I was going to dismiss the whole issue with that comment, but my reading this morning has brought up some interesting insights.
See this post by Glenn Greenwald on what the real significance of this whole "anti-Catholic bloggers" mess is. Greenwald has further comments here. And here's Sara Robinson in rare form on the Donohue strategy. It was written before Edwards decided to keep his bloggers -- or before he "rehired" them, and touches on my reservation about the whole thing: it took pressure from the netroots, apparently, for Edwards not to cave in to Donohue. That bothers me a lot. I think his response should have been, right from the start, "Bill Who? Do you have a question on a real issue?"
I think both Greenwald and Robinson hit some important points: public discourse in this country has been dominated by right-wing extremists for more than a decade -- really, their influence goes back to the 1980s, when Reagan used them to gain power, but also gave them legitimacy and a forum. (This is the same Reagan whom conservatives praise as the greatest president of the twentieth century. He is also the one who created the "imperial presidency," let us not forget.) The mainstream media has bought into the diction of the radical right, and even worse, has stopped questioning the assumptions within which our discourse is framed. The blogosphere is our only recourse, so I don't find it paranoid at all that Robinson advances the idea that one goal of the right is to silence us. (The historian in me reflects that history is, after all, a series of reactions, and we're just suffering through the reaction to the 1960s. As I remarked to a younger friend, "I realize your generation marks the end of civilization as we know it, but it's pretty annoying to have to live through it.")
From the other side of the aisle, this also touches on my exchanges with Robbie of The Malcontent about Mary Cheney and the reaction of "gay politics." (We really have to be more precise about what that means, otherwise we're getting nowhere -- precision, alas, seems to be another victim of the current mode. I do note, however, after reading several recent posts at The Malcontent, that Matt and Robbie seem to have a common response to certain questions: the left is always wrong, especially the gay left, and is moreover hateful about it. In Matt's post touching on the blogger controversy, the bloggers, of course, are totally wrong and evil; there didn't seem to be any question that Donohue's motives are of the purest. [There are other issues here, but this is not the place for them. Let's just say that I see the post as underhanded, at best.] I can see why the boys at GayPatriot find them soulmates. Considering that observation, perhaps imprecision is merely part of the arsenal, much in the way that creationists skate among various meanings of "theory." Actually defining what they were talking about would kill their "controversy." Just sayin'.) It's a context in which any criticism of the right is seen as based on a double standard (as though they don't), without reference to how deserving of criticism they are. As I stated, I think the Cheneys, father and daughter, deserve whatever brickbats we can throw: they are not our friends, they are out for themselves and themselves only. I'm not about to give Mary Cheney a pass because her closet has a revolving door. (Known in GayPatriotspeak as "out and proud.") This doesn't mean I won't criticize a Democrat when I don't think they're right, but I'm going to save my harshest comments for those who I think are doing to most damage to my community. Sorry, but Nancy Pelosi is not in the running.
At any rate, going back to Robinson's comments, the blogosphere is democracy in action, spontaneous, rough, dirty, and offensive. I've often said that you have to have a fairly thick skin to survive in a democracy, and I still have that opinion. You will maintain my respect if you show integrity and honesty, although you don't need to be particularly genteel about it (come to think of it, I've used a couple of naughty words myself from time to time) and if you don't, take the consequences. I'm not prepared to moderate my stance at all for some poseur like Bill Donohue, whose religiosity is arguably nothing more than a front for a politcal agenda. My only comment to him is "Grow up and get a life." (And even that, I think, gives him too much credibility -- after all, where are his comments from the time those "objectionable" posts were first available?)
PS -- if you scroll down the recent posts at Eschaton, Atrios has a wealth of comments by Donohue fully illustrating just what a piece of slime he is.
And this is the spokesman for American Catholics?
Update:
Jane Galt has some interesting thoughts on this, but I think she misses a point: If there were the slightest reason to believe that Donohue's outcry rested primarily, or even in large part, on genuine religious feeling, I daresay my reacton would be quite different. I don't believe it for a minute.
