Man Bites Blog

One of Andrew Sullivan’s more annoying tics is his tendency to wait about 5 minutes after there is some news item that is uncomfortable conservatives, then note that there as not been commentary on the Corner about this news, and proclaim that this silence is somehow telling. Usually it involves the word “crickets.”

Here’s today’s example:

Not a single mention, so far as I can see, at the Corner on Bob Casey’s endorsement of Barack Obama at this moment of blogging. Casey is a darling of NRO. You’d think at least they’d try to grapple with a second pro-lifer’s endorsement of the hard-left stealth version of Louis Farrakhan, Senator Hussein from Illinois. Actually, you wouldn’t.

Hmmm, so a Democratic Senator decided to endorse a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. And a conservative web site’s failure to comment on it is somehow telling?

This notion that Bob Casey is a darling of NRO is quite rich. Casey got his Senate seat by defeating Rick Santorum, who, when it was convenient for Sullivan’s purposes in demonizing the Republican Party as a party of homophobes, Sullivan was fond of calling “the number three Republican senator.” But the Democrat who defeated him is a “darling of NRO?” Right.

I have other things to day about the Stanley Kurtz post Sullivan links to. In short, my take isn’t that the culture wars are over, but they’ve shifted.

There’s something about Mike Huckabee that brings out the worst in his critics. I can’t think of any other public figure about whom I have heard more posts and columns beginning with something like, “I am by no means a Huckabee fan, but…”

In that vein, I pass along this from Andrew Sullivan:

Huckabee relates the key prudential principle of Christianism. Yes: it’s vertical. When addressing what a polity needs, you just need to ask God. And then we obey. At least now no one will hide it. This dog whistle is loud and public and audible by anyone:

“When we become believers, it’s as if we have signed up to be part of God’s Army, to be soldiers for Christ… When you give yourself to Christ, some relationships have to go. It’s no longer your life; you’ve signed it over.”

Geez — it’s almost like it’s a religion or something.

Sullivan would have us believe that this type of thinking is an innovation of Huckabee and the Christian Right.

The reality is that this is a princliple, not of “Christianism,” but of Christianity itself, at least if its Founder has anything to say about it:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, ²⁰ take up his cross, and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Maybe this is incompatible with “conservatism,” as Andrew Sullivan might define it. But it is Christianity. The notion that Christianity is something to be compartmentalized and seaparated from one’s public life is antithetical to what Christ preached.

If you have a problem with religion touching all aspects of a believer’s life, then you have a problem with Chritianity, not “Christianism.”

In a post entitled “Christianism In The Military” Sullivan passes on the story of a chaplain doing damage control after an NCO in the marines tells a soldier’s friends that he is burning in hell because he committed suicide.

Not Christianity’s finest hour for sure, but not a new, dangerous fusion of faith and politics, either, and not a reason to discredit the pro-life or anti-same-sex marriage movements, which is the normal purpose of the “Christianism” smear.

These posts may seem non-objectionable. Who wants to defend what the NCO did? But what Sullivan is doing is poisoning the waters, so that when he calls someone like Ramesh Ponnuru a “Christianist,” you think of scenes like this, even though Ponnuru would never advocate what the NCO did.

This is why I find the label so offensive.

According to Andrew Sullivan and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board,  there is a great distinction between embryos and fetuses or babies, a distinction so great that it is acceptable to kill one and not the other.   Those who do not see that distinction are blinded by dogma and backward thinking.

But when it comes to same sex couples, we are expected to see absolutely no distinction between them and heterosexual couples.  Never mind that one can produce children and the other can’t.  Never mind that we’re talking about relationships rather than the people themselves.  Never mind that a same sex couple can never develop to produce children as a heterosexual couple can.  Never mind that the stakes are much lower — the difference is in how we officially recognize the relationship rather than saying that one is eligible to be killed for our benefit.  If you see any distinction at all between the two, and think the two should be treated differently at all based on that distinction, you are a beyond-the-pale bigot.

I’ll also note the Post-Dispatch’s enigmatic deference to the opinion of Missouri voters on the embryonic research issue.  I doubt they are similarly deferential to the same voters’ decision by a wider margin to amend the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.  And I suspect they’d be even less deferential if there was a manipulative publicity blitz in favor of the amendment funded mostly by a single family who stood to gain from its passage.

Sullivan tsks at Mickey Kaus for writing about John Edwards’s “private life.”

First of all, topics of Sullivan posts have been the Romneys’ family life and how they treat their dog.  But I guess that’s OK, because Romney opposes same sex marriage.

Plus, Edwards has attempted to benefit from what seems to be the more virtuous parts of his “private life.”  Sullivan himself has praised the Edwards family, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness.:

But, yes, I also think a lot of the Edwardses. I think they’re a class act. I’d have supported them in either decision. I actually believe them and trust them on these questions.

