Well, I want the same attention paid to what the Bushies have done to the national forests. Timothy Egan writes,
I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.
In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.
Remember the scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,†when Jimmy Stewart’s character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement dwellings in Pottersville?
If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he’d find some of the same thing in the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all.
The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse.
In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than 75,000 people wrote them — 98 percent opposed to drilling.
For most of the Bush years, the Interior Department was nominally run by a Stepford secretary, Gale Norton, while industry insiders like J. Steven Griles — the former coal lobbyist who pled guilty this year to obstruction of justice — ran the department.
Same in the Forest Service, where an ex-timber industry insider, Mark Rey, guides administration policy.
They don’t take care of these lands because they see them as one thing: a cash-out. Thus, in Bush’s budget proposal this year, he guts the Forest Service budget yet again, while floating the idea of selling thousands of acres to the highest bidder. The administration says it wants more money for national parks. But the parks are $10 billion behind on needed repairs; the proposal is a pittance.
Where is all this money going? Into whose pockets??? Those public lands belong to us, you know, not to the Bushies.
Speaking of crooks, is Halliburton cooking its books?
He Who Fights and Runs Away …
Pauline Jelinek writes today (June 23, 2007) for the Associated Press:
The U.S. may be able to reduce combat forces in Iraq by next spring if Iraq’s own security forces continue to grow and improve, a senior American commander said Friday. He denied reports the U.S. is arming Sunni insurgent groups to help in the fight against al-Qaida.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top day-to-day commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, did not predict any reductions in U.S. forces but said such redeployments may be feasible by spring. There are currently 156,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Hmm, why does that sound familiar? Oh, I remember …
U.S. Signals Spring Start for Pullout
General Restates Position, Noting Contingencies, During Rumsfeld Visit to Baghdad
By Ann Scott Tyson and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 28, 2005; Page A18BAGHDAD, July 27 — The top U.S. military leader in Iraq said Wednesday there could be substantial withdrawals of some of the 135,000 U.S. troops in the country as early as next spring.
Gen. George W. Casey said that despite continued lethal attacks by insurgents, the security situation in Iraq had improved. He reiterated a position he had taken earlier this year on the possible decrease in the U.S. military presence during a one-day visit by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for meetings with Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.
Back to the present, June 2007:
Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon from his headquarters outside Baghdad, Odierno gave an update on the U.S. offensives under way in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad and in areas south and west of the capital. He said U.S. and Iraqi troops have made important progress.
“I think if everything goes the way it’s going now, there’s a potential that by the spring we will be able to reduce forces, and Iraq security forces could take over,” Odierno said. “It could happen sooner than that. I don’t know.”
From July 2005:
“If the political process continues to go positively, and if the development of the security forces continues to go as it is going, I do believe we’ll still be able to take some fairly substantial reductions after these elections in the spring and summer,” Casey said before meeting with Jafari.
While U.S. officials have said recently that troop cutbacks are possible, Rumsfeld’s visit gave special focus to the prospects for withdrawals. Rumsfeld and other officials have rejected making a deadline public, but a secret British defense memo leaked this month in London said U.S. officials favored “a relatively bold reduction in force numbers.”
One week the Bushies are talking about “the long war” and how the effort in Iraq will take many years. The next week they talk “post-surge” strategy and reduction of troop forces. In fact, it would be an interesting exercise to go through news stories from the beginning of the war to see how many times the Bushies or the “commanders on the ground” told news media that troops reductions were just around the corner. I dimly remember some talk about troop reduction coming out of the White House during the 2004 election campaign, also.
However, the propaganda cycles are spinning so fast now they are bumping into each other. Thomas Ricks writes in today’s Washington Post:
The major U.S. offensive launched last weekend against insurgents in and around Baghdad has significantly expanded the military’s battleground in Iraq — “a surge of operations,” and no longer just of troops, as the second-ranking U.S. commander there said yesterday — but it has renewed concerns about whether even the bigger U.S. troop presence there is large enough.
