Related Note...

The New Archbishop of Boston, Sean O'Malley, was installed yesterday, promising to clean house and set things right. Word around the campfire is that he's dealt with dioceses plagued with child molestation scandals in the past. Here's his sermon. Good stuff and solid theology. Here's the bit that made me blog it:

When he [Saint Patrick] returned to Ireland as a missionary bishop, he was preaching in County Mayo where the O’Malleys hail from. A fierce warrior asked to be baptized and received into the Church. Since there were still no Churches in Ireland, they gathered in a great field. A huge crowd arrived to witness the event. Saint Patrick arrived in his bishop’s vestments, his miter and crosier. He stuck his staff in the ground and began to preach a long sermon on the Catholic Faith. The chieftain to be baptized stood in front of Patrick during the sermon. He grew pale, began to sweat profusely and fainted at the saint’s feet. When they rushed over to help him, the people discovered that Saint Patrick had inadvertently stuck his staff through the man’s foot. When they were able to revive the wounded warrior, they asked him why he had not said anything when it happened. He replied that he thought it was part of the ceremony.

Boston could use some laughter, that's for sure.

The Last Acceptable Bias

As the Senate expends more and more energies towards not filling judicial vacancies ("I have never had an opinion. I swear, I'm as dumb as a rock! Go ahead, Mr. Chairman, bonk me with your gavel. Won't damage a thing, I assure you"), an interesting wrinkle has emerged. Byron York of National Review, discussing the debate over federal appeals court nominee William Pryor explains:

In previous confirmation fights, Democrats have controlled the agenda and the course of debate by making a variety of allegations against the president's judicial nominees. They accused Charles Pickering of racism. They accused Priscilla Owen of being a judicial activist. They accused Miguel Estrada of hiding his opinions on important legal matters. In each instance, Democrats played offense, and Republicans played defense.



The Pryor nomination began in the same way. At first, Democrats accused Pryor of being an extremist on abortion and other issues. Then they alleged that Pryor improperly sought political contributions for a group he helped create, the Republican Attorneys General Association. GOP senators, as they had many times in the past, found themselves defending a nominee by saying he was not an extremist and had not done anything wrong.



But then Republicans changed course. They leveled an accusation of their own against Democrats, accusing them of opposing Pryor because of his religious beliefs. Pryor is a Catholic who opposes Roe v. Wade both on constitutional grounds and because he believes that abortion is morally wrong. In recent weeks, Republicans accused Democrats of using coded language when questioning whether Pryor's "deeply held beliefs" would interfere with his judgment on the bench. Such language, Republicans said, was in fact an indirect way of condemning Pryor for being a faithful Catholic. That, Republicans concluded, amounted to a virtual religious test for judges, something forbidden by the Constitution.

Accusations of this kind are blood-in-the-water to interest groups, so a Catholic political-action-committe ran a newspaper ad saying "Judicial Chambers: CATHOLICS NEED NOT APPLY." And then the fit really hits the shan. Catholic Senators such as Ted Kennedy shouted very loud that OF COURSE there wasn't any Anti-Catholic bias in the democratic party, Catholics are more than welcome, etc., etc. The prospect of Ted Kennedy being a spokesman for anything spiritual naturally provoked a debate over who gets to call themselves Catholic and who doesn't. Byron York seems to think this is an improvement on the situation. Sadly, I cannot refute him.


But it all begs the question, which has been filtering through certain circles of late, of whether anti-Catholic feelings amount to "the last acceptable bias" in this country. I can see it from both sides. I remember an episode of "Sex In the City," when one of the ladies, the redhead, took up with a man who was raised Catholic, and consequently had a compulsive need to get up and shower after they had sex. Wait, it gets better. When redhead tells Sarah Jessica "I'm the succubus who destroyed Matthew Broderick" Parker's character of this, the latter is shocked. "They still have Catholics in this city?" she gasps. "I'd thought they'd all been done away with." Nice.