Beginning with a quote from Ampersand, she goes on to make what to me is the major error:
What the right is doing here is attempting to shift the Overton Window of Political Possibilities. The “window” is the space of acceptable ideas for political discourse. So, for instance, right now being either pro-choice or pro-life falls inside the window; it is mainstream and acceptable to hold either view. But being (say) pro-Nazi falls outside that window; being pro-Nazi means that you’ll get fired from political campaigns, because your views are that far outside of the window of accepted political views.
Should criticizing (and even making fun of) the political positions of the Catholic church, the Pope, and the conservative Christian movement be “within the window” of acceptable views? Or should criticizing the Pope — even on perfectly true grounds, such as pointing out that he supports pro-life and anti-gay policies — be outside the window of what it’s politically acceptable to say and to criticize?
I think this captures the essence of the argument, although I'm not sure that Amp is right about this being an attempt to shift it; my admittedly limited knowlege of Non-Coastal-Elite-America indicates that in most of the country, slagging off the Pope, or indeed making fun of religion qua religion, is mostly verboten.
The error is simply that the right has so distorted the discourse in this country that attacking (or satirizing) the political agenda of someone like Donohue (or the Pope, for that matter, who, let us remember, has said that separation of church and state is "a myth" and who is nothing if not a politican) is equated, almost automatically, with attacking his religion. This is an entirely predictable result of equating God with, for example, the Republican Party, not that it's a desirable result. We can lay it at the feet of Donohue's spiritual forebears, so to speak -- Robertson, Falwell, and their ilk, who repeatedly conflated their religion and their politics -- and those outside of that small coterie who let them get away with it. And, to the rejoinder that in their minds their religion and their politics are inseparable (the Rushdooney Effect), I say "So what?" As far as I can see, that's an example of taking political correctness way too far. If, living in a country founded on secularism, they can't separate their beliefs from the common good, and go so far as to insist that only their beliefs have any validity as a basis for our society, then I reiterate: they are not only un-American, they are anti-American.
(I got this link from Andrew Sullivan. It seems to be his only comment on the situation, which surprises me -- I would have thought that anything that so seamlessly intertwines the Catholic church and the Christianists would merit more scrutiny from him.)
Update II
(Channeling Glenn Greenwald again.) Steve Gilliard at Newsblog calls it just about the way I see it:
This is NOT about bloggers, but allowing the right to still determine the agenda of Democrats.
It's about allowing the right to determine agendas, period. That's Donohue's whole game. And Dobson's, and Limbaugh's, and Wildmon's, and. .
2 comments:
the left is always wrong, especially the gay left, and is moreover hateful about it.
A simplification. Not an entirely untrue one, but a simplification nonetheless. We're pretty open about being right of center, so naturally we're going to have a fairly dim view of politics from the Left. You note Nancy Pelosi isn't the greatest threat to gay rights. I agree. She's not. Not by a long, long way. I think you misread our general blogging stance if you're coming away with the impression we think that.
There are basically two dimensions to what undermines the gay rights movement. There is the external dimension which largely consists of the religious right. Here you would place the Dobsons, the Santorums, the FMA supporters, the ex-gay therapy pushers, etc. If you and I had a conversation about this aspect of gay issues, we'd probably agree nearly 100% of the time.
The second threat is the internal one. This one interests me. I can bash Dobson all day long. Sometimes I do, but so do a thousand gay blogs, and I don't like blogging something if I have nothing original to add. It's the internal criticism of the movement that is severely lacking in the blogosphere, in my opinion, and so that's an angle of approach I find appealing. I count internal threats to gay rights the unapologetic left-wing orientation of the leadership, the unseriousness infecting large portions of gay thought, the marginalization that necessarily attends declared allegience to one party, and the the PC-motived victimology mindset that serves to shut down criticism and diversity in thought. We need better ideas, we need better leadership, and we need to persuade the American electorate. Is there any question the current crop of gay leadership is not up to the task of making inroads into Middle America? We need moderates instead of all this left-wing baggage.