As the U.S. offensive, code-named Phantom Thunder, has been greeted with a week of intensified fighting in areas outside the capital — areas that the U.S. military has largely left untouched for as long as three years — the push raised fears from security experts and officers in the field that the new attacks might simply propel the enemy from one area to another where there are not as many U.S. troops.
Since President Bush ordered the troop increase in January, the military had focused on creating a more secure environment in Baghdad. “We are beyond a surge of forces,” Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said yesterday in a briefing from his headquarters in the Iraqi capital. He did not directly address the size of the force, saying only that the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops over five months “allows us to operate in areas where we have not been for a long time.”
Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who in 2003 was among the first to call public attention to the relatively small size of the U.S. invasion force, said that the new operation shows how outnumbered U.S. troops remain. “Why would we think that a temporary presence of 30,000 additional combat troops in a giant city would change the dynamics of a bitter civil war?” he said in an interview yesterday. “It’s a fool’s errand.”
Compare/contrast to John Burns’s report in today’s New York Times:
The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.
In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,†abandoning “midlevel†Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.
Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. But General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north.
“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,†General Odierno said in a teleconference briefing with Pentagon reporters from the American military headquarters in Baghdad. “They watched the news. They understood we had a surge. They understood Baquba was designated as a problem area. So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.â€
Which begs the question: Why bother?
OK, we know why. Our troops are playing whack-a-mole to entertain the armchair warriors here at home and allow them to keep the faith. Meanwhile, the bulk of al Qaeda is comfortably entrenched in Pakistan and no doubt watchng our troops fight and die with much amusement also.
Speaking of al Qaeda, Josh Marshall notes:
I’ve long been amazed at how freely reporters accept it when this or that Arab or Muslim with a gun is labelled as “al Qaida.” And the issue is complicated by the fact that a new group — a post-invasion group with a very uncertain connection to the actual al Qaeda — has taken the name of al Qaeda in Iraq.
But is the standard bamboozle getting ramped up a notch? As Andrew Sullivan noted yesterday, even David Patraeus acts like the whole issue in Iraq now is just al Qaeda and Iranian arming of, I guess, al Qaeda. Otherwise things would be great.
This is the sort of thing that requires a close watching of the news and how things are being reported. Is ‘insurgent’ now being replaced across the board by al Qaeda. Keep an eye out and let us know what you see. We’ll do the same.
See also: The Iraq Insurgency for Beginners.
Update: See also Glenn Greenwald, “Everyone we fight in Iraq is now ‘al-Qaida’.”
The Boy Ain’t Right
There’s a disagreement between Glenn Greenwald and the BooMan about whether President Bush’s famous religiousness is the real thing or an affectation. Let me weigh in.
It’s pointless, IMO, to argue about whether Bush is “sincere” in his religious beliefs. The man is seriously miswired. At the very least he has narcissistic personality disorder. He may be a malignant narcissist or some kind of sociopath for all we know. He isn’t capable of “sincerity” as most of us might understand the word.
However, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t see himself as being genuinely religious. The boy’s a legend in his own mind, remember. I think it’s probable he really does believe he has some special rapport with God, although he’s mistaking his own ego for God. This is not an uncommon phenomenon.
As this old Observer article by Paul Harris reminds us, Bush seems to believe he is on a special mission from God. He even told people back in the 1990s that God wanted him to be President. A touch of megalomania often goes along with narcissistic personality disorder, I understand.
This is, IMO, why the deaths of Iraqi civilians don’t disturb his sleep, yet he calls research on surplus frozen blastocysts “unethical.” Most of us find this a tad inconsistent. I doubt that he does. Nor does he have any idea what a charade his presidency actually is. He thinks his policies are right and that history will vindicate him.
Normal human emotions and motivations don’t apply to Dubya, in other words.
A Pox on All Pundits
Melinda Henneberger is the political editor of the Huffington Post. I say this sadly, because I like the Huffington Post. HP could do a lot better.
Henneberger has an op ed in today’s New York Times titled “Why Pro-Choice Is a Bad Choice for Democrats.” This op ed is bad. It is profoundly bad. It is a near-perfect example of all that is bad, and stupid, and brain dead, and absurd, about those creatures we call “pundits.” And clearly the lady has a big future in punditry. This op ed reveals she fits nicely into the David Brooks – David Broder – Joe Klein mold, a mold with all the intelligence of Jello. For her, the sky’s the limit.