Then there's the hullabaloo over Mel Gibson's upcoming film about the Crucifixion, no one's seen it, but it apparently sticks to the Gospels, and that's bad, because the Gospels say that Jews were responsible for Christ's death, and that could lead to...something. I don't recall reading "And yew Jew boys better watch out, 'cuz wer gonna git'cha!" anywhere in the Gospels or the New Testament, but never mind. Believing what the Apostle John wrote about Jesus means that you're an anti-Semite. Lovely.


Now, I'm not really worried over any of this. It's a far cry from Leno making pedophile-priest jokes to a re-emergence of the Know-Nothing Party. Catholics in America are pretty well Americanized, pretty well woven into the societal fabric. I couldn't imagine that changing. Do I occasionally get annoyed when someone makes fun of or misunderstands my church? Sure. Is it fair to say that outsiders can attack Catholics and Catholicism in a way that would never be permitted for Judiaism or Islam, or any ethnic group for that matter? Yeah, but that only underlines liberal hypocrisy, and that rotting equine's already been whupped. I don't want to be a part of one more special group in this country claiming they've been picked on, we've enough of those. And as I've noted in the past, it has ever been thus for the Church. I'll take putting up with "Hee hee! Catholics hate sex!" over getting porked in the butt with a hot poker for refusing to worship the Emporer any day of the week, and twice on Sunday (Get it? Sunday! Ha HA!).


But let's get back to William Pryor. In their defense, Democrats have explained that many Catholics in America don't agree with the official Church's position on abortion (Oh, you thought they were worried about something else?). That's self-evidently true, but so what? Does that mean that only those Catholics who don't agree with church teachings get to be judges? Pryor has basically been cited for rejection from the federal bench because of "deeply held personal beliefs." Deeply held personal beliefs are now bad. No, wait, I've misspoke. Here are Republicans, speaking up in Pryor's defense:

When a devoutly religious nominee's "deeply held personal beliefs" are repeatedly cited as grounds for rejecting him, even when his public record shows the ability to distinguish personal from legal judgment, we think it warrants public criticism.

I get it now. Deeply held personal beliefs are bad, unless they can keep those deeply held personal beliefs as far, far away from whatever decisions they make as possible. So Catholics are welcome, just so long as they aren't all CATHOLIC about it. Because that's just wierd.


This is an old problem, and one which was a root of the anti-Catholic bias of the American past, the charge that Catholics will be Catholics first and Americans second, the invading armies of Popery and the Whore of Babylon. And there's a tiny little nugget of truth underneath it. At some point, Catholics are taught to think beyond tribal interests, that we owe to Caeser/Washington what is Caeser's/Washington's, but we owe to God what is God's. I can see Dianne Feinstein's point: how is someone who has signed on to Rome's teaching regarding abortion going to remain firmly rooted in the law with regard to Roe vs. Wade? If that national law is really so important to the life of the Republic, maybe the Republic's lawmaker's are right to keep away a man who may threaten it.


Course, there's another solution...

More On Music, Part II

My complete thoughts on the RIAA situation have been posted on Allzah; you can find them here.

More on Music

My BMG order has arrived, and my letter of account closure will go out with my payment (for shipping and handling). In the meantime, spot reviews will be posted here just as soon as I can collect the focus. I'm digging it all, though.

Commercials are Bad, Mmmkay?

Interesting piece in todays Washington Post about a group called Commercial Alert, an anti-consumerism advocacy group, dedicated to de-commercializing certain arenas in public discourse. On the one hand, I can sympathize with founder Gary Ruskin's antipathy towards the excessive commercialization of our culture, the shrinking sense of shame and privacy. If Commercial Alert can stop more Candlestick Parks from becoming 3-Com Pavilions, I won't complain too loudly.


But why must such efforts always bring the same tedious leftist bag-of-whines with them? Why do these leaders have to ally himself with the anti-globalization nutjobs? Why does the critique of market capitalism inevitably lead to calls for vandalism? And finally, why, when Ruskin declares that certain spaces must be thought of as "sacred and therefore off-limit to peddling wares," (a nicely elitist turn of phrase) can he come up with nothing that should be "sacred" aside from "Governments, schools, and civic institutions"? Is the state the only thing we have left to make sacred?