As I said at the time, commenting on private family decisions, even to praise them, is an extreme act of arrogance.  And positions one poorly to play the arbiter of privacy.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

It’s For The Kids

14 Sep 2007 12:17 pm

Some data from Canada on why same-sex couples get married:

According to the census, nearly one in four lesbian married couples in B.C. (24 per cent) have a child living with them, compared with just 13 per cent of lesbian couples living common-law.

Gay men are far less likely to have children than lesbians.

But they, too, have a big marriage gap, with 6.8 per cent of gay married men living with kids, compared with just 0.5 per cent of unmarried gay couples.

How does this undermine civil marriage for heterosexuals? How does it harm society? Isn’t it better for children of gay couples to have the legal and social security of a marriage? Isn’t legitimacy better than illegitimacy? And doesn’t this pattern actually enhance the conservative argument that marriage is primarily for the benefit of children? I guess that argument doesn’t count for much with some when lesbians make it.

Leaving aside the paltry 6.8% number for married all-male couples, 25 % of married all female couples have children, and this leads to the conclusion that lesbian marriage is “for the kids?”  As Sullivan would say, Please.  I am quite sure that if heterosexual marreid couples had such low numbers, Sullivan would point to it as evidence that the connection between marriage and children is a bogus invention of the “Christianist” right, and thus there is no non-bigoted reason to oppose “marriage equality.”  But for same sex couples, it’s evidence that it’s “for the kids.”  Right.

Both raising children and getting married would be indicators of a committed relationship, so I would certainly hope that there would be some correlation between the two.  Contrasting numbers between married and unmarried couples doesn’t prove anything.

And are any of these children are the natural child of one of the members of the marriage from a previous heterosexual marriage?  If so, then I would hazard a suspicion that those marriages at least, were undermined.  But I guess that argument doesn’t count for much when “Christianists” make it.

Read the rest of this entry »

This seems to be the way of resolving the notion that religion inevitably poisons politics with the religious backing of movements like abolition and civil rights which have been vindicated by history.

 In his rejoinder to Douthat Sullivan writes:

Some of this, as the theocons keep reminding us, has been to the good - the abolitionist and the civil rights movements spring to mind. What they’re less likely to say is that the institutional core of today’s Christianism was on the wrong side of those struggles(SBC anyone?)

As Sullivan is well aware, Brownback is a Roman Catholic, which was on the right side of those struggles, in the case of civil rights, courageously so.

<snip>The difference between the good and the bad in Christianism is that the good was also often framed in terms of secular, non-sectarian arguments (as MLK took pains to do), while the bad, having much less logic to stand on, was more reliant on pure Biblical authority.

This is where Sullivan doesn’t play fair.   Because the only thing from Brownback that we’re looking at is this speech, compared to the entirety of the civil rights movement.  So MLK’s meetings with other groups count, but Brownback’s ecumenical efforts to stop genocide in Darfur don’t. 

Read any of MLK’s speeches, and see how entrenched in Christian imagery they are — “I have been to the mountaintop, etc.”  If any Republican used similar language to support his causes, Sullivan would be all over him for rising tide of Christianism.

The notion that this kind of politics has no victims, has not led to evil, has not at times led to absolute insanity (like Prohibition), and is not still a constant threat - is preposterously complacent.

I don’t think anyone is asserting that the fusion of religion and politics always leads to only good things.  We are disputing the notion that it always leads to evil, and that any politician who utters the word “God” must be immediately scolded for doing so.

 Policies like prohibition were wrong because they were wrong.  The civil rights movement was right because it was right.  Prohibition was not poisoned by religion any more than the civil rights movement was sanctified by it.  It provided fuel, and made both movement more powerful than they would have been, for good or ill.

 Once this happens, once it is acquiesced in, once it becomes normal, the immense power of religion and its unequaled capacity to change society and politics is unleashed in unpredictable and dangerous ways. If you doubt that, look at Iraq.

Yes, look at Iraq.  And look what side the Roman Catholic Church was on that issue before it.  And look what side Andrew Sullivan was on.  It seems to me that if more politicians seriously applied their faith (rather than being suckered by Bush and Rove’s appeals to it) we might be better off.

If Sam Brownback is wrong on issues, a commentator as smart and Andrew Sullivan ought to be able to demonstrate how.  But shouting, “Faith! Poltitics! Foul!” isn’t such a demonstration.

Is this a dangerous fusion of faith and politics, or just Christians doing something that Sullivan disagrees with? Read the rest of this entry »

according to this Sullivan post.

I just hope none of them are doing this for Jesus. Becuase that would be poisonous.