While We’re At It

• It is thought to be a very potent plus if your favored cause has about it the air of inevitability. Although nobody in all of human history suggested the idea until about five years ago, the major media are letting us know that they are getting more than a mite impatient with the bigots and reactionaries who are resisting the self-evident good that is same-sex marriage. In the incessant stories about devoted lesbian and gay couples with happy children assuring us that nobody needs a daddy or mommy so long as you have two of what you have or, if not two, at least a really loving adult who is between partners, there are grumbling acknowledgments that two-thirds of American adults continue, even at this late date, to obstruct the course of democratic progress. Good government, it is suggest-ed, is too important to be left to the people, or at least to those people, which is why we have courts to make the laws preferred by the enlightened minority. Christopher Caldwell is senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a conservative of sorts who brings a critical intelligence to bear on what some view as the definitive argument for change, Jonathan Rauch’s Gay Marraige: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. But Caldwell also succumbs to the myth of inevitability, writing that most Americans view same-sex marriage as “a bad idea whose time has come.” He chides Rauch for writing that “with the rise of the gay-marriage debate, another view has come to the fore: marriage is about children.” Caldwell points out the obvious, that marriage has always been about having and rearing children. How-ever: “Sex, childbearing, and childrearing-which marriage once bound as tightly as an atomic nucleus have been disaggregated.” The disaggregation has been effected by, inter alia, divorce, contraception, abortion, and cohabitation. Contra Rauch, Caldwell does not think “the gay-marriage movement will be able to shore up an institution that has for decades been undermined legally, socially, medically, theologically, philosophically, psychologically, and politically. Gays will soon accede to marriage, but only because marriage is losing its old set of purposes and is becoming, irrevocably, something else.” Irrevocably as in unstop-pably, so why continue to resist? Now that marriage no longer means much, why not let couples or triples or quadruples of whatever variety get married? They’ll be married as much as anybody else is. Caldwell might say that his is a statement of resignation, but it is, in fact, an argument from calculatedly exaggerated catastrophe. The factors that he says have “disaggregated” marriage have been with us for decades, and yet “tradi-tional” marriage, always a difficult enterprise besieged from many sides, is still standing. Ask all the couples who have recently married what they intended and I expect that, with tew exceptions, they would cite the “old set of purposes”—love, companionship, fidelity, mutual support, and, yes, having and rearing children. A lot of them will fail in realizing those purposes, as a lot have always failed. The cultural indicators of the last decade, however, show that the overwhelming and growing majoritv of voung people want to realize those purposes. It is both talse and cruel to tell them that their aspirations are in vain. Far from being “a bad idea whose time has come,” the deconstruction of marriage is a bad idea that some are determined to force upon the country, with the aid and support of Christopher Caldwell and others who counsel surrender to the inevitable.

• The use of the imperative indicative is troubling in a comment on The Passion of the Christ by the publish-er/editor of the Christian Century. He writes, “I concluded that you can’t know much about the dreadful history of Christian anti-Semitism and feel very good about Mel Gibson’s movie.” I can’t? I know a great deal about that history and feel very good about-or, better, think very highly of the movie. The writer deplores the frequent reference to “the Jews” in the Fourth Gospel. “In fact, I substitute ‘the people, which, while no more accurate, at least avoids the clearly pejorative use of the term.” No more accurate? He means they were neither Jews nor people? He further writes, “As I walk through the passion accounts I am also grateful for having learned to think critically.” And, he might have added, humbly.

• A study on sexuality is scheduled to come to a vote at the 2005 churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). My Lutheran friends tell me that the revisionists have been watching carefully the Episcopalian crack-up and want to avoid the alienation of a couple of million members from the much larger ELCA. So the idea is being floated that a vote would be unnecessarily “divisive,” that love requires that “we live with our differences.” Over time, after a few thousand same-sex blessings (which may by then be legally recognized as marriages) and a few hundred ordinations of practicing gays and lesbians at first tolerated as “exceptions”), the Lutheran tradition will be de facto transformed from legalism to grace, and all without the inconvenient difficulties of formal deliber-ation, debate, and decision. The strategy might very well work. Never underestimate the power of antinomianism veiled in the language of love. When truth is trimmed to accommodate togetherness, the quality of togetherness is admittedly thinned, but the good thing is that nobody is excluded. Except, of course, those who thought the point was to be together in truth. The churchwide assembly is still a year away. It is enough time to effectively label those who want a vote for fidelity as the party of “divisiveness.”