Yes, commercials are crass. Yes, they can clutter up the landscape and our sense of quiet. A few local ordinances (such as San Francisco's proposed ban on selling naming rights to public spaces) are probably welcome. But don't let's get carried away. Let's not forget that without advertisment, we could never know what is available.

Back to the News...

*Insert inconsistent blogging apology here*




Reuters has a snippet about a new audiotape, purportedly containing the voice of Saddam Hussein, claiming that his sons died as "martyrs to Iraq." Now maybe this is Saddam's voice and maybe it isn't. Either way, this is the message that the Baathist resistance wants to put out. So they're admitting that we got Uday and Qusay. I wonder if that will convince the "skeptical" Iraqis. Or maybe their "skepticism" is short-hand for something else?

Other stuff.

Now that I'm on a music purge (with 9 CD's due to arrive within the next week or so...who am I kidding?), it occurs to me that I don't read as much as I used to anymore. In my youth, books were my constant companion, I read voraciously, especially anything to do with history. But sometime after college I decided that I needed to live life instead of read about it, to formulate my own experiences instead of digesting others', to get some friggin' exercise. All the time I used to devote to reading are now spent writing, attempting to learn how to play electric bass, and doing theater.


Consequently, there's a whole list of books I've never cracked. Here's an Amazon geek's random sample. I've read some of most of these Dead White Males, and am familiar with the thoughts of most of the rest. But I've never read, say Proust, and differential calculus is a mystery wrapped in an enigma covered in numbers to me. Mayaps while I get pissy with RIAA I'll spend some of the music budget on books instead.




I've added a new link: that of political commentator James Lilek's blog. He's a funny man, and sharp as a katana. As an example, today's bleat fairly sums up my opinion on yesterday's Big News:

As for Uday and Qusay, now prone and perforated: huzzah.

Share and enjoy.

It's official...

My last order from BMG has been shipped. I mean that. Now I can close my membership and be free of all taints of association with RIAA. This may seem melodramatic, but I think that one should order one's life according to the principles one espouses. Any hipster twerp can whine about the music industry's suckage, but those who would have things change cannot persist in being part of the problem. And I plan to communicate to this company, which has served me well in introducing me to some fine music I would not have otherwise stumbled upon, exactly why I am ending our relationship. Maybe they'll take notice, maybe not. But it's good to make things clear.

Behind the Music

I like to keep an eye on RIAA and their lame attempts to shut down file-swapping, but today I actually got mad. One of the creators of Allzah had the following rant on the subject. Apparently the suits are going after individual file-swappers now, since KaZaa has managed to block their attempts to force it out of business. My own dissertation should be up there soon, but for the time being, I'll provide a few new links:






Boycott RIAA


Contact your Senator


Contact Your Senator




I plan on letting both Senators and my congressman know how I feel about these guys and their perversions of the law. They're a scummy organization that's grown fat and twisted, while providing little value to our culture. Their time has come.

As to the Imagery...

They are home produced. I dusted off my old Minolta recently and took stills of the interior of my bedroom. I'm fond of Black and white film. Easy artiness.

Alterations

Due to BMG's offer that I couldn't refuse, I've delayed my usual two-purchases-per-month until August. They are reflected thusly. I'm going to review the three jazzy CD's in a moment, But first, here's what's coming:




Miles Davis -- On the Corner


Thelonious Monk -- Live at the Five Spot


The Roots -- Things Fall Apart


AC/DC -- Back in Black


Beastie Boys -- License to Ill


Paul Butterfield Blues Band -- The Resurrection Of Pigboy Crabshaw


The Bad Plus -- These are the Vistas


Sonic Youth -- Daydream Nation


Echo and the Bunnymen -- Songs to Learn and Sing




A few fills, a few explorations, a lot of mix tapes in the offing. I proclaim this the Summer of Tunes.