Returning to the topic at hand, you have to dismiss Matt's opening line to divine an assumption that he thinks William Donahue's motives are pure. I think Matt makes it pretty clear what he thinks of the man right from the start.
Simply put, Marcotte's remarks are fairly bigoted. If a conservative candidate hired someone who made similar postings about Jews or Muslims or [pick your minority group here] is there any question much hay would be made of it? Of course there would. And if someone took Marcotte's approach toward that group, I'd have some pretty harsh remarks for them too.
I think you and others are making a mistake in seeing this issue as right-wing media versus the left-wing. William Donahue is no doubt a self-motivated ass in the James Dobson mold, but Catholics aren't. Catholics tend to be a lot better at separating church and state than their evangelical cousins. After all, national polls show them as divided between Republican and Democrat as the general electorate tends to be. And no matter what Donahue and the Church leadership might say, the lay Catholic is actually a pretty complicated, unideological voter by all accounts and polling.
Which makes Marcotte's postings all the worse. Maybe she was targeting the Church leadership (fair enough), but she went so broadly as to denigrate the entire faith. Which is well and good, but objecting to that is not some kind of "Right-wing smear machine". Just because William Donahue is involved doesn't mean she wasn't wrong, or that the right-wing media are the real villains here, or that this is about taking back the power to frame debates.
Marcotte was wrong. Making her the basis for these broad theorems and criticism of the right-wing belies a shaky foundation at best.
There is no framing necessary with Marcotte. You can go to her blog and read her rants for yourself (at least the ones she didn't delete, which raises the question if there's not all that much wrong with what she said, why does she hide it). Many people have. While I have criticisms of the Catholic leadership, I found her bigoted and hate-filled.
And finally, as for Matt's article on the subject, his objection rested on Andy Towle calling Marcotte a pro-gay blogger. If you read Towle's posts on the incident, he constantly frames her as a pro-gay blogger first and foremost. Almost as if the Catholic League's objection to her substantially rested on that. Oh, I'm sure it's an aspect of her they dislike, but that was not their primary complaint about her. It never was. As Matt noted, she wasn't exactly prolific in blogging on gay issues. Towle's categorization was willfully, pointedly dishonest and politically motivated. That was the complaint. Amusingly, our complaint is much like yours. Towle's framing of the incident was intentionally misleading.
It's the idea that no matter what you do, if you at any point say "I like gay people," some people in our community will support you. Towle is guilty of that in spades. If some celebrity was accused of fucking puppies, but attended an HRC gala in the past, I'd half-expect a post on the right-wing railroading a pro-gay celebrity. Hyberbolic, sure, but this Marcotte stuff was along those lines.
I begin to think we should actually be cross-posting this discussion.
I don't know that I'm misreading your stance. I'm a reviewer -- I've developed the habit of reading (and listening and viewing) everything analytically, and I'm pretty good at it. It's always a possibility, of course, but equally possible is that you and Matt may know what you intend to say, but that it's not what you wind up saying. I only read maybe a dozen recent posts, but the general tenor was square in the right-wing lexicon: "they are not only wrong, they're nasty."
Since we agree on the external threat to gay rights, we can dispense with that, although I feel impelled to point out that the left, and we in the middle, are not going to let you pick and choose which aspects of the politics of the right you espouse. I would guess that you favor limited government and great personal freedom within the context of a rational, orderly society, as do we all, but you are allied, like it or not, with those who have created the most intrusive government in our history, and the one most disdainful of constitutional guarantees of liberty. Sorry, but you're carrying that baggage whether you want to or not.
As for the "internal threat," I simply don't see how you can say that internal criticism is lacking, after I've pointed out that many gay bloggers have been critical of HRC, the Democratic Party, and the other political apparatus of the left. (A sidebar: It's also germane, I think, to point out that one reason for the focus on criticizing the right is that the right has been in power. It will be interesting to see what happens as the Democrats fail to live up to our somewhat inflated expectations.)