• What would Jesus do about stem cell research? Michael Fitzgerald, who is a member of the Presbyterian Church USA, which he suggests is a good deal more enlightened than Catholics and other ” conservatives,” thinks he may have the answer. Writing in Acumen, a journal of business and science, Fitzgerald says researchers should not be distracted by legal and legislative questions.

• “Scientists should leave that fight to the lawyers and, instead, acknowledge something that most will find distasteful to contemplate-modern science is still playing catch-up to Jesus. Some of his miracles now seem less than awesome: Ordinary paramedics routinely bring people back to life. Artificial insemination matches virgin birth. Prozac and other drugs do a reasonable job of casting out demons.” Many Christians, we are told, have qualms about creating embryos in order to use and destroy them, and progressive scientists need to meet those concerns head-on. “Scientists may doubt even the historicity of Jesus, let alone his putative divinity. But the most entrenched and effective opposition to stem cell research comes from people who buy into the New Testament hook, line, and sinker, and who may well doubt science itself. So the scientists must engage them on their own territory. In so doing, scientists may find that they’ve been ceding moral high ground unneces-sarily.” One has to wonder whether describing them as people who buy into the New Testament hook, line, and sinker is really the best way to persuade Christians who may be uneasy about Mr. Fitzgerald’s suggestion that we must take over from God the process of creation. And, contra Fitzgerald, the argument that Jesus would support stem cell research because he violated the rules by healing on the Sabbath may strike some as less than conclusive. In addition to this latest specimen, Acumen has published some notably dumb attacks on the “sophistry” of the President’s Council on Bioethics for trying to draw lines with respect to what is distinctively human. But perhaps that is to be expected in a journal of business and science that treats science as a business.

• “The Test of Time: Challenges to Traditional Christian and Jewish Views of Homosexuality.” That’s the title of a seminar sponsored by the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Directing the seminar, it says here, are “Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox Rabbi, and Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. ” But of course. They’re just the fellows to take the lead in meeting the challenges. Assuming they are to be embraced and not repulsed, nobody knows the challenges better than the challengers. As for “the test of time,” the notice says the meeting will be over by two o’clock. Brisk obsequies, it would seem, for the late and unlamented “traditional views.” The notice specifies, however, that the luncheon will be kosher.

• The New York Times reports that John Kerry became “combative” with reporters when asked about critics who say he does not follow Catholic teaching on questions such as abortion and same-sex unions. “Who are they?” he demanded. “Name them. Are they the same legislators who vote for the death penalty, which is in contravention of Catholic teaching?” He went on to explain: “I’m not a church spokesman. I’m a legislator running for president. My oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States in my public life. My oath privately between me and God was defined in the Catholic Church by Pius XXIII and Pope Paul VI in the Vatican II, which allows for freedom of conscience for Catholics with respect to these choices, and that is exactly where I am.” We had better tread lightly here. We’re dealing with the inner sanctum of the conscience. This is a man who apparently has taken a private oath under the tutelage of a pope of whom most of us have never heard. Rumor has it that members of the very secretive Society of Pius XXIII are taught to be so careful about not imposing their religion that, just to be safe, they do not impose it upon themselves. It has also been said that “Pius XXIII” is a pseudonym used by Father Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who has contrived a moral rationale widely employed by Catholic politicians inconvenienced by Catholic teaching. I have no idea whether such rumors are true, but I have a strong hunch that during the course of this campaign we may be learning a great deal about Catholicism that nobody knew before.