Leviathan

I have been putting my degree to use, as it were, contemplating the meanings of the War on Terror for the international stage for this new century. Of late, I’ve been forced to look at the world diplomatic dynamic in much the same way as Jacques Chirac: the U.S. providing global security, because no other state has the capacity or the will. Russia might become a player again, in a few decades, but its power has been historically land-locked, ever driven at the little states of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. China is a contender already, but China has always devoted its attention to being Chinese, which they consider far more interesting than the game of nations (they may be right). There’s the Franco-German axis, attempting to be the magnetic core of a European superstate, but the EU is about to be flooded with Eastern European states that are less than enthusiastic about joining a node of anti-American power, and if Tony Blair’s speech to Congress yesterday wasn’t a promise to lead them in that, I don’t know what is.


So Russia’s being Russia, China’s being China, Europe is still being Europe, and we’re left holding the bag. Serbia needs a lesson? Call the Yanks. Liberia’s in trouble? Call the Yanks. Iraq’s thumbing its nose at the Security Council? Call the Yanks, unless of course they have security interests of their own regarding Iraq, in which case dragging our feet and calling the Yanks names if they grow impatient with our incessant procedural niceties is appropriate.


It is this last which has many Americans in a quasi-isolationist fit, perfectly willing to handle our own business without permission from the states whose security we guarantee; indeed ready to tell the UN to vacate lower Manhattan if they don’t like it. Just what does the rest of the world plan to do about it? Tax our trade? Two can play that game, and we’ve got the longer tail. As to diplomatic sanctions, let me direct your attention to Iraq again.


This is the problem with being the Leviathan, this grumpy insistence on having our way, because there isn’t anybody who can truly compel us otherwise. To the Leviathan, all others are varying degrees of puny. What other state is even in our weight class, militarily speaking? The Brits and the Commonwealth have got the professionalism but not the numbers. Most of the Third World is laughable. There are a few powers we’d never be able to conquer (China), and a few we’d never be dumb enough to try to conquer (Russia), but nobody who could best us very long in a particular theater of operations. Even Vietnam, where we did everything wrong short of siding with Ho Chi Minh, managed to turn out halfway decent when the shooting stopped (we didn’t lose that war until the South fell in 1975, and the only reason that happened was because somebody shut off the aid and refused President Ford’s request to send in the B-52’s. But I digress).


But military might is as destructive as it is transient. It is useless without diplomatic surety and flexibility. The history if Europe is filled with the stories of states (Charles V’s Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV’s France, Hitler’s Germany) whose military might did nothing so much as unite all other powers against them. We might find the idea of fearing the Italian navy laughable now, but it wasn’t always so, and the history books are even more filled with stories of underestimated foes beating the favorite. Napoleon thought the Italians were pretty sorry, too, for all the good it did him. Even the strongest man needs friends.


The key word there being friends. We know the difference between “friendly states” and “states that act like friends while un-secretly trying to pull a William of Orange (Louis XIV’s implacable enemy) and embarrass us when we’re trying to get something accomplished.” I can understand Europeans feeling like we’re arrogant, like we need to be reminded of our limitations. What I can’t understand is feeling the need to do this while we’re trying to fight back against a corrosive ideology and the corrupt states that back it; bravely attempting to shut down the force that’s poisoned international diplomacy for decades.


What manner of man wants to live with terrorism? What manner of fool looks at someone willing to blow himself up just so long as he takes Jewish children with him, and decides that giving this person what he wants will defuse the situation? Do the Europeans really think that compromise is the way to ensure their security? It’s an easy thing to say that “Better Saddam than Bush,” is no different from “Better Hitler than Blum,” and I can feel eyes rolling when I point it out. But I think the fact that both mustachioed goose-steppers were really fond of Mein Kampf is more than a coincidence.


