Last month I wrote about the “Manhattan Declaration”, wherein a unified front of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox leaders got together to petulantly whine that nobody pays enough attention to abortion and who’s sleeping with who anymore. This NY Times Magazine article profiles Robert George, a Princeton professor who was one of the lead authors of that declaration and is touted as the “conservative Christian big-thinker” by the article (that’s actually the title of the article.) What challenging and novel ideas does George bring to the table?

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear. To be sure, he said, he had no objections to bishops’ “making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies. They should stop lobbying for detailed economic policies like progressive tax rates, higher minimum wage and, presumably, the expansion of health care — “matters of public policy upon which Gospel principles by themselves do not resolve differences of opinion among reasonable and well-informed people of good will,” as George put it.

In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.

Huh. Well, it seems to me like this guy isn’t so much a “big-thinker” as he’s the smartest guy who thinks the same stupid, moralizing and paternalistic crap as people like James Dobson. Different road, same result I guess, only everybody thinks you’re smarty-pants if you constantly refer to “natural law” and name drop Aquinas.  Here’s the always-worthy-of-a-read Fred Clark on this “doctrine” and it’s proponents:

Their own awesomeness is a topic the authors address with relentless relish. Everything else in the document is merely a foil for this central subject. The threat of The Gay is grave, ominous and potentially world-altering, they warn, repeatedly, before reassuring us that their heroic resolve and moral superiority will save the day. Even the passages in which they luxuriate in their own massive humility are saturated with this swaggering self-regard.

This all-consuming self-absorption coupled with an utter lack of self-awareness plays like something from a Christopher Guest movie. I’m only half-convinced at this point that Robert George is even a real person and not a Fred Willard improv run amok. The authors possess that same remarkable knack for straight-faced seriousness while making uproariously ridiculous assertions.

And at one level it’s impossible to view these pretentious peacocks, these Malvolios grimacing and strutting in their yellow stockings, without succumbing to the derisive laughter they deserve. Such self-inflation demands deflation. And anyway it can’t be helped. I mean, just listen to them:

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

The whole thing is like that — like a bad parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. Except of course that Henry was outnumbered. Here instead we have a group of powerful elites, men at the center of political, cultural, academic and ecclesiastical privilege bemoaning their oppression at the hands of the homosexuals and religious minorities they claim run the world. They are overlords posing as underdogs. (It’s hard out there for a pope.)

[...]

So ultimately, even though we’re being treated to grand examples of the Blowhard Fool — a comic type that dates back before Plautus — this isn’t funny. And formally, structurally, we’re dealing with tragedy. There is no resolution, no reconciliation, no marriage. (Shakespearean shorthand: Tragedy means everyone dies; comedy means everyone gets married.) Indeed, the whole production here is an explicit rejection of the possibility of reconciliation and an adamant denial of marriage. So this isn’t comedy. We can’t help but laugh at these tragic clowns, but the laughter has a bitter aftertaste.

The important thing here, though, is to recognize why these buffoons have embraced this buffoonery. Their silliness is not a sideshow. The pompousness is the purpose. The fatuousness is the function. This is, as the kids on the Internets like to say, a feature, not a bug.

The anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-religious minority Manhattan Declaration is not primarily about opposing any of those things. That’s all just collateral damage. The primary purpose of the Manhattan Declaration, its raison d’etre, is to help the authors and signatories convince themselves that they’re better than everyone else. The ridiculous, overweening pride is what it’s for.

Chuck Colson, Robert George and Timothy George are blitzed out of their minds on the drug of smug. They’re hard-core umbrage junkies, snorting offendedness, mainlining grievance, freebasing uncut self-righteousness.

Big thinker indeed.

I don’t generally read opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, on the advice of countless liberal bloggers who say that the WSJ opinion pages are as bad as the paper’s financial reporting is good. But sometimes I stumble across a doozy I can hardly resist, like this op-ed comparing Bush to Batman (favorably, and ridiculously) and this op-ed which paints Obama as a third world populist. But it appears Daniel Henninger isn’t content to let others hog the spotlight, and uses this column to race to the bottom of the barrel of dumb:

This year we celebrate the desacralized “holidays” amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin — fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man’s theory: A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.

One had better explain that.