• Plaintive is the word to describe reactions among many United Methodists to the acquittal of the Rev. Karen Dammann. The charge was that she had engaged in “practices declared by the United Methodist Church (UMC) to be incompatible with Christian teachings.” The pertinent teachings have been debated time and again at General Conferences of the UMC, and a strong majority backs the statement of the Book of Discipline on standards for ordained ministry: “Since the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be accepted as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve in the United Methodist Church.” The Pacific Northwest Conference to which the Rev.Dammann belongs declared in 2000 its defiance of the UMC teaching, and in its trial of Dammann put the Book of Discipline, not Karen Dammann, in the dock. She was utterly straightforward about her living in a “covenanted” lesbian relationship, having presided at a same-sex “marriage” ceremony, and her involvement in related floutings of church authority. Everybody understood that the trial was something of a farce. The minister in charge of the prosecution said afterwards, “I’m glad I lost.” Acknowledging that the jury ignored UMC teaching, he said, “I don’t feel bad about that.” I write before the UMC’s General Conference in Pittsburgh. It is expected that some will press for a censure of the Pacific Northwest Conference, and perhaps of the entire Western Jurisdiction of which it is part. That may happen, or it may be, as others urge, that the deviant jurisdictions will be declared in a state of schism from the UMC. What would be the practical effect of such actions, however, is far from clear. In the past, the proponents of the biblical and traditional ethic geared up for battle royals at the General Conference, and prevailed. Much as folks in the Presbyterian Church USA and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are gearing up for a battle royal in their governing assem-blies, and may prevail in their defense of the tradition. But such victories may turn out to be hollow, as willful opponents do as they wish, daring denominational authorities to act against them. Once again, the circumstance of orthodoxy being optional moves toward orthodoxy being proscribed. The orthodox declare their determination to take back their church, for which they are accused of destroying their church. Not in two millennia of Christian teaching, not in millennia more of human experience, has it been proposed that homogenital sexual relations are on a moral par with the union of man and woman. Until a few years ago. Now those who oppose or even voice serious reservations about that radical proposal are, as mentioned earlier, condemned as “divisive.” Denominational structures may be preserved by vested interest in pension plans and by the triumph of those who would proscribe any ortho doxy that others might prescribe. The alternative is new Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches, which nobody can believe is Christ’s intention for his body, the Church.

• A gimlet-eyed reader caught this editorial correction in the New York Times. “A report on February 15 about the wedding of Riva Golan Ritvo and Alan Bruce Slifka included an erroneous account of the bride’s education, which she supplied. Ms. Ritvo, a child therapist, did not graduate from the University of Pennsylvania or receive a master’s degree in occupational therapy or a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Southern California. Though she attended Penn for a time, her bachelor’s degree, in occupational therapy, is from U.S.C.The Times should have corroborated the credentials before publishing the report.” Therein must lie a story. A whistle blower in her or his family? Was he deceived? Padding a résumé to get a job is, regrettably, common enough, but to get married? Jayson Blair and Walter Duranty may have slipped by, but it is reassuring to see that the newspaper of record is on the job in the case of poor Riva Golan Ritvo.

• After decades of progressive everything, teenagers in the United Kingdom appear to want a very different society than the one their elders gave them. Bliss, a teen magazine, commissioned the Young People’s Survey of Great Britain, interviewing thousands of teens. Eighty-six percent say they are proud to be British, 40 percent say their mother is their greatest role model, 60 percent believe in God, 66 percent think people take abortion too lightly, and 91 percent say they intend to marry one day. In the northwest, 22 percent say they have had sex and a third of them say they now regret it. On more political matters, 82 percent do not trust Prime Minister Tony Blair, 76 percent say Britain should not have gone to war with Iraq, 90 percent are for expelling “bogus asylum seekers.” Almost half favor bringing back the death penalty, and 70 percent oppose the rule of the European Union. Of books and films, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings top the list of favorites. The editor of Bliss comments: “Teenagers like boundaries. They make them teel safe, but over the years they have been torn down. Thev want to walk the streets in safety, they want their schools to be free from drug pushers, and they don’t want to be rushed into sex too young. This survey is a damning indictment of the damage caused by the lax attitudes of adults inflicted on children. Young people have passionate beliefs about the society they want to live in and it’s not the one they’ve got.” Yes, I’ve sent these findings on to George Weigel for possible use in his revise version of “Europe’s Problem – and Ours” (see F February), but I expect he’ll respond that, given its birthrate, in fifteen years or so the UK will have very few teenagers, sensible or otherwise

