Category: Journalism

Double Standards

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni scores some plausible points against double standards in Sex and the Single Murderess.

But until noon yesterday, I’d not heard of Jodi Arias and had no idea such a person was on trial. I must rummage my memory banks for who Amanda Knox is, and I probably wouldn’t know at all were there not some legal news in there like reversal on appeal.

Yet I have been beating the crap out of Mark Sanford — not because he strayed, and not even because he’s not still hiding in shame, but because his mumbled apologies are excuses in disguise. In my Church, if a man went to confession and said “I committed adultery, but she was my sould-mate,” any Priest worth his salt would say “go away and come back for absolution when you can leave off the part after the comma.” I consider the self-consciously Christian Sanford voters of South Carolina to be enablers, not forgivers.

And Frank Bruni? Does he want us to hold men to a higher standard or women to a lower one?

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Confirmation bias

“Confirmation bias” is putting it gently. A lie is a lie even when the person being lied about is the President of the United States and the truth is ominous.

An old and admirable friend posted on Facebook, but now seems to have taken down, a link and apocalyptic commentary on a story about a supposed effort to make it a court martial offense to share one’s Christian faith in the military.

An individual Orthodox Christian (whose blog, in fairness to him, posts many stories without much filtering) passed on this similar story. Excerpts:

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime–possibly resulting in imprisonment–for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains …

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life …

(Emphasis in original)

I earlier said “This sounds too lurid and absurd to be true, but it’s from several sources. Stay tuned.”

This morning, I saw another item from the Western Center for Journalism, which appears to be, er, more partisan that one might gather from its name:

According to Obama’s advisor on religious tolerance within the U.S. military, Christians sharing their faith, including chaplains, present “… a national security threat. What is happening [aside from sexual assault] is spiritual rape. And what the Pentagon needs is to understand is that it is sedition and treason. It should be punished.” …

And what does the Obama administration do in the face of Muslim war declared against the U.S.?

He threatens to court-martial all U.S. military personnel, including chaplains, if they share their faith ….

What are the facts behind these lurid opinions-masquerading-as-facts? Everyone is citing Breibart:

“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”
Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.

(Emphasis added) Read the whole Breibart piece; don’t trust me. It’s loaded with lots of inflammatory adjectives, but generally seems to state as fact only that which is fact. “Generally,” though, is important. There is no supporting citation or link for the assertion that the “policies on religious tolerance,” which apparently have not begun to be drafted, will include any “policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.”

So: Weinstein is going to be a Pentagon advisor on new policies on religious tolerance. He’s not the one-and-only Obama advisor.

I’ve heard of Mikey Weinstein. He’s a bat-shit crazy but very loud voice of intolerance, who conflates soldiers’ “solemnly sworn oath to the Constitution” and “follow[ing] the military’s regulations regarding religion” — which he hopes to shape. It’s ominous that the Pentagon feels obliged to include him as a consultant. I’m on record against the Obama administration’s already-execrable record on domestic religious freedom, and this proposed appointment does not bode well.

But we are not yet where the “Christian” liars say we are, and they should be ashamed of themselves. There’s no exemption from the command against false witness for political “war.”

UPDATE: Breibart has a followup story May 1.

The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense…Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis…”.

Neither Breibart nor Fox News linked to the written statement for anyone who might care to look at the context, but it appears that the Pentagon is alluding to some existing regulation, not to anything concocted in whole or part by Weinstein.

More update (May 6). It looks like thanks are due ADF.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Manufactured Outrage

There is a manufactured outrage circulating at Purdue University.

Perhaps it was an hysterical personality, rather than actual malice, that started it. The words “White Power” were found on a mirror in the Black Cultural Center. This led to major outrage and a march on the Administration building demanding action against racism.

When it turned out that the words on the mirror were left over from a class in which they were written for some didactic purpose, another outrage conveniently appeared. “[P]olice are investigating an incident in which a racial slur was written on one of the posters left behind by the group,” today’s newspaper reports. It’s being treated as a hate crime “since property was altered or destroyed and the conduct was apparently motivated by bias.”

I’d bet a modest amount – say, lunch at a downtown eatery – that if they find who wrote the stick figure, it will prove to have been a person of color, not some cracker.

I’d bet a larger amount that there will be no criminal prosecution because the posters left behind by the demonstrators were abandoned property. You cannot steal (or vandalize) abandoned property, as the publishers of a “conservative” free paper discovered  on another campus when “liberal” students methodically appropriated and destroyed every copy of one issue. When they put the free paper in the kiosk, they were abandoning it, so the reasoning went. When the demonstrators left their posters behind, they were abandoning them (and violating an anti-littering part of the student code?).

I would not bet you anything that if a white person is identified as the writer, he (or less likely, she) will not be expelled, though there’s no crime. That’s how hysteria a victimology works.

But I would again bet a modest amount that if the writer is found to be a person of color, he or she will not be expelled for the hoax, even though that, too, should be a serious violation of the student code of conduct.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The French way with words

The local paper Tuesday picked up a Fort Wayne News Sentinel column that made an interesting point about the Culture Wars.

The author, a “conservative with strong libertarian leanings — or a libertarian with strong conservative underpinnings,” noted that despite the rumored moratorium on social issues, he’s not feeling the love as he sees movement on:

• Women in combat.
• Gays in the Boy Scouts.
• Gun control.
• Immigration reform.
• Guaranteed sports access for the handicapped.

That would not be my list. Others would be. But the the author’s point is valid:

But it annoys me no end that most of the commentariat on one side feel perfectly free to browbeat the other side about polluting the body politic with divisive wedge issues — shut up about abortion and traditional marriage! — to the point where even some conservatives cave.