Henneger’s essential argument is that the Dems should back off a firm pro-choice position for the sake of winning elections. This opinion is based on her interviews of women “swing” voters who said they’d be more inclined to vote for Democrats were it not for their position on abortion.
I say you can take Henneberger article, redate it to 1963 or so, and change the words women to whites and abortion to desegregation, and it would be the same argument. In the 1960s and 1970s many whites bailed on the Democratic Party because of its stand on civil rights and racial equality issues. Using Henneberger’s logic, the Dems should have been softer on civil rights and more accommodating to the segregationists in their midst.
Henneberger is saying, in effect, that parties are wrong to take firm stands on the great moral issues of the day if it costs them votes. She’s telling the Dems to move to the right to pick up swing voters. Let’s not give the voters a clear choice; let’s be sure both parties support the same stuff in the mushy middle.
Did I mention that this dimwit is is the political editor of the Huffington Post?
Let’s take a look at the op ed.
Even in the real world, a pro-choice Republican nominee would be a gift to the Democrats, because the Republican Party wins over so many swing voters on abortion alone. Which is why Fred Thompson, who is against abortion rights, is getting so much grateful attention from his party now. And why, despite wide opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats must still win back such voters to take the White House next year.
She’s saying the Dems have to turn their backs on abortion rights in order to win back the White House in 2008. Let’s think about this. Yesterday the Christian Post published an article titled Survey: “Abortion Not Top-Tier Issue in White House Race.” A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll of May 4-6, 2007, asked the question “How important will each of the following issues be to your vote for president next year?” Abortion was 14th out of a 17-item list. And the list doesn’t distinguish between pro- and anti-choice voters who say the issue was “very important.”
According to this USA Today article from 2005, analysis of the 2004 election showed that Kerry’s stand on abortion cost him votes among white Catholic voters. This is hardly surprising, given the number of bishops who publicly denounced Kerry and ordered the faithful to vote for Bush. However,
Abortion-rights advocates, concerned that the issue was being blamed for Kerry’s loss, commissioned an analysis by Kerry pollster Mark Mellman. He concluded that abortion “played little role in the election” and, when it was a factor, “appears to have helped Democrats.” He wrote: “Support for a woman’s right to choose has, in many ways, become the scapegoat for Democrats’ losses.”
“Democrats at their own peril will move away from choice,” says Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily’s List, which supports Democratic female candidates who favor abortion rights. She says Kerry would have fared better by doing more, not less, to emphasize the issue.
I agree. I realize that in the most conservative parts of the country a pro-choice candidate would have a hard time getting elected. But in many other parts of the country, an anti-choice candidate would have a hard time getting elected. The issue is a sword that cuts both ways. For years the anti-choice movement has aggressively taken credit for Republican victories and Democratic defeats, to the point that the power of abortion to swing elections for Republicans has become conventional wisdom. But I’m convinced the claims of anti-choice leaders have been, um, inflated. And I say districts that would not elect a pro-choice politician probably are safe Republican strongholds on other issues as well.
Henneberger continues,
Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms†saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.
Dems have a problem with women voters? According to the Pew Research Center, in last year’s midterms 56 percent of women voted for Democrats, as opposed to 51 percent of men.
Henneberger continues,
The standard response from Democratic leaders has been that anyone lost to them over this issue is not coming back — and that regrettable as that might be, there is nothing to be done. But that is not what I heard from these voters.
Many of them, Catholic women in particular, are liberal, deep-in-their-heart Democrats who support social spending, who opposed the war from the start and who cross their arms over their chests reflexively when they say the word “Republican.†Some could fairly be described as desperate to find a way home. And if the party they’d prefer doesn’t send a car for them, with a really polite driver, it will have only itself to blame.
What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters — and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. But real respect would require an understanding that what supporters of abortion rights genuinely see as a hard-earned freedom, opponents genuinely see as a self-inflicted wound and — though I can feel some of you tensing as you read this — a human rights issue comparable to slavery.