• The state’s highest court upheld a California law requiring charities to provide prescription contracep tion coverage. In this case, it was applied to Catholic Charities, which, the court said, did not qualify for a religious exemption because it is not religious enough. Its leadership includes non-Catholics and it serves everybody, not just Catholics. Without providing any evidence of a connection, Peter Steinfels of the New York Times says the ruling is part of a backlash against the Bush administration’s plan to meet social needs through faith-based organizations. Close watchers of California politics, however, say that liberal legislatures have for years tried one tactic after another to force charities of all kinds to provide contraception, abortion, and other ” reproductive servic-es.” At the same time, a court in San Diego ruled that a longstanding arrangement whereby the Boy Scouts manage a public park is unconstitutional. The reason? The Boy Scouts are “religious” and the arrangement is therefore a forbidden establishment of religion. Both suits were strongly supported by the ACLU. They’ve got you coming and going. If you claim to be religious and plead an exemption under tree exercise you re not religious enough. If you claim to be non-religious, the court finds you vestigially religious enough to be excluded from a government contract. In his more melancholic mood, Francis Cardinal George has been known to opine that within ten years time the government’s cooptation of religion will result in something like China’s aboveground and underground churches, albeit without the same level of persecution. That seems to me unlikely. On the other hand…

• At a recent campus lecture, a superannuated radical from olden days interrogated me sharply on how I, the radical hero of his youth, could now be so conserva-tive. And I thought of a line from Joseph Epstein, that master—he prefers to think of himself as the only surviving practitioner-of the occasional essay: “Sooner or later, either a man grows up or he pulls his gray hair back into a pony tail.”

• Here’s an invitation to a lecture at the Harvard Club “Empty Chairs and Empty Altars: How Will the Church Be Without All the Priests and Nuns?” The lecture is sponsored by the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and America magazine. I don’t think I’ll go. The usual phrase is full pews and empty altars, which contrasts the burgeoning Catholic population with the diminishing number of priests. In any event, the question in the lecture title would seem to have an obvious answer. If there are no people and no priests, there will be no Church. Or is it only the nuns who sit on chairs? Whatever. One is struck by the number of people who seem to relish the shrinking of priestly ranks. The other day I received a long letter sent to parishioners by the pastor of a large metropolitan church—also Jesuit, I’m sorry to say. It explained in excruciating detail why, given present patterns, the parish, which now has three priests, would in a decade or two likely have to share one priest with several other parishes. There was no suggestion of a possible change in present patterns, such as, to cite one obvious possibility, the encouragement of more priestly vocations. One might describe the tone of the letter as fatalistic. Except for a few upbeat references to the multiplication of lay ministries and proposals for other professionals taking over traditionally priestly tasks. It is anticipated that the one priest some years hence will play a role of teaching, sacramental presence, and general oversight. In other words, the priest would be in a position traditionally held by a bishop. Which leads one to suspect that maybe all the talk about the inevitable decline in the number of priests is not fatalistic at all. Rather, and however perversely, it reflects something hoped for. To paraphrase Huey Long, Every Priest a Bishop.

• “Ratzinger Regrets Church Centralism.” It is a story in the Tablet on remarks by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to journalists. “Perhaps we could sometimes be more generous in certain matters,” Ratzinger said. The story continues, “But the right balance between the central authorities and local churches had not always been found, he admitted.” That’s the whole of the story. Why “he admitted”? Did they assume the Cardinal thinks that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has stretched generosity to a fault in every instance and has invariably struck exactly the right balance between Rome and local churches? One imagines the Cardinal remarking in passing that of course he is not infallible and the resulting Tablet headline: “Ratzinger Admits He Is Not Infallible.”