Blair was right: The US needs to listen as well as lead. If we treat our allies like the ancient Athenians did, NATO will go the way of the Delian League. And our allies will be just as shocked to discover that today’s Koran-sporting Spartans aren’t any more palatable. Leaders need to listen, and be persuasive. But followers need to follow as well as question and advise. De Gaulle understood that. Every time he yanked one of the eagle’s talons, he polished another one. For every gesture of independence, there was another calculated to demonstrate that the Atlantic Alliance mattered to him. When Kruschev started sticking nukes in Cuba, de Gaulle was the first man in Kennedy’s corner. I don’t see de Gaulle’s successor making those kind of moves. And he needs to. For Leviathan to be tamed, it must be cajoled as well as castigated.

Climate Happens

It should surprise no one that a brief perusal of such right-leaning organs as News Max will yield an article refuting on or another of the sacred cows of the Left. It's instant blog-material. Today we have a climatologist at the University of Virginia, Patrick Michaels, sending another arrow at Global Warming.


I've long since come to the conclusion that climate scientists have become like economists: if you take five or six of them, stuff them in a bag, spin them around, and pour them out again, they'll come up with five or six different explanations for what just happened. Climatologists simply don't know what's going to happen. They're guessing, and that leads me to believe that we're pretty much safe. They earth may warm up a skosh, but we'll deal.


The environmentalist retort to such a conclusion is to insinuate that scientists who debunk global warming are in the pay of oil companies or conservative think tanks or other places where men with pointy hair and diamond-studded tie-pins smoke cigars wrapped in dollar bills. But Michaels offers a suitable riposte to such: that scientists who preach global warming are competing for government money. Government money is tied to politics, and politics achieves the best results when there is an alarm sounded. If there aren't any monstrous disasters confronting us, Congress will be less inclined to give money to scientists to study climate.


Vested interests run both ways. Who knew?

Bring Out the Pincers

I mentioned in my "Sex Talk" screed that even pedophilia has its advocates, those who are willing to understate its corruptive force. Well, here's the evidence. Assuming that this particular article has a definite right-wing agenda, and assuming that the rest of academia isn't signing on to this yet, it's still an unpleasant thought. It has been established as a principle that if an act does no physical harm, or no immediate, noticeable psychological harm, then there is no reason to speak against it. There is a degree of legal practicality to such a principle, other principles are needed to mitigate it. Again, we are undermining our ideal, and replacing it with nothing other than the phony feel-goodness. Eventually, we will be left with nothing to strive for, and every reason to give in to our baser instincts. And then we'll sit and wonder how society got so crass, lustful, and empty of content.

"Quitting the Slave Trade Now Is the Best Chance of Preventing Tyranny, Ethnic Strife, and Low Economic Performance"

I recently heard that National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice refers to slavery as America's "birth defect". I find that an apt metaphor. A birth defect is something that a child must learn to overcome if it ever expects to grow. Strains of that particular birth defect persist in America today, alas, but the person of Ms. Rice, herself a descendant of slaves, is itself a sign for reasoned hope.


The other reason I like that description is because it breeds an interesting analogy: What is the cause of most birth defects? Trauma in the womb. So who can we blame for our birth defect, if not our parent nations, especially the ones who most loudly denigrate our racism, as though the discovery of the North American Continent compelled Europeans to the trade in West Africans. It's easy to have wonderful race relations when your nation is homogenous. 'Course, Europe isn't so homogenous anymore. I haven't seen that they're dealing with it any better, have you?


Yes, it's passing the buck. I only offer it as a tonic to certain preachiness.

A Quote for the Day

"My country will not at any price accept that a collection of states more or less totalitarian and professional at dictatorship, a collection of new states more or less responsible, more or less consistent, dictate its law to us. The United Nations is a derisory tribune for sensational speech-making, overbidding and the worst kind of threat-making."


-Charles de Gaulle

La Nouvelle Revolutione?

It appears that not everyone in France is happy with its Third-Way, socialist-welfare, keep-young-Arab-men-on-the-dole way of doing things. The following is a picture of Sabine Herold, who has become overnight the leader of a new Libertarian movement in la belle pays, and one which is attracting attention:





Ooh, baby. It's time to brush up on my French.