It seems fairly obvious that we don't automatically support candidates because they are Democrats -- we support Democrats because they support us, to a greater or lesser degree. Once upon a time there were Republicans who were more liberal on social issues than some Democrats, but they've pretty much been pushed out by the radical right.
As for the left-wing orientation of the gay leadership, two points, the first of which I touched on above: while it is theoretically possible, and actually even expected, that the right would support the gay community based on the philosophy of what Sullivan calls "true conservatives," it hasn't happened. Quite the opposite. I can't really admit to much surprise that the left is more appealing to most of us, because the left is actually doing something besides demonizing us. (With a couple of notable exceptions.) It wasn't Republicans who got the Illinois gay-inclusive civil rights bill through (finally).
As for unseriousness in gay thought, unseriousness infects large portions of everyone's thought in this country. The serious ones are the ones you are likely to hear from if you're outside the group. Please don't try to tell me that every American Black is an activist, and every woman is a feminist. I know better. Why condemn the gay community for a characteristic that is not unique to us?
I do agree with you about allegiance to one party, and I've said so. I think, however, that you'd find many gays who tend to vote mixed tickets, as I have done most of my life -- in fact, I was so fed up with both gubernatorial candidates in Illinois in the last election that I voted for the Green candidate because he was actually taking a position.
Please don't try to brand the left with playing the victim. It's a tactic that has been honed to a sharp edge by the radical right. Once again, it's not ours -- it's common property, and if you can't admit to that, I begin to suspect a troubled relationship with reality.
The whole country needs better ideas and better leadership. Unfortunately, that's not what persuades the electorate. In this regard, HRC is correct: what's going to win the hearts and minds is knowing us, having gay neighbors whom you see at PTA meetings and at block parties, gay coworkers, gay brothers, sisters, etc. That's a time factor that is way outside the realm of this election or that one, but that's the only thing that's going to undercut the rhetoric of the right. That has been the national leadership's overall strategy, and it's the only thing that's going to work. Whatever their other failings, I'm with them on that one.
As for the blogger flap, it's not the objection to Marcotte's posts that is the operating factor here. That's certainly legitimate. Asking for an apology from Marcotte would be legitimate. Holding Edwards accountable for something she wrote independently two years ago is really nothing more than a tactic. Donohue's move was purely political, and was meant to muddy the waters as much as possible. Strictly speaking, it's not swiftboating, but it's a close cousin. Granted, Towle was reading a lot into the situation, but, as with any other blog (even mine!), taking that as the main source is a mistake because you're only going to get part of the story filtered through a particular point of view. (Which is why I was at pains to check out a number of blogs and news stories on it.) That's why, as painful as it is, I do occasionally pop into GayPatriot, Althouse, Instapundit, and will even check out The Corner at NRO, which is sort of like looking into a hermetically sealed terrarium. Sometimes I even read Daily Kos and HuffPo. (Actualy, less often than I read GP or Althouse.) I never saw this as a gay issue at all. I think that only obscures the real meanings in the whole contretemps: Donohue is trying to smear Edwards with something that's not really relevant to his campaign; Edwards, whatever the actuality, gave the appearance of dithering before finally telling Donohue to take a hike, which is what he should have done within fifteen minutes, particularly since everything that happens in his offices is now under a microscope. I don't envy him. (One of the advantages of being a not very popular blogger. Of course, if I ever land a plum political job -- I've been known to use naughty words myself, and say not very nice things about some people.)
As for Marcotte being "pro-gay," these days that applies to anyone who's not trying to put an anti-gay ballot measure up. Yeah, well.
I think you need to take a fresh look at the "internal threat." A lot of your objections seem to me to be assigning culpability to our community, or at least its major political figures, for things that are common property across the spectrum, which I think is a mistake.
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