Recently in Social issues Category

What part of "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission " does a wayward husband not get?

Through a spokeswoman, Mrs. Sanford declined requests to be interviewed for this article, but told The Associated Press she learned of her husband's affair early this year when she found a letter he had written. She told him to end the relationship, but he repeatedly asked permission to visit the woman in Argentina in the months that followed.

Social conservatives will soon tire of liberals' snickering about the latest true confessions of philandering GOP would-be presidential candidates. I think the larger problem for the conservative faithful is that they've gleefully led a divisive culture war in recent decades, condemning media and universities for warping the values of the mainstream. So I don't think they convince others when they then blame innate human weakness for their own foibles; they'd been arguing that their way is better and healthier. If they're going to maintain that position, it would be more credible if they focused less on cultural street fights and moralizing on Fox News, which then leads to a loss of credibility when "life happens."

I was having dinner with a morally conservative couple a few years back, when the wife joked about how her husband was eyeing a fetching waitress -- prompting him to bellow, "How dare you?!?!" She withered, as did our evening. I realized he was outraged by the insinuation of "wrongdoing," but he seemed too defensive.

Now Todd and Sarah Palin, the parents of at least one sexually active teen who snubbed their moral teachings, are outraged that a talk-show host would poke fun of the Palins for having family problems. That's Letterman -- always irreverent and rude, regularly poking fun of Bill Clinton for being a slut long before even Monica-gate. Like it or don't, but the indignance is tiresome. The Palin teens are not "off limits," given how the McCain campaign exploited them. At last, Levi Johnston's assessment of the Palin parents indicates they're a bigger threat to the maintenance of conservative values than Letterman is.

Shephard Smith worries that anti-Obama violence is in the air, here in a clip from Fox. This won't be popular with those who feel that Obama's administration is planning on rounding them up for daring to oppose mandatory abortions. But Frank Rich argues that, just as it took McCain's best efforts to calm down the people calling the eventual US president a treacherous terrorist, the GOP's leaders must calm down the people who are signaling their intention to "put an end to the false prophet Obama." Camille Paglia, herself a critic of Obama, shares some concerns about the threats against him here.

I'll go back to TS's request for "evidence" of Mark Steyn's bigotry.

Before giving specifics, I'll note that Steyn's comments consistently, over time, show a strongly anti-Muslim view that stingily refuses to give Muslim civilization any credit for its past successes. While Obama is trying to tell Muslims that they should re-embrace their own best principles, Steyn says Muslims have no principles to fall back on. Um, that's not a good way to engage them. Even if you believe they should all come to Jesus, I'm sure Diane would agree that getting them all defensive and angry about their tribal identity is not a good way to "share the good news." The mission committee doesn't teach that approach -- I know, I used to chair those kinds of committees in a former life.

As Philip Jenkins has written, people like Steyn demonize Muslims in much the manner that Protestants once demonized Catholics as representing a peril to America a century ago.

Here are the passages I question:

In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran...

That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it...

Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders....

The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

I've complained about Steyn before, notably here with my brother:

This "red-egghead" approach is exemplified by Mark Steyn, a hero of the religious right. "With every passing month," Steyn wrote in a recent column, there are more Muslims and fewer Episcopalians, and the Muslims export their manpower to Europe and other depopulating outposts of the West. It's the intersection of demography and Islamism that makes time a luxury we can't afford."

In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, he escalates his argument that Muslims are breeding fast enough to destroy all civilization within little Mariam's lifetime. Steyn is careful not to prescribe bombings, beatings or final solutions. He leaves that to the fertile imaginations of his rabid following. He has perfected the mixed message sent by America's leaders to Muslims: We will deliver democracy to your doorstep, and we believe that democratic institutions will speedily bring peace and enlightenment to your nations; but we so fear your irredeemable madness that we think your grandchildren will corrupt our own centuries-old democratic institutions and will bring the West to a new Taliban-like state.

If you want to read more unfiltered Steyn, try this, which strikes me as bigoted.

Again, while I write about this urgent effort on the part of Muslims to reclaim the best in their heritage, Steyn argues loudly -- against either evidence or good taste -- that they have nothing good in their heritage. That helps nothing except his own desire to be a rabble-rouser.

Finally, my brother and I concluded our piece with this: "Scratch a conservative, flag-waving intellectual, and under the surface you will see an America-basher -- one who complains that America lacks character and resolve, one who has no confidence in America 's transforming power, one who cannot trust America to defend its principles when they are truly threatened."

And Steyn proves that anew in his latest piece, with these silly words: "A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower."

I'm attempting to back away from this topic in the future. I never believed President Bush was a bigot, but I did believe he received fevered counsel from bigots. But I have no interest in giving attention to fading figures like Steyn, because I suspect they are like parasites that feed on attention and will straddle whatever line necessary to get it (which he proves by snidely citing criticisms like mine in his "Reader of the Day" section).

We've talked a little lately about nuances as they relate to how our arguments are perceived by others.

I'd like to share two blog posts that I think are nicely nuanced, on the things that some of our readers love to spar about. Let's hear their thoughts on this one about Jesus' approach to gay marriage and this one on atheism vs. faith.

This just in, tragically. Now we'll have to see how it's handled by pro-life forces.

Muslims have been told to push aside their extremists more vigorously than they have, as I myself wrote here. Many Muslims say they've done their best to do so.

But that doesn't always come out clearly, given how many Muslims share the grievances of terrorists -- grievances about how Palestinians are treated, grievances about US interventions globally, etc.

Many Westerners act as though Muslims can condemn the terror adequately only if they renounce those shared grievances. That's asking a lot. Muslims detest the tactics of their extremists, but they find it hard not to care about the same issues.