Here are the Sonics!

And were they worth the wait?




The CD came with a novel's worth of praise for these scruffy Pacific Northwest wailers, and all the mad crazy noise they made. I was expecting something loony, a banjo-less Monks. In this I was disappointed, at least at first. After the stormy "Cinderella," the next several tracks were soul covers. Good Soul covers, but not that wild, not that punky. I was beginning to feel like the downer was approaching.


And then they played "Jenny, Jenny" and tore the roof off. I was punchin' the air. I was rockin' AND rollin'. It was all right.


Worth the wait? What wait?

Strategery

I knew Sully would come 'round eventually on Iraq (thruth be told, he was never off it. The man's been a tower to the pro-war blog community). Today he riffs off of the President's "bring them on," statement, and suggests that fighting terrorists in Iraq is precisely what we ought to be doing. It means we aren't fighting them here. That's the whole point of this operation: yank them out where they live, root and branch, and clean them up. This may make you uncomfortable if you are the kind of person that thinks checking out young Middle Eastern men at airports constitutes a gross racist crime, but it is the objective.


Now, we must point out that most of the conflict the troops are dealing with in Iraq today is coming from Baathists, the supporters of Saddam Hussein, and not terrorists in the secret-cell-blow-up-schoolchildren sense that we use. But I suspect the line between Baathists and terrorists is going to become increasingly porous in the coming months, and is morally a subject of great doubt to begin with (remember: terrorists are nothing more than guerrillas who target civilians). And besides, can there be any greater distraction for terrorists themselves than Americans ruling the lands of the Caliph of Baghdad? They can't stay away too long.


One more thing: I love that our President said the words "Bring them on." I defy you to imagine Al Gore, or any of the Nine Walkers who would replace him saying any such thing. That's why the soldiers love him.

Corporate Intervention

I'd idly decided on Wire and the Roots as my July music purchases, merely for the sake of variety (which is a bit of a passion of mine). But now BMG has intervened in my plans, offering 12 CD's for the price of 3. I've had a BMG membership since '98, it's a handy way of digging up jazz, and occasionally I get some good deals and freebies. The downside is their selection sucks for anything not Jazz or blues. So stuff like Wire and Sahara Hotnights is gonna have to wait for this process to sort itself out. The journey of music and money continues, and I'll keep you posted.

Sex Talk

So now the Republicans in the Senate are ready to tack on a new Amendment to the Constitution in the aftermath of Lawrence v. Texas, declaring that only heterosexual unions will be recognized as marriage. It makes me a bit queasy, and not because I'm an advocate for gay marriage (I don't see the point). Using the supreme law of the land to dictate the nature of something so basic and personal runs against the grain of my understanding of federalism. The federal government should not be involved in marriage.


Yet this appears to be the one remaining way to preserve the understanding of marriage. Gay activist groups have been working to put this issue center stage. And thanks to the SCOTUS overreaching in a way unseen since Earl Warren was Chief Justics, it's now a national issue that you can bet will be on the 2004 campaign talking points. Since, per Justice O'Connor, public morality no longer provides a "compelling interest" for legislation (but "diversity" does. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight), Amendment 28 is just about all the social conservatives have left.


Now, I'm not the kind of right-leaning Cat'Lick who is forever fomenting on "the gay agenda" and the bad, naughty, Wicked Gays (and after the spanking...)! I think a great deal of the fury within the Republican party aimed at countering gay activism has, at its heart, a degree of scapegoatism. Gays are not to blame for the state of the American family. American families are to blame for the state of the American family. Men who feel no obligation to the women they use like tissues, women who slaughter their offspring in the womb, couples with purely notional ideas of what "Til death do us part" means, children who wouldn't know discipline if it bit them on their joystick hands, these are our culprits, not the 4% of us who like having sex with their own body type. When we heteros start behaving ourselves, we might have the standing to lecture the gays. Until then, heal thyself.