• It’s not easy to say something new about the end of the world, Crawford Gribben writes in Books & Cul-ture. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Tenkins, which has sold zillions of books, mainly to Evangelicals, is in large part derivative (Gribben carefully does not mention plagiarism from a British writer, Sydney Watson, who wrote rapture novels in the early twentieth century. Since Watson, others besides LaHaye and Jenkins have rewritten the basic storyline to keep it up to date with current events such as the end of the Cold War and the latest twists in the agonies of the Middle East. With specific reference to the Left Behind series, Gribben writes: “Equally fascinating is the manner in which the novels negotiate the end of the other Cold War, the hostile standoff between the competing branches of Western Christendom. Throughout the rapture novel tradition, Roman Catholicism has been given a negative press. Watson’s heroes were ultra-protestants adhering to a Moody and Sankey religion. The motives of their enemy were undisguised: Romanism boldly declares its aim to win, or coerce Britain back into her harlot fold.’ LaHaye and Jenkins certainly moderate this mood. In Left Behind, the pope is among the raptured, though perhaps only because he has embraced Luther’s “heresies”; but, in later novels, the rapture seems to have also involved entire Catholic congregations whose evangelical credentials are in no way signaled. Such rapprochement is tempered, however, as the novels identify the replacement pope as the Antichrist’s false prophet. In the aftermath of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the Left Behind novels seek to have their cake and eat it.”

• A few years ago an acquaintance had what he thought was the brilliant idea of marketing little stuffed dolls representing Jesus and Mary. I mentioned it to a friend who is a mother of some experience. She responded, “This is a really bad idea. Kids hug their dolls and sleep with their dolls. They also dunk them in the toilet bowl and in fits of anger throw them against the wall. Moreover, little girls from time immemorial have been spanking their dolls when they think they’ve been bad. Tesus and Mary do not deserve this.” Here is a report that CPR Marketing, Inc., in Massachusetts is launching a nationwide promotion for their Jesus Beanies. “Jesus Beanies are soft and loveable nine-inch-tall cloth dolls designed to resemble the image of Jesus Christ. They’re small enough to be cuddled in young arms.” Bad ideas, like bad pennies…. One wonders if the reviewers who complain that the Jesus of The Passion of the Christ is not “spiritual” (read soft and cud-dly) enough played with something like Jesus Beanies when they were kids. The manufacturer says, “This cuddly toy is both a comfort-bringer and a parent’s tool for helping children to understand who Jesus is, at a much younger age.” Jesus as toy and tool. That’s not a bad summary of the anemic spirituality that too often passes as the gospel.

• There is a large library of books and research reports demonstrating that, by any measure, the most important factor in the flourishing of children is that they live with their mother and father. Except, gay activists note, that such children typically have a deficit in homosexual experience, which most parents believe is a very good deficit to have. There is much talk about happy children in gay and lesbian homes, but researchers are all but unanimous in pointing out that there are no reliable studies on that since research requires a large and identifiable population and a long period of time to know the life course of such children. Just how primitive the state of the question is at present is illustrated by Abigail Garner’s Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is. Ms. Garner is also the author of what Publisher’s Weekly calls “the children’s book classic” Heather Has Two Mommies. Her advocacy book is a collection of anecdotes tailored to her argument. It is acknowledged that nobody knows how many children have grown up in LGBT families. “Estimates vary from one million to sixteen million.” Or maybe one hundred thousand or maybe twenty-five million or maybe whatever. (Time out: The hopeless incorrectness of this magazine’s readership requires that we explain that LGBT means Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered. And what does transgendered mean? If you have to ask, you don’t want to know.) Ms. Garner and others emphasize that many children reared by gays do not turn out to be homo-sexual. They are “culturally queer, erotically straight.” Being culturally queer is deemed a great achievement. Which, in a very old-fashioned meaning of the word, seems a bit queer.

• “Rick Warren’s popular 1995 book, The Purpose-Driven Church, did not merely beget his 2002 New York Times best-seller, The Purpose-Driven Life. It also led to a flurry of imitators, including Values-Driven Leadership (1996), The Servant-Driven Church (1997), Purpose-Driven Youth Ministry (1998), The Prayer-Driven Church (2000), Vision-Driven Small Groups (2000), The Mission-Driven Worship (2001), The Generation-Driven Church (2002), Jesus-Driven Ministry (2002), The Passion-Driven Congregation (2003), and The Passion-Driven Sermon (2003). That’s just for starters. It doesn’t include the Purpose-Driven journals, workbooks, calendars, and DayTimers.” That’s from the Nicotine Theological Journal, to which, as longtime readers know, I am mildly addicted. The editors then add this: “These book titles might signify little more than a reminder of how trendy and derivative the evangelical publishing industry has become. But what is also striking about them is how they run against another trend in evangelical publish-ing, that of the therapeutic warnings against the dangers of obsessive-compulsive behavior.” Trendy, derivative, and capitalistically cunning. Inducing the disease that you purport to cure is a very old and very profitable trick. 