Yes, one had better. After some blathering about “moral hazards” (everyone’s favorite catch-phrase these days it seems) he comes right down to it: the global financial crisis can be blamed on “secularists” (read, liberals):

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Boy, have we seen this play before. Literally every year you can count on the culture warriors to blame the downfall of western society on retailiers who won’t let their employees say “Merry Christmas” and force them to renounce both Jesus and Santa Claus by saying “happy holidays” instead , I guess for fear of angering the tens of millions of liberals, atheists and secularists who threaten boycotts, stand-ins and marches every time they’re forced to listen to someone say the word “christmas.” The new twist, at least to Henninger, is that the pall of fear that descends over America each Christmas when secularists demand to have the Christ taken out of Christmas has undermined the moral virtue of our nation, which in turn led to people on Wall Street making foolish and greedy decisions and thus causing the subprime and global financial crisis (as opposed to just leading people to get more abortions, as in years past.) According to Henninger, in years past when America was more religious and anyone could say “merry christmas” without fear of shunning, capatalists in general practiced the virtues of thrift, common sense, and concern for their fellow man. Never mind that they didn’t.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle on legislating through the courts:

In general, courts are the wrong place to press these sorts of claims. The courts were appropriate for civil rights because blacks were literally denied the right to participate in the legislative democratic process. And on a practical level, they worked because a majority of people in the country were more than happy to force civil rights on an unhappy white southern minority. Unfortunately, too many groups have decided that the success of civil rights can be widely applied to circumvent the electorate on issues where there is no public consensus. Now widespread gay marriage seems quite a bit less likely for the near term than it would have been had we attacked the issue legislatively.

I’m truly tired of this sort of nonsense, peddled especially by the likes of Benjamin Wittes (regarding abortion in his case) and liberals and libertarians of his ilk. First of all, McArdle makes it sound as if gay marriage is only legitimate where it has been publicly mandated. This simply isn’t true; gay marriage was established in Massachusetts in 2004, and remains in effect today despite the fact that the State legislature has taken no action to give legal sanction to it. If the electorate was in fact “subverted”, then they seem to have acquiesced to it. Nonetheless, the Massachusetts state Supreme Court was ahead of the curve in their ruling; does anyone think that but for that ruling, gay marriage would somehow have become legal by legislative action in the intervening period between 2004 and now?

Second, the progress of gay marriage is not solely decided by those who allegedly make a cynical and completely selfish decision to “circumvent the electorate” by obtaining before courts what they cannot obtain in state legislatures. Believe it or not, many of us who support gay marriage genuinely believe that bans against gay marriage are in violation of protections afforded by both numerous state constitutions and the federal constitution. Being as the rights of those who are barred from legal protections of marriage are being violated by unconstitutional laws, then it only makes sense to go to court to have those rights vindicated. Were the state of Texas to suddenly pass a measure that requires registered Native Americans to take a loyalty oath before voting, would I consider as my only recourse legislative efforts to repeal that law, even if it was broadly supported by the public? Of course not. The immediate response would be to file suit in state or federal court, and rightly so.

Now, that is not to say there isn’t an argument among gay rights activists as to whether the legitimacy of gay marriage should be pursued in the courts, or in state legislatures. But this is in response to the fact that the citizens of many states largely sanction discriminatory behavior. Were it possible to have gay marriage recognized by law or public initiative, surely that is the path gay rights activists would take. It is not in the vast majority of states, as anti-gay discrimination is the last remaining acceptable bigotry. There are some gay rights activists who fear the public backlash that accompanies judicial decisions, and there are some who think these judicial decision lead the way for greater acceptance (I happen to think the latter are right.) But this is an argument over the practicality of pursuing gay marriage in the legislature; it has never and never will be inappropriate to have civil rights vindicated by the courts. I honestly don’t know why this distinction is so difficult to grasp, or how anyone can bring themselves to blithely argue that it is a mistake to have rights vindicated in courts whose purpose is to do just that.

What were the keys to Obama’s victory last night? I have my ideas. Here they are (though not in order of importance because honestly, I couldn’t say which had more impact than others, at least not enough to rank them):

To conservatives, it would appear to include denouncing liberals for not loving their country. John Holbo at Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion of that phenomenon which demonstrates that for conservatives, patriotism is something that exists largely so they can accuse liberals of not having it. Of course they try to disguise that behind something approaching rhetorical flourish, and of course they fail, as Holbo explains:

Frum: “There is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism – it is a wish fantasy. And it is this wish fantasy, this shrinking from realities, this attempt to let phrases do the work of real ideas, that is the ultimate failure not just of a single book, but of the whole new approach to patriotism.”