Again, though, that doesn't mean I'm ready to sign on to gay marriage. Gays may feel their agenda is harmless, a pure civil rights issue. It's not. They feel their status is just like that of the blacks in the 60's. It's not. There are many obvious similarities, but also several obvious differences. Repealing Jim Crow and ending the second-class citizenship of blacks was an easy call. Ethnicity is a political, not a moral issue. No one but a racist kook can argue that there's anything immoral about not being white. Homosexuality is different, because it deals with sexuality, which is a region girt with taboos, a subject striking at the very center of our humanity. It has ever been our species' habit to apply special controls to our most powerful drive, and I am wary of attempts to undo those controls, without compelling (that word again) reason.


Being Catholic, I see homosexuality as but one of a myriad of sexual deviations, and among the least blameworthy. No one chooses to be gay, and being gay, even actively gay, does not necessarily bar you from being a productive citizen and worthwhile person. Sodomy laws are asinine not just because they are all-but-unenforceable, but because one man having sex with another man who wants to have sex with him is all-but-impossible to construe as doing that man any harm that the state needs to be involved in. It really is nobody's business.


And it should stay nobody's business. Gay marriage makes it everybody's business. Redefining one of the bulwarks of our society is not going to do anything to improve the abuse it's taken over the last forty years. George Will has it right: if consent is all that is required to produce legal protection, than can any deviate act be illegal? Andrew Sullivan and those like him think to skirt around this by climbing atop a high horse and getting very offended that someone would even put homosexuality and bigamy in the same ball park. I sympathize, but we're talking legals, not morals. If the law can't stop two men from marrying, why can't it stop a man from marrying two women? Feminists will object, but what if the two women involved don't? Polyamory is as old as humanity itself, and there's probably even less reason to object to it on purely moral grounds.


Prostitution? "The Oldest Profession"? Are laws against it any more enforceable or effective? It spreads disease, sure, but so does our swinging single date-but-not-marry lifestyle. If you've ever had to explain to adolescents that a third of people between the ages of 15 and 19 are carrying some kind of STD without knowing it, as I have, you'd find it pretty hard to single out those that are selling it.


Incest and pedophilia are harder, but they have their advocates, too. It's not as easy to dismiss it by saying "Homosexuality is something you are, pedophilia is something you do," as Andrew Sullivan does (So we're all sexually attracted to children, but most of us manage to resist the temptation? What C-R-A-P). I very much doubt that anyone chooses to desire children any more than someone chooses to desire someone of their own sex. Most pedophiles are the victims of abuse themselves, are they unworthy of our sympathy? Camille Paglia, for example, has argued that most of the psychological harm done to children who have sex with adults is the result of the fear of being caught, and not the sex itself (assuming the child is not raped, and isn't that the basis of our argument?). An episode of Allie McBeal all but advocated relationships between older women and teenage boys, because its so sweet and beautiful, and damn the consequences! Look how far Britney Spears has come with banal dance moves and nonexistent vocal talent, just by selling the wide-eyed innocent schoolgirl routine. How many psychologists need to start digging their pincers into child sexuality before we give this one up, too?


Slippery slopes are easy to make, because they're speculative by nature. I can't prove that any of this is valid, and neither can anyone else disprove it. The argument raises fears about the future and lets me stand athwart History, yelling "STOP!" Bully for me. But History needs to stop on this one. Our Judeo-Christian monogamist tradition is not a perfect fit for everybody, and it's a chore for those it does suit. But it's an ideal and a model we desperately need to acheive that control and deny the supremacy of the sex drive. Rousseau was wrong, and it's time we admitted it.


I'm perfectly willing to accept the "gay agenda" as being no more than "leave us alone." Gays have it tougher than most of us. They carry fear of the majority and unassuageable guilt and the pain of seperation with them constantly. I've watched friends come to grips with this aspect of themselves, and it cannot be but a brutally hard slog. We should leave them alone.


And they should return the favor.