• Jason Berry and Gerald Renner address a very important question in Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (Free Press). That question is the role of secrecy in church leadership. The simplistic answer is that there is no legitimate place at all for secrecy, nor for confidentiality, nor for discre-tion. Whether it be churches or corporations or government or the personal lives of public and not-so-public figures, everything should be exposed to the sunshine laws of “transparency.” The great exception, of course, is journalism. Reporters have an absolute right to hide their sources and methods because they are the good guys and are not susceptible to abusing their power. Regrettably, the authors of the present book subscribe to that simplistic answer, and the result is yet another sensationalist screed that is likely to find few readers beyond those who have an insatiable appetite for Catholic-bashing. The book carries glowing endorsements from the egregious masters of that niche market: James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword; Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame; and Robert Blair Kaiser, formerly of Newsweek, who has lived a long and embittered life off the invention of nefarious Vatican conspiracies. Along with the authors of the book, they are all Catholics of a sort. By choosing such company and their accustomed style of crude accusation, the authors have almost certainly guaranteed that nobody in a position to do something about the problem they want addressed will take the book seriously, or even bother reading it. The book itself is a tediously familiar rehash of the sex scandals, combined with an uncritical celebration of Father Thomas Doyle, a Dominican who early on warned the bishops about the prevalence of sex abuse and in the last two years has become a much-lionized champion and cheerleader for sundry dissident organizations and the expert witness of choice for trial lawyers extracting millions from the Church and its insurance companies. The rest of the book is a repetition, in wearying detail, of complaints against the Legionaries of Christ and its founder Father Marcial Maciel (for a discussion of the complaints and what to make of them, see FT, “Feathers of Scandal,” Public Square, March 2002). Jason Berry, let it be said, rendered an important service when, in Louisiana in the 1980s, he was among the first to throw public light on the incidence of priestly sex abuse. Gerald Renner, on the other hand. has made a long and undistinguished career of beating the Catholic Church with any stick at hand. Vows of Silence is a distinct disappointment, but perhaps I was wrong in hoping for something better. There is no doubt that bishops and curial officials sometimes invoke secrecy “for the good of the Church” in concealing what need not and should not be concealed. That is a big factor in the current scandals. The moral lines between secrecy and deception, between discretion and dishonesty, must be clarified, even as we recognize that no institution can flourish without a reasoned measure of trust in its leadership. Bishops need to hold one another accountable, and to give a believable account of their stewardship to the people whom they would lead. Responsible journalism has a legitimate role in encouraging them to do that. The prosecutorial zeal of Berry and Renner in full attack mode, however, will, if it is noticed at all, only exacerbate the problem they say they want to help remedy. A bishop wouldn’t give these fellows the time of day for fear of how they would find a way to turn it against him.There are amusing moments in the book. There is, for instance, the extended discussion of “Father X” and his views on the evils of secrecy in the Church. There really is a “Father X,” we are assured, and he is an expert on secrecy. Who is “Father X”? Don’t ask. It must remain a secret, so severe is the problem of secrecy in the Church. Then there is the reported time a group of American bishops requested the help of John Paul II with the abuse scandals. The authors quote the Pope: “You’ll get no quick fixes out of me,’ he declared.” I have over the years spent hours in conversation with the Pope and anyone who believes that he ever said that to anybody about anything at any time has passed the credulity test for reading Vows of Silence. As the Amazon.com website might put it: people who bought this book also bought Carrol, McBrien, and Kaiser.

• Several readers point out what they believe to be an egregious sign of the hubris of “the religious right.” In a story on the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals held in Colorado Springs, the New York Times reports: “And the convention organizers were aware of their political clout. A slogan on the back of the convention program reads: What Can 30 Million Evangelicals Do For America? Anything We Want.'” Hubris? Not necessarily. Note that it says for America, not with America. Shouldn’t we want people to want to do all they can for America?