Oh, yes, let’s have a moratorium on social issues, urged then-Gov. Mitch Daniels. At the same time, they go about merrily pursuing their own wedge issues. And they feel absolutely no shame about it. Why should they, when they hardly ever get called on it?

This takes me back to one of my favorite remarks on the bigotry of the bien pensants:

One suspects that the bashing of the religious right amounts to little more than that right-thinking people find the religious right distasteful.  The logic is “We are good, true and beautiful.  But we find you repulsive.  Therefore there must be something very wrong with you.”  The reasoning is impeccable given the first premise, but perhaps the first premise is false.    The French have a witticism: “Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend.”  (This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself.)  The religious right did not start the fight.  For more than a quarter century, elite, privileged, sophisticated, and “right-thinking” Americans have exhibited contempt for some fundamental values, and have exhibited even greater contempt for the religious traditionalists who hold them.

David Carlin, Right Thinking About the Religious Right, First Things, November 1994.

1994. Note that. It reminds me of another French saying: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Oppression in America

It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.

So ends a Timothy Dalrymple reflection on the Louie Giglio incident, which he described thus:

An evangelical pastor with a sterling record, who had developed strong relationships with President Obama and particularly his office of faith-based initiatives headed by Joshua DuBois, who had turned his enormously successful Passion conferences against the problem of human trafficking, was just publicly humiliated and shouted out of the public square for professing fairly standard Christian views on human sexuality and the possible redemption of our desires through the transformative power of the gospel of Christ. On the advice of the faith-based office, Giglio was invited to deliver the benediction, the LGBT community raised a hue and cry, and the White House quite obviously (see here and here) pressured him to step aside.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Louie Giglio until Friday. I’m an ex-evangelical, still a practicing Christian (in the most historic sense), and have ceased trying to keep up with the doings of the evangelical subculture. Still, as in the current kerfuffle, those doings come to my attention often anyway.

But it sounds as if Mr. Giglio is an exemplary and center- to center-left figure, except that he does, or once did, believe that what we do with our genitals matters.

I’m not going to oversell what happened to Giglio. He was going to get to give a very public prayer. Now he’s not going to get to give that very public prayer. That’s not exactly being sent to the Gulag.

But I do think it’s ominous that a guy with so stellar a record was keelhauled for a remark from 20 years ago, as Dalrymple’s links do pretty well confirm, and that mainstream media aren’t eager to let that cat out of the bag:

Here’s how the fourth paragraph of [Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s] report appeared on The New York Times website early yesterday afternoon.

An official with Mr. Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee said the committee, which operates separately from the White House, vetted Mr. Giglio. People familiar with internal discussions between administration and committee officials said the White House viewed the selection as a problem for Mr. Obama, and told the panel on Wednesday night to quickly fix it. By Thursday morning, Mr. Giglio said he had withdrawn.

This paragraph was one of the most significant that I read yesterday because it confirmed that the White House had initiated pulling Giglio from the inaugural program. Yet by yesterday evening and in today’ print edition, this part had been removed from Stolberg’s report.

(Denny Burk, another evangelical of whom I’d not heard until this morning.)

What kind of pressure was brought to bear? Well-reasoned?:

ThinkProgress discovered that Giglio had said some nasty things about homosexuality, including that it’s a sin, that it can be cured, and that it’s a “malfunction.”
As you can imagine, Malfunction-Americans weren’t terribly thrilled about yet another anti-gay bigot appearing at yet another Obama inaugural.
In the ensuing uproar, Louie Giglio was suddenly no longer giving the benediction.
…
Louie Giglio is free think gays have a malfunction that he can cure.  And we’re free to tell him to take a hike.  Religious bigots have an awfully hard time dealing with the concept of mutual free speech.  They love the idea that they can say whatever hateful thing they want.  But then they get very upset and confused when someone gives them a piece of their mind in return.
I can’t prove that the White House told Louie Giglio to take a hike.  I’m simply reading tea leaves.  And the tea leaves I’m reading are making me more and more pleased about how the White House has handled this issue.
I wasn’t pleased that Giglio was selected in the first place.  It was a huge oversight, considering past history.  But they fixed things fast, and to our satisfaction.

(John Aravosis) This is a “progressive” version of the right’s incorrigible misrepresentation about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” thought. “Nasty,” “anti-gay bigot,” “religious bigots,” and “hateful” are very broad-brush and very dubious. It is possible to “love the sinner” while hating the sin, and it does not sound to me as if Giglio is a hater in the mold of Fred Phelps.

The silver lining in this – and, yes, it’s an ominous cloud – is the adage that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. A court recently declined to decree same-sex marriage into his state’s laws precisely because the lobby seeking it is powerful, well-funded, well-connected, and has gained such remarkable cachet in just a few decades that they really don’t need courts carrying water for them any more. They can make their case politically, as they did in several referenda last November.

Perhaps it is something of a paradox that as their political clout grows stronger, the constitutional claims of same-sex marriage advocates become weaker. But if powerlessness is a legitimate variable in judicial decision-making, it is hard to gainsay the view of Judge Jones:

The question of “powerlessness” under an equal protection analysis requires that the group’s chances of democratic success be virtually hopeless, not simply that its path to success is difficult or challenging because of democratic forces. . . . The relevant consideration is the group’s “ability to attract the attention of the lawmakers,” an ability homosexuals cannot seriously be said not to possess.

Of course the advocates of same-sex marriage will continue to press their case in courts of law. They would rather convince five justices of the Supreme Court to impose their agenda on the country than try convincing the country itself.

Yup: “It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.”

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.