I see it as a human rights issue, too. A human rights issue for women.
And when did Democratic Party leaders accuse anti-rights voters of being “extremists”? If anything, Dems have rhetorically tip-toed around abortion for years, being careful to speak respectfully of those who oppose abortion. The most common talking points from Dems are those that begin “I am personally opposed to abortion, but …” and those that end with the words “safe, legal and rare.”
I bet if I looked I could find Republicans who have accused pro-choicers of being extremists, as well as baby murderers and a few other things. I’d like some respect too, y’know.
Again and again, these voters said Democrats are too unwilling to tolerate dissent on abortion.
Bean answers this one at Lawyers, Guns and Money:
That might have been true in 2004 — maybe (I concede nothing). But it’s not now. The Democrats have shown that they are willing to tolerate dissent — look at the candidacies of Bob Casey Jr. and Heath Shuler. Henneberger is right that Dems were slow to broaden the tent when it comes to abortion rights, but it seems as if they have been recently. To pin Democrats’ chances in 2008 on this is a false excuse.
This may be the single dumbest sentence in Henneberger’s article:
Democratic Party leaders should also stop pushing the perception that Republicans are natural defenders of the faithful.
Um, haven’t Democratic Party leaders been working overtime to prove how religious they are in recent years?
Henneberger also thinks Dems were wrong to criticize the recent Carhart decision. It may cost them votes, she said. Yes, and speaking out against job discrimination cost Dems votes in the 1960s, too. Were they wrong to do so? Are the lives and health of women to be bartered for votes?
But Henneberger, somehow, is the political editor of the Huffington Post. I suggest HP cut Henneberger loose so she can rise in the ranks of big-time pundits. Surely there is someone else in America qualified for the job who actually (dare I hope?) thinks.
Update: Tristero posts on this same op ed, then updates —
In comments, Susan S. makes an important point, but I don’t think her conclusion follows:
I think you’re missing Melinda’s point. I recently saw her at a Planned Parenthood luncheon in Tampa where she made the same arguments that she makes in her op-ed. She’s merely saying that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t see abortion in the black and white terms most of us do. We ignore that at our peril. We have to find a way of talking to them that shows we recognize their concerns, and not automatically dismiss them…
She doesn’t disagree with us. She’s saying that there are many Democrats who can be brought back into the fold if we stop automatically dismissing them and equating them with the right-wing crazies. For whatever reason (possibly because they’ve been manipulated) their views on abortion are more complicated than ours. We need to educate them, but we can’t do it by talking down to them.
I completely agree. That is exactly the issue. There are a lot of people who don’t see abortion as black and white.
But the issue is not abortion but government regulation of abortion. The fact that so many of us see the abortion issue differently is precisely at the heart of the fight against the right.
They, not Democrats and liberals, want this country to see the issue in black and white. The effect, if they win, will be catastrophic. And the catastrophe will fall predominantly on poor women.
That’s why Henneberger is not only wrong, but completely wrong.
One more thing: While I think Susan S. is quite mistaken in defending Henneberger, I hope my saying so directly is not perceived as a personal attack. It certainly is not meant to be.
Again, to be clear, this is not about personal opinions about terminating or completing pregnancies. This about demanding the government regulate pregnancy and reproduction in accordance with one specific ideology.
Possibly no one feels the same as another about abortion itself. But that is not the issue. It’s the extreme right forcing people to adhere to their, and only their, morality that is the issue.
Nicely put, and let me add that I disagree with Susan when she says “their views on abortion are more complicated than ours.” Just the opposite is true; theirs is very simple. Abortion is bad. We’re the ones who have to be nuanced.
Then What the Hell Is It?
From the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:
The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.â€
Dick: There are three branches of government. Those are the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The Constitution puts the Vice President’s office in the executive branch. If you aren’t part the executive branch, then what branch do you think you are in?
Please, Dick, answer the question. This is fascinating. I really want to know what you think.
As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.
I want to reassign the lot of them to this branch.