• The Canadian government is appealing a court order which mandates that gays receive survivor benefits for their dead partners, retroactive to 1985. The government claims this would potentially cost hundreds of millions of dollars it cannot afford. It is also pointed out that it would be difficult to determine who was and who was not a “long term gay partner.” Gay activists decry what they see as a retreat by the new prime minister Paul Martin from the support of his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, for extending all entitlements, including marriage, to gays. In the same mail is this story from Washington D.C.’s gay newspaper, the Washington Blade, on the departure of Lorri Jean as executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) amidst heated policy disputes. The report says, “During contract negotiations, Jean called for dropping a longstanding NGLTF policy of paying 100 percent of the health insurance premium for staff members’ domestic partners, saying the benefit was prohibitively expensive.”

• Writing in Azure and agreeing with almost all reviewers, Robert S. Wistrich of Hebrew University in Terusalem thinks that Daniel J. Goldhagen goes over the top in his book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. There is much that the Catholic Church still needs to do, writes Wistrich, but: “I doubt that Goldhagen’s other proposals—that the Church abandon papal infallibility, embrace religious pluralism, or actually rewrite the Christian Bible—while highly desirable in themselves, are at all practicable…. [They] would surely mean the end of Catholicism as it has been historically understood. This would be fiercely resisted and surely defeated.” As highly desirable as the end of Catholicism would be, it’s just too much to hope for? Or perhaps I misunderstand Professor Wistrich, who a few years ago helped torpedo a Jewish-Catholic project studying Vatican archives pertinent to the Holocaust.

• It’s been a while since I’ve had occasion to remark on Peter Singer of Princeton University, the ageing bad boy of moral philosophy. But now Gerald Nora, a sec-ond-year medical student, sends me the dust jacket of the 1996 edition of Singer’s Rethinking Life and Death. Mr. Nora is right in suspecting that the blurbs “praising” the book might have been chosen by Professor Singer’s enemies. For instance, there is this from the Washington Post: “Far from pointing a way out of today’s moral dilemmas, Singer’s book is a road map for driving down the darkest of moral blind alleys… Read it to remind yourself of the enormities of which putatively civilized beings are capable.” Precisely. If you want a roadmap for driving down blind alleys, this is it. Then there is this from the publisher: “A profound and provocative work in the tradition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Precisely again. Even more precisely, it is in the tradition of thinking that Huxley so powerfully warned us against.

• The demographics of the abortion controversy are often overlooked. Recent months have seen a number of reports indicating that opposition to abortion is growing dramatically among young people. In a Gallup survey of youth aged thirteen to seventeen, only 19 percent say that abortion should be legal in all circumstances (the current regime of Roe v. Wade) while 72 percent say that abortion is morally wrong and should be entirely prohibited (32 percent) or permitted only in rare instances (40 percent) Undoubtedly related to these changes is the fact that pro-life couples have an average of three children while pro-choicers average only one child. Of course children do not always, to put it gently, agree with their parents on abortion or anything else, but one cannot discount parental influence. Moreover, there is the deeply poignant but seldom mentioned factor that millions of people born in the last thirty years know that they have a brother or sister, or even brothers and sisters, who were aborted. I have often tried to imagine what I would think were I one of those children missing a sibling. “Honey,” Mom explains, “we just weren’t ready for another baby.” I know the pro-abortion people say that a child told this is filled with warm feelings that he or she was really wanted. Maybe so, but I expect there are many more who cannot erase from their minds that Mom had their brother or sister killed. Not to mention the moral and spiritual ramifications of knowing that their existence was contingent not upon an act of nature or gift of God but solely upon their parents decision. “Thanks for not having me killed, Mom.” That touches upon the spiritually weird and murky, but I expect it has a great deal to do with the growing number of young people who view abortion with horror.