Now, a pro-lifer has killed a doctor in violation of standards of Western civilization. Pro-life people will now face a similar dilemma as Muslims. By finding it hard to renounce the grievance that they share with the Operation Rescue crowd, I'm betting that they'll come under criticism from, say, David Long on this board, for seeming to condone the terror.

Should be an interesting discussion. I hope it enables the religious right, which has been eager to denounce all Muslims as thugs, to feel a little empathy.

According to hard-liners on the right, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is an emotionally overwrought, non-intellectual, racist bigot, a benifactrix of gender preference and ethnically based affirmative action. In other words, they don't like her. This caricature is neither factual nor substantive. She is, in fact, a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Princeton and a Yale Law Review editor. You may not like her, but a dummy she ain't.

As to the deeper issue of whether biography is destiny, there is, at least, a question which is not automatically offensive--it has unfortunately been posed so far in a fairly offensive manner. In the best of all possible worlds, which this is not, our courts could be all white or black or Catholic or Jewish or Asian or Hispanic. Ethnicity and gender would not make a difference. In this imperfect world, I believe that having diversity of biography, experience, ethnicity and gender broadens our perspective and grants the court the opportunity for fresh insight. Sotomayor acknowledges her background as a factor, as part of who she is, but then says that it is her job to get past it.

Do I think there should be a Jewish seat, a Black seat, and a woman's seat? Should we always have at least one WASP, one Catholic, and one Jew? No. We should not have quotas, but we should look in places where we have not traditionally looked. We should look at our patterns and ask if we are keeping good people off the bench because of race, gender, religion or ethnicity. We should not elevate incompetents based on race or religion. But surely, in this great land of ours, there are qualified blacks, Hispanics and women in numbers that look a little more like our nation.

At the moment, we have seven white men--four of whom are Catholic. We have one black and one and a half Jews--all of Ruth Bader-Ginsberg and Brier before he converted. It is just possible that Sonia Sotomayor could add something to the bench. And no, even though Catholics are over-represented as a percentage of our population, her religion should not count against. However, pro-choice women may sleep restlessly.

As for her so-called radical decisions. Well, they are not radical. Her call, as part of an appellate panel, on the firemen having the results of the promotion test thrown out by the city, was not based on the merits of the test. It was a narrow decision on whether the city had the right to set the test aside. It was not if the test was good or fair. It was not if the city was smart or stupid. It was if they constitutionally could do what they did.

This is, in fact, exactly what conservatives say that they want judges to do--not go beyond the question, the four corners of the law and expand their decisions. This is exactly, incidentally--to open another can of worms--what the California Supreme Court did with Proposition 8. They did not judge if allowing same sex marriage was a good idea or bad. They did not judge if the proposition was smart or kind or really mean. They simply tried the question if the proposition was valid, if the people had the right to amend our State Constitution or if such an issue needed legislative approval. They found that the people had the right--not that the people were either right or wrong.

But back to Sotomayor. She will be confirmed--barring an unpaid nanny. The Republicans will continue to do themselves damage. They cannot win national elections without blacks and Hispanics--and many blacks and Hispanics are social conservatives. They were a large part of the vote that passed Prop 8. To fight this fight in a demeaning and mean-spirited tone is wrong morally and politically. Fight on the issues and if you pick up quotes, make sure that they are fundamentally different from what Justice Alito said at his confirmation hearing--how his history and the discrimination his Italian immigrant Catholic ancestors suffered informs his life. Pick something different from what Scalia said about how "Laws are made at the appellate level."

Finally, on both the right and left: Be prepared for surprises--some good and some bad. History shows that Supreme Court Justices are not very predictable.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Beauty pageants should be an anachronism in 2009. These are young women who have yet to complete their education and professional training or to fully define themselves as human beings, yet they're being "judged" for their, um, talents. Miss City of Orange is a 19-year-old at Chapman University. Miss Huntington Beach is 18 but still in high school, and Miss San Bernardino is a 17-year-old high schooler, which sends a funny mixed message to middle-aged men ogling the TV set.

Such contests are all about the human quest for beauty, and yet we've never been able to take that at face value, so we ask them silly questions and nod, "uh-huh," as if to pretend we're interested in her personality, and then occasionally get offended. The Carrie Prejean saga shows that we're puzzled, just stumped, by gender and orientation roles in our day. As smart as we are, our scientists, humanists, theologians, philosophers and laity have no slightest consensus on how to view gender, marriage or any aspect of human behavior. That should make us all a little humble, shouldn't it?

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker criticized Obama recently for a bad precedent in meddling in free enterprise when Obama pushed out the head of GM; that led to liberals deriding Corker for himself recently calling for blue-collar union workers to work for less than what they're accustomed to. Liberals' implication was that Republicans care less about the blue-collar workers than about executives.

Conservatives will deny this, of course. But should they? Think about the values and priorities that make us either liberal or conservative.

On average...

Don't liberals worry more about the plight of the poor than conservatives do?

And aren't conservatives more flag-wavingly patriotic and religious than liberals?

Don't liberals care more about racial equality than conservatives?

And don't conservatives dislike abortion more than those who make it "a choice"?

And so on.

When push comes to shove, don't liberals feel we must collectively consider every possible way to rescue the indigent, whereas conservatives are quicker to say that many potential solutions would only gum things up for the rest of us who think we have a fighting shot at getting wealthy? Don't liberals insist on racial and gender equity while conservatives say things will shake out fine by themselves? Don't conservatives detest every abortion and every flag-burning whereas liberals say that there are plenty of bigger things to worry about? Aren't conservatives willing to go to a war to protect what they consider to be the American way of life whereas liberals feel that approach is too imperialistic?

Do we need to be more honest about our priorities, rather than the "methinks she doth protest too much" approach to claiming that we worry about things that we don't really worry about?