Subpoenas
From Think Progress:
The Senate Judiciary Committee just voted 13-3 to authorize chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to issue subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) voted with the Democrats on the committee to authorize the subpoenas for any legal opinions and advice the Bush administration has received regarding the NSA program.
The Center on Democracy & Technology has released a list of the seven “most wanted surveillance documents.†See the full list here.
The confrontation over the documents “could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.†The Senate Judiciary Committee had previously scheduled to authorize subpoenas last week, but Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) blocked the Judiciary Committee from voting on the subpoenas.
Unsafe in Any Election
Ralph Nader is thinking about running for president again. Whoop dee doo.
Ralph Nader says he is seriously considering running for president in 2008 because he foresees another Tweedledum-Tweedledee election that offers little real choice to voters.
He said the same thing in 2000, when the choices were Al Gore and George W. Bush. Some people were dumb enough to believe him then, and some will believe him now. I have little to add to what this fella says, except to advise people to watch Ralph’s modus operandi. He’ll say something about how one party is as bad as the other and then spend the rest of the evening bashing Democrats. Republicans, as a rule, get a pass from Ralph.
One wonders what his motivation is. If he’s trying to reform the Dems — and Lord knows they could use it — this is not the way to go about it. Personally, I think he just wants the attention.
The Wisdom of Doubt, Part II
Yesterday President Bush vetoed a bill that would have provided for federal funding of some embryonic stem cell research. John Amato writes,
He falsely asked for Congress to stop politicizing Stem Cell research, but that’s what he did today and took a ridiculous moral position. This is why we need separation of Church and State. Religion cannot dictate Science. Here’s the role call of the vote … Update: Fact Check Bush on Stem Cell via The Democratic Caucus’s Senate Journal. 68 percent support funding, in the latest ABC/Post poll to measure views on the issue, in April.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times,
“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” Mr. Bush said during a brief ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He called America “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.”
Picking up where the last post left off … Our culture places a high value on certainty and considers not-knowing a flaw. And moral clarity is ballyhooed as the sine qua non of all that is Good and Righteous.
As I’ve written elsewhere, achieving moral clarity is remarkably easy.
First, take a firm and inflexible position on a moral question. Then, studiously ignore any factors that might call that opinion into question. If the factors refuse to go away, make up lies to neutralize them.
See? Nothin’ to it.
If you are foolish enough to take all facets of an issue into account, you risk not being clear. In fact, the more gut-level honest you are about a messy, unpleasant issue, the less clear you are likely to be. And this is a problem for conservatives, who by nature cannot stand ambiguity. One of the most basic traits of conservatives, in fact, is a compulsion to sort the world into rigid binary categories — right and wrong, good and evil, white and black. Any muddling of categories sends them into nervous fits. But once all things and all issues are properly sorted, they can relax and bask in their moral clarity.
The standard way to achieve moral clarity on the abortion issue, for example, is to completely disregard women. Examples of such “clear” moralizing include this op ed by Dean Barnett and this one by Michael Gerson. See also Digby:
This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument and it’s always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.
Abortion presents a painful choice, and although I oppose criminalization I understand why people agonize over this issue. But embryonic stem cell research? Particularly when there are boatloads of frozen embryos that will almost certainly be discarded anyway? You’re balancing the “rights” of a cluster of frozen cells against sentient children and adults suffering from terrible diseases. I see absolutely nothing “ethical” in Bush’s veto.
Weirdly, people who have “moral clarity” that embryonic stem cell research is bad often are compelled to lie — to us, to each other, to themselves — about the facts of the embryonic stem cell issue.
Satyam writes for Think Progress:
Faced with the opposition of nearly two-thirds of Americans, White House spokesperson Tony Snow today attempted to spin the veto as a positive development. Snow claimed that Bush has a “unique and unprecedented role” in supporting stem cell research, and attacked critics for “misstating” the administration’s policies, claiming that Bush was in fact “putting science before ideology.”