• However the Supreme Court comes down on Elk Grove Unified School District v. Michael A. New-dow, there is widespread agreement that the government botched its case for keeping “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. The solicitor general fell into the trap of defending the phrase as a revered historical curiosity, an expression of ceremonial deism, and something good for reinforcing patriotic sentiment. Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic says that this is to evacuate religious language of any intellectual content. He writes, “The argument that a reference to God is not a reference to God is a sign that American religion is forgetting its reasons.” He rightly warns against the unhappy consequences “of a smug and sloppy entanglement of religion with politics, for politics and for religion. It is never long before one nation under God gives way to one God under a nation.” Which, as he does not say, is an important reason for treating that entanglement, which is in important ways inevitable, in a manner not smug and sloppy but self-critical and precise. But then Mr. Wieseltier goes off the rails. “The need of so many American believers to have government endorse their belief is thoroughly abject. How strong, and how wise, is a faith that needs to see God’s name wherever it looks?” Perhaps some Americans do feel a need to have their faith stamped with a seal of government approval, which is abject. I expect most Americans, however, think we should publicly acknowledge that this is a nation under God not for the sake of their faith but for the sake of the nation. Ours, they believe, is a nation under God, as in “under judgment,” and we ignore or deny that truth at great peril. In sum, they agree with Mr. Wieseltier, and with Mr. Newdow for that matter, that a reference to God is a reference to God, the government’s brief notwithstanding.

• By the end of the nineteenth century, after much wrangling, Harvard had dropped Veritas pro Christo et ecclesia from its motto, settling for the one word, Veritas. This March, Columbia University redesigned its symbol, a crown with three crosses, by removing the crosses. Columbia was established 250 years ago as an Anglican college and chartered by King George II. Predictably, some conservatives lamented the change. Others, however, took comfort in the fact that the university, while no longer Christian, is still monarchist.

• Depending on whose data you credit, in 2000 there were 5.3 to 6.1 million Jews in the United States. The low estimate is a significant decline from the 1990 figure of 5.5 million. As a percentage of the population, Jews are certainly in decline, from 3.6 percent in 1940 to 1.9 percent today. In American Judaism: A History, Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University concludes his impressive narrative with an examination of the ways in which Jews today worry about a “vanishing generation.” He cautions against the despondency that reigns in some circles: “’A nation dying for thousands of years,’ the great Jewish philosopher Simon Rawidowicz once observed, ‘means a living nation. Our incessant dying means uninterrupted living, rising, standing up, beginning anew.’ His message, delivered to Jews agonizing over the loss of six million of their compatriots, applies equally well today in the face of contemporary challenges to Jewish continuity. ‘If we are the last—let us be the last as our fathers and forefathers were. Let us prepare the ground for the last Jews who will come after us, and for the last Jews who will rise after that, and so on until the end of days.’”

• Donald Barr, a distinguished educator here in New York City, died at age eighty-two a few months ago. He married Mary Margaret Ahern in April 1946. After his father’s death, their son Stephen, a member of our editorial board, found an old Latin missal that his father had apparently given his mother while they were courting. In it was inscribed this poem:

For Mary

October 27, 1945

I cannot share the bright inn of your creed Although the waters tumble sickening 

And icy from the skies, and bead by bead 

The windows tell of your hearth, though poplars sing

Tonelessly “Kyrie eleison”

About my own bent head. I may not stop Among your company. And I walk on:

The skin below my eyes accounts each drop.

My love, you are companion on my path, Though you are with the gay and reverend And fiery shelterers. If there be wrath 

Above my road and payment at the end, There is reward as well: you safe. I too 

Am of God’s party, since we both love you.

Don

His father finally came into the Church, being baptized shortly before Easter of 2000. To the great joy of Mary and in answer to her daily prayers. She died in March of 2001.

Sources:

Caldwell on why gay marriage is so splendid, New York Times Book Review, April 11, 2004. Christian Century on how you can’t feel about Gibson’s movie, Christian Century, March 23, 2004. United Methodist Church saves Dammann’s woman-to-woman marriage, Good News press release, March 25, 2004. U.K. teens embrace common sense rather than each other, Manchester News, March 11, 2004. The ACLU secular coup, New York Times, March 13, 2004. Epstein on “The Perpetual Adolescent,” Weekly Standard, March 15, 2004. Tablet’s tabloid headline, Tablet, April 3, 2004. Jenkins and LaHaye leave Watson behind, Books & Culture, July/August 2003. Driven books, Nicotine Theological Journal, January 2004. Evangelicals for anything in America, New York Times, March 12, 2004. Canadian gays and lesbians, Blade, March 11, 2004. Robert S. Wistrich on Goldhagen, Azure, Winter 2004. Young people demonstrate pro-life attitudes, Population Research Institute, December 10, 2003. A nation under Wieseltier, New Republic, April 12, 2004.