So it is absurd to think the American Revolutionaries were patriots, or that the spirit of the American Revolution is an appropriate object of patriotic attachment? Abraham Lincoln was indulging a wish fantasy, expressing no patriotic sentiment, when he appealed to the ‘better angels of our nature’ (as opposed to the ‘actual, warts-and-all angels of our natures’)? Seems like a sorry sort of patriotism that forbids you to accentuate the positive about your own country, on pain of failure. (Sigh.) Maybe it’s a Canadian thing.

Getting back to bloggingheads, at one point Goldberg describes some editorial backchat at NR, during which Ponnuru apparently made the standard ‘can’t love of my country be like love of my mother?’ point. Which is actually pretty much the right thing to say. All the other stuff – the stuff about loving America because it is objectively exceptional in certain ways – is not really it. If you love America because it is objectively the best at doing certain things that’s fine but not patriotism. That’s like loving your football team only so long as its winning, which is sort of the opposite of team loyalty. As I was saying: who thinks that loving your mother means loving everything about her to the point of being opposed to your mom improving herself or getting her act together or overcoming her problems? If your mom has problems – maybe really serious problems – and your brothers or sisters are trying to help, do you stand athwart the train of helping mom crying ‘stop!’ On the grounds that you love her too much to bear to see her become better, hence un-mom-like? Suppose your mom is a drug-addicted schizophrenic, living on the streets. Is a condition of still loving your mom that you find a way to love the fact of her drug-addiction and mental problems and lack of housing?

So in other words, liberals can’t possibly be patriots because the country we love is the ideal hypothetical country that we know would exist if Government would only enact our policies. Holbo agrees with Yglesias (who he links to above) in describing the conservative’s version of patriotism as something like the love of a sports team; you love it fiercely, but of course wish that your team would make the changes necessary to win. Perhaps, but when conservatives defend their love of country, it sounds an awful lot like the “My country, right or wrong” though of course they can’t possibly believe that, because otherwise they wouldn’t lobby for political change with as much vigor as liberals do. I suspect the “right or wrong” approach is adopted most frequently as a knee-jerk reaction by criticism of American policy from without and within, especially in the sphere of foreign policy though, frankly, that approach or the sports team approach to patriotism are each equally childish and naive.

Anyway, I’m sure conservatives believe themselves to be greatly patriotic. I take issue with the usefulness of their patriotism however since, to borrow Holbo’s anology, it’s the kind that would keep mom on the street and hooked on drugs. And frankly, I take issue with the validity of their patriotism in the first place, since I believe that today’s conservatives, living in earlier times, would have been more than happy to take up arms for the monarchy against the long-haired insurrectionists who had no respect for tradition and wanted to enact all sorts of radical ideas about social justice, liberty and property.

I didn’t have much to say about the Spitzer debacle before now except perhaps “There goes another one!” But frankly, some of the commentary coming from people on the left about it is beginning to rub me the wrong way. The responses on left-leaning blogs thus far seem to be “Prostitution ain’t so bad!” to “Republicans set him up!” to “Don’t give Republicans cover by going after him too hard!” (that in email from colleagues.) Here’s Glenn Greenwald, for example:

With all of the intense hand-wringing abounding, it’s very difficult to discern the standard being applied here. Are any public officials who commit adultery engaged in such morally intolerable behavior that they ought to resign, because that didn’t seem to be the standard back in the 1990s? Or is that any illegal behavior of any kind — no matter how serious or frivolous, whether victim-creating or victimless — merits resignation? If a political official smokes pot, or gambles in a poker game, or commits adultery in a state where adultery is a crime, are they now so morally beyond the pale that it is time for them to go? Is that the standard here?