In an attempt to drum up support for less potent alternatives to embryonic stem cell research, Snow falsely characterized the science behind stem cell research, claiming scientists “are not even entirely sure about what the possible benefits of embryonic stem cells [are].” …
…Snow’s claim doesn’t pass the laugh test. Contrary to what Snow says, Bush has held a backwards and overly ideological perspective on scientific research. In 2001, Bush neutered the ability of scientists to engage in stem cell research by curbing funding for new embryonic lines. In 2006, he vetoed legislation lifting those restrictions. Even Bush’s top scientists have criticized him for these actions.
Currently, “not a single scientist who is pursuing research on any kind of cell has said that research involving embryonic stem cells should stop.” And scientists have seen potential treatments from embryonic stem cell research for a variety of ailments.
The only thing stopping federally-funded stem cell research from progressing is the White House’s insistence on putting right-wing ideology ahead of science.
UPDATE: More on the administration’s misinformation here and here.
As I said, whenever any messy facts get between you and moral clarity, just lie about them. That’s the ticket.
There is something self-evidently screwy about “ethics” that value frozen blastocysts above children and adults suffering and dying from terrible disease. But “moral clarity” on the stem cell issue — born of a stubborn refusal to look at all facets of the issue honestly — results in myriad unfortunate side effects. As explained here, for example, thanks to morally clear policies doctors performing in vitro fertilization cannot research ways to reduce multiple births. And multiple births increase the risks for both babies and mothers.
In other words, the rigid “right-to-life” policy is killing babies.
Essentially, “moral clarity” is about bullshitting yourself. It’s about not dealing honestly and compassionately with all aspects of a moral issue. Instead, the “morally clear” begin with the position they want to take and work backward to justify it, scamming themselves and others when necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This twisted way of achieving “clarity” is founded in the dualistic thinking Glenn Greenwald writes about. This dualism assumes one side of an issue must be “good” and the other must be “bad.” Thus, in much anti-choice literature embryos can talk and women who choose abortions are either ignored or assumed to have evil or selfish motivations. But real-world moral issues often involve multiple “good” sides. It is actually quite rare for people and facts to so neatly sort themselves into “good” and “bad” boxes as the morally clear want to sort them. And by achieving “clarity” based on lies and false assumptions, the “clarifiers” actually create more pain and complication.
Moral clarity takes inflexible positions based on rigid, narrow concepts of good and bad, life and death, self and other; see the “One Watch” series for further explanation of this. The morally clear like to talk about “standing firm.” The philosophical Taoists would tell you this is a bone-headed and disastrous way to approach morality. The Tao (way) is harmonious and does not take sides. Taoists call the Tao “soft,” and like water it naturally finds its best course without having to be forced. You understand it not by its actions but by its effects. The American Right is the Anti-Tao, always striving to impose their hard will on others and refusing to acknowledge how much harm they do and how much suffering they cause.
In John Wu’s translation of verse 38 of the Tao Teh Ching (Shambhala, 1989), I think the word ceremony can be read as either “organized religion” or “social convention.” I say that because other translations use ritual or etiquette instead of ceremony. Other than that, I think the verse applies as well to 21st century America as it did to China in 500 BCE.
High virtue is non-virtuous;
Therefore it has Virtue.
Low Virtue never frees itself from virtuousness;
Therefore it has no Virtue.High Virtue makes no fuss and has no private ends to serve:
Low Virtue not only fusses but has private ends to serve.High humanity fusses but has no private ends to serve:
High morality not only fusses but has private ends to serve.
High ceremony fusses but finds to response;
Then it tries to enforce itself with rolled-up sleeves.Failing Tao, man resorts to Virtue.
Failing Virtue, man resorts to humanity.
Failing humanity, man resorts to morality.
Failing morality, man resorts to ceremony.
Now, ceremony is the merest husk of faith and loyalty;
It is the beginning of all confusion and disorder.As to foreknowledge, it is only the flower of Tao,
And the beginning of folly.Therefore, the full-grown man sets his heart upon the substance rather than the husk;
Upon the fruit rather than the flower.
Truly, he prefers what is within to what is without.
See also: “Mr. Bush’s Stem Cell Diversion.” Click here for The Mahablog stem cell archives.