Posted by Andrew Sullivan has an excellent essay on how Mary Cheney’s pregnancy is exposing serious cracks in the conservative political coalition, primarily between those who truly are anti-gay and those who are publicly anti-gay purely for political purposes, but privately are fine with gays. A very insightful article, well worth reading.
Dispatches from the Creation Wars
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Blah, requires registration. Have some good excerpts?
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Registration is free.
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Registration? I laugh at registration. Go to http://www.bugmenot.com and get around it. I’ve got a plugin for Firefox that does it automatically.
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Thanks Ed, I get really annoyed when I have to register to read one damned article. What’s the FF plugin called?
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The firefox plugin is at http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/02/07/bugmenot/
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It’s articles like this one that keep me reading Andrew Sullivan. I don’t always agree with his politics but he is an excellent writer — clear, insightful, even handed, and immensely reasonable in this piece. I found his examples of Bush’s and Rice’s private acceptance of transgendered people particularly effective.
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I disagree with Sullivan about half the time, but I check him every day. He is a principled, intelligent person, and he takes on christianist scum like the modern National Review crowd.
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I was watching The Corner when this happened
The more moderate conservatives, however, could not bring themselves to say such things about someone so close to their hearts. And so they said nothing. In fact, they took umbrage at any mention of the subject. Kathryn Jean Lopez, an enthusiastic supporter of the FMA and editor of National Review Online, wrote on the site’s group blog, The Corner: “Unless Mary Cheney asks to be part of a political debate about this, there is no need to have a public discussion about her life. The New York Times raises the question of how/who, etc. That just seems outrageous to me. She is not the vice president. She is not the president. That’s just uncalled for from anyone in the media/commentariat.”
But the news of the pregnancy was confirmed by Mary Cheney, who did not object to any invasion of privacy. She is a public figure who has written a book about her private life. She ran a national Republican campaign. And her pregnancy is the kind of news that simply cannot be ignored or covered up–because it comes in the form of an actual human being, a child, who, thanks in part to Lopez, will be denied the legal security of two parents. And Lopez now wants it not to be personal. Sorry, but it is already personal.
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Lopez’s colleague, Jonah Goldberg, is a nimbler enabler of anti-gay discrimination. He rightly surmised that any discussion of this issue could only expose the incoherence or cruelty of the right’s position on gay families, and so he advised saying nothing.
And I am pleasantly surprised to see Andrew’s analysis almost identical to mine. I remember thinking, “They have to keep it abstract. They can’t show you what their policies would do to a real person, because you’d be repulsed by their cruelty.”
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It’s articles like this one that keep me reading Andrew Sullivan. I don’t always agree with his politics but he is an excellent writer — clear, insightful, even handed, and immensely reasonable in this piece. I found his examples of Bush’s and Rice’s private acceptance of transgendered people particularly effective.
Posted by: AndyS | December 22, 2006 01:52 PM
I agree. What’s great about Sullivan in a world of Sean Hannities is, he is guided by principles and not party. While the pro-Bush roboticism has suffered lately, for a few years GWB could have ordered Democrats into concentration camps and the modern conservatives would have praised his strength and brilliance.
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Apologies for blabbing all over the comments here, so this is my last one.
Sullivan says:
In fact, it is now the only coherent conservative position on a matter made impossible to avoid by the living, breathing reality of a mother and her child. Their position is nothing at all. Neither for amending the constitution to bar gay marriage nor against it. Neither for gay marriage nor against it. Neither supportive of Mary Cheney nor hostile. After two decades of debate, discussion, state initiatives, lawsuits, protests, custody battles, and on and on, the last coherent conservative position is nothing. On Mary Cheney, they are forced to take a stand. But any stand either attacks the base of the party or attacks someone they know and love. So they have no alternative but to stand very still, say nothing, and hope that someone changes the subject. It is as close to intellectual and moral bankruptcy as one can imagine.
Here Sullivan achieves the zenith found in the best of Hitchens’s writing: the unrepentant calling of a spade a spade.
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