I like Greenwald, but I couldn’t disagree with him more here. I for one tend to think prostitution should be legal. That does not change the fact that it is certainly illegal now, and any man who secretly engages in the services of a very expensive prostitute as arranged by a service that provides for such, certainly knows that he is engaging in a highly illegal enterprise. Spitzer also allegedly went out of his way to hide the money he was using to pay for the prostitute’s services, further indication that he was quite aware of the wrongfulness of his acts. Greenwald and others seem to think that prostitution, as a consensual act between two adults, should not be considered disqualification for political office anymore than adultery. And Greenwald downplays the illegality of the act by comparing it to silly examples like gambling in a card game. But what if that official shifts his money around to hide his thousands of dollars in gambling losses? What if that official routinely spends thousands of dollars going out onto the street to personally buy pot that he then smokes while he’s on official business? Greenwald seems to have trouble discerning a standard of conduct here, but I can tell you that it’s not difficult to discern at all. If you systematically engage in illegal conduct, fully aware of the illegality of the conduct, and you make every effort to hide that conduct from others, then you are not fit to be the mayor of a small rural town, let alone the governor of a major American state. No, Spitzer is not guilty merely of hypocrisy (though he is certainly guilty of that too.) He is guilty of flouting the law, doing so deliberately and in a manner that reflects a capacity for deceit. Why wouldn’t he resign?

I pay no heed to what Republicans have to say about Spitzer. But the fact that the Republican party has its own issues with sex and prostitution does not excuse Spitzer, nor is it a reason to let him off the hook. If Democrats want to attack conservative pundits and bloggers for their willingness to defend disgraced politicians, then we cannot hypocritically defend our own politicians who are clearly undeserving of our defense. As for the conspiracy-mongering…I’m more inclined to be suspicious of conspiracies to pervert justice when the targets don’t deserve to go to jail. Spitzer is no Siegelman.

UPDATE: Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

UPDATE: Spitzer resigns.

Of course, many people who died in New Orleans when Katrina hit had nothing to do with a gay pride parade, but the fundamentalist God has never been a discriminating sort.

I don’t know why I’m even mildly surprised, but Hillary quite publicly refuses to repudiate the use of torture by the U.S. government:

Clinton was similarly vague about how she would handle special interrogation methods used by the CIA. She said that while she does not condone torture, so much has been kept secret that she would not know unless elected what other extreme measures interrogators are using, and therefore could not say whether she would change or continue existing policies.

“It is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing. We’re getting all kinds of mixed messages,” Clinton said. “I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new president. I think [until] you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know.”

What? “Mixed messages”? I’m sorry, but we know quite clearly that the Bush administration has authorized the use of brutal techniques like water-boarding and stress positions, has refused to renounce such techniques, has authored secret legal opinions justifying them, and has only reluctantly backed away from such techniques after losing cases before the Supreme Court. If you are genuinely against torture, you would simply come out and say “I do not support the use of torture techniques such as water-boarding, stress positions” etc., etc. What are the reasons you wouldn’t come out and say something like that? Either because you are genuinely not really against torture all that much, or because you don’t want to say you’re against torture because that’s not “tough.” Which is worse? I don’t know, but Kevin Drum detests this sort of weasily spinning:

Politics is politics. Spin and ambiguity are part of the game. But if you can’t even take a full-throated, non-weasely position against torture and abuse of prisoners in American custody, what the hell good are you?

Indeed. Who of us desires to vote a Democrat into the White House, only to find that torture continues in our name? Not I.

I like Hillary. I really do. I think she’s tough, strong, intelligent and would be a hell of a President. But this sort of thing is really starting to chap my hide. I am seriously beginning to question whether or not Hillary lines up with my ideas on American foreign policy and national security enough for me to be comfortable with her as President. I hardly need to say anything about her infamous vote for the Iraq war, a vote that haunts her on the campaign trail, a vote she has yet to adequately explain. Even now she continues to hedge on Iraq, as if she’s preserving some sort of maneuvering room that will permit her to keep us in the conflict longer than most Americans desire (though to be fair, all the major candidates seem to be having this problem.) Then there’s her vote on the recent Iran resolution, followed shortly by her support of a proposal that would block funding of a military strike on Iran, a position which leaves people like me wondering exactly how much leeway Hillary thinks she’s giving the Bush administration to act on Iran and to what purpose. It doesn’t help that her list of advisers includes hawks suck as Michael O’Hanlon, defender of the surge.

Then there’s the nuclear weapons kerfuffle from earlier this year, where Obama made the egregious mistake of saying he wouldn’t unilaterally nuke thousands of innocent Pakistanis to kill a dozen or so terrorists, and Clinton called him out for his unseriousness in that regard, and for his willingness to waste time talking to heads of State we disagree with.

Then there’s her approach to Cuba, which appears to be to continue the failed embargo approach of the last fifty years.

In contrast to that we have Barack Obama, who unabashedly and clearly repudiates the use of torture, spoke out against the war in Iraq, refused to back the Iran resolution, who thinks we should talk to our enemies, who believes it’s silly to admit that we won’t nuke peaceful citizens just to get to terrorists, who in fact believes we should ban nuclear weapons, who supports rapprochement with Cuba, and who employs a noted human rights activist as his most prominent foreign policy adviser.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t support or oppose a candidate based solely on my foreign policy beliefs. But we are at a critical juncture in the history of our Nation, where our relationships with other powers can either be repaired and restored or where they can be broken beyond repair, where we can engage in war until it saps us of our military and economic might or we can begin the difficult road to peace and diplomacy, and where we can break with the ineffectual policies of the past to engage in a new era of world leadership. At this juncture, I think it’s becoming clearer who is best suited to do all of these things, and it’s not Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE: Dammit! The Hillary campaign ruins my anti-Hillary screed by revealing that Hillary was not quoted accurately by the Washington Post (check the link to Kevin Drum above for an update.) Her entire quote reveals about as unequivocal a stand against torture as you can ask for and I’m not going to over-interpret her words like Andrew Sullivan in an effort to sustain my original point (and Sullivan has his own weird problems with the Clintons anyway.) But I stand by the rest of my post, and her clear statement against torture isn’t enough to change my mind about any of the rest of her foreign policy positions.

Dinesh D’Souza, writing in the LA Times today conjures up the same insulting, tiresome and bone-headed arguments about how “The Left” is to blame for 9/11 that reactionary conservatives have been peddling since 9/12/2001. There is no point in arguing with this nonsense because untangling the conservative paranoid fantasies that inhabit D’Souza’s brain would be an exercise in futility, and I can promise you that this the first time and the last time I’ll ever write about him on this blog. The only proper response to D’Souza’s mis-leading and defamatory column would be to throw D’Souza off of a bridge, which is also probably also the only thing that would shut him up.

UPDATE: Others can bring themselves to say more about D’Souza and his idiocy than I can. If D’Souza thinks conservatives should “ally” with “traditional Muslims”, then I invite him to go live among them in say Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

We don’t normally engage in the internecine blog wars between the left and right here at TWM, in large part because it’s a waste of time (there are too many things of substance to blog about in a given day as it is) and because it’s dangerous to gaze too long at the madness that is the right-wing blogosphere. But this post by Nitpicker (filling in for Glenn Greenwald) is too good not to mention. Apparently, right-wing pundits and bloggers share with our terrorist enemies a hatred of American culture:

You would think that Republicans would be shamed by the fact so many of them seem to agree, at least to some extent, with the beliefs of terrorists and other Muslim extremists. For example:

• Dinesh D’Souza thinks that “decadent and depraved American culture…angers and repulses other societies—especially traditional and religious ones.” You know, like the religious conservatives of al Qaeda.
• Congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA) believes, in the manner of the Taliban, that countries should be run by a single religion. They only disagree on which religion should rule.
• Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter think certain Americans are simply asking to be attacked by terrorists.
• Bush supporter author Orson Scott Card thinks that, when terrorists call us decadent and evil, Hollywood movies “prove their point.”
• Mary Grabar, writing on one of the most-visited conservative sites, writes she agrees with pre-Enlightenment views of women, specifically that”Women, without male guidance, are illogical, frivolous, and incapable of making any decisions beyond what to make for dinner.”

It’s unlikely the Saudis who keep women from taking part in the electoral process would disagree. Me, I’d be ashamed if these beliefs were held by people on my side of the political aisle, but not Republicans.

Of course these people are not at all ashamed. In fact, they completely lack any sense of irony. After decades of accusing liberals of celebrating American defeats at the hands of our enemies, these super-patriots now find themselves sympathizing with terrorists who wish to kill Americans. These absurd arguments permit an inference of the belief that America “deserves” to be attacked by terrorists because of our decadent and self-indulgent ways. Who now then is on the side of our enemies? And this from the people whose overriding concern is supposedly some fear of a world-wide Islamic Caliphate ruling over us? It seems to me that these wise pundits think such a result would be an improvement on the current state of affairs.