James Alison on Homosexuality Among the Clergy, the Anatrella and McCarrick Stories, and the Trap of Clerical Dishonesty

Someone else who understands and has recently commented on the significance of the Anatrella (and McCarrick) story for those trying to revive the gay-bashing "lavender Mafia" theme about gay clergy and gay bishops in the Catholic church: the gay priest-theologian James Alison. Here's his recent commentary in The Tablet, entitled "Homosexuality among the clergy: caught in a trap of dishonesty":

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Ross Douthat on Coronation of Donald Trump — "Disgraced Themselves on a Level Unique in the History of Our Republic"

Conservative right-wing Catholic journalist Ross Douthat tweets as the Republican party chooses Donald Trump as its 2016 presidential candidate:

Everyone major figure who participated in this grotesquerie has disgraced themselves on a level unique in the history of our republic.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) July 20, 2016

Did Gay Marriage Cause Ashley Madison? Taking the Arguments of Folks Like Ross Douthat to Their Logical Conclusion

Did gay marriage cause Ashley Madison? Has permitting same-sex couples to marry caused millions of heterosexual folks to cheat on their spouses? As Business Insider reports this morning, only three zipcodes in the U.S. did not have folks signed up for Ashley Madison. Two of those were in Alaska, one in New Mexico, and all together, they have a whopping total of 476 population.

Mark Silk Responds to Ross Douthat on Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage: What Were You Saying Again About Religious Freedom, Mr. Douthat?

Mark Silk responds to Ross Douthat on same-sex marriage and polygamy (see my earlier posting about this) at Mark's "Spiritual Politics" blog — "The Polygamists Are Coming!" As he notes, the argument that same-sex marriage will open the door to polygamy is a longstanding slippery-slope argument of religious conservatives, so it seems . . . odd . . . that Douthat wants to reprise that argument now (obviously, in light of what has just taken place in Ireland and in anticipation of a soon-to-come Supreme Court ruling in the U.S.). 

A Catholic Nation Resoundingly Supports Equal Rights for LGBT People, and the U.S. Catholic Right and Its Centrist Enablers Want to Talk About . . . Polygamy?

Steve and I had dinner yesterday with some friends of ours who have long been powerful and effective activists for civil rights. They're an African-American couple who have played, each in his/her field, an extraordinary role in local movements to protect and extend the rights of people of color, women, the poor, LGBT folks, etc., over many years now.

Patricia Miller on Ross Douthat and Synod on Family: Catholic Doctrine Has Evolved

At Religion Dispatches, Patricia Miller has an interesting take on Ross Douthat's recent temper tantrum regarding the synod on the family's willingness (initially) to entertain discussion of welcoming gay folks and permitting divorced and remarried folks to receive communion. As she notes, Douthat argues that church teaching on these matters is locked in, unchangeable, quasi-infallible (if not outright infallible). And to change a jot or tittle of any of the teachings about marital matters would be to cause the whole Catholic edifice to fall to the ground.

Conservative Response to Ross Douthat on Impending Catholic Schism if Church Welcomes Gays: Damon Linker and Andrew Sullivan

Two conservative thinkers respond to Ross Douthat about the schism he sees looming in the Catholic church if Pope Francis continues, as Douthat thinks, to betray the "small minority" who have "kept the faith":

Ross Douthat on the Pope's Betrayal of Catholics Who Count: A "Small Minority" Have "Kept the Faith"

My family once belonged to a country club. I hated every moment we spent in that club, because its "old" members made it very plain to my family that we were jumped-up interlopers who didn't belong as they did. 

Andrew Sullivan, Et Al., on Testosterone, Tradition, and Natural Law in the Construction of Masculinity: A Rejoinder

Andrew Sullivan says that he (along with Ross Douthat) is "kinda tired of" arguments like Fredrik DeBoer's recent assertion that the "association of male value with aggression, dominance, and power is one of the most destructive forces in the world, and so it has to be destroyed." 

End-of-Week News Roundup: Venus, Mars, Ongoing Discussion of Misogyny and Gender Roles in American Culture

More links — these, to recent articles and commentary continuing the discussion of misogyny in the U.S (and other cultures) in the wake of the Isla Vista shootings, as well as ongoing discussions about gender roles and double standards:

Arranging the Terms of Our Surrender and Admitting What We Don't Know About the Homosexuals: Us, Them, and the Gospel Message

Three short takes from articles published online in the past several days:

Ross Douthat: What Are Conservative Catholics to Do with Francis?

To be honest, I don't really read Ross Douthat. I can't take the man seriously. 

Mark Silk to Ross Douthat: What about the "Nones" and the Growth of Non-Denominational Churches?

At his Spiritual Politics blog, Mark Silk engages Ross Douthat's argument that liberal churches are withering on the vine--and his presumed contention that, by contrast, right-wing churches like his Catholic church under the last two papacies are thriving.  I blogged yesterday about Douthat's latest statement in this vein.

Ross Douthat's Catholics Win, Episcopalians Lose Meme: Let Us Make-Believe Together

The Episcopal Church USA holds its triennial convention, at which it approves the use of rituals to bless same-sex unions, and within days, New York Times talking head Ross Douthat offers readers a hand-wringing analysis of how liberal Christianity is failing to save Christianity.  That analysis focuses--surprise!--on the Episcopal church.

Mark Regnerus's New Study of "Gay" Parenting and Ross Douthat on Gay Marriage and Severing Marriage from Procreation

As he comments on Mark Regnerus's badly conceived and badly executed recent study of "gay" parenting, which isn't actually about gay parents at all and which was bought and paid for by two well-heeled right-wing foundations, one of them closely associated with the National Organization for Marriage, Ross Douthat writes,

And the near-universal liberal optimism on the subject notwithstanding, we don’t really know how straight culture will be influenced on the long run by the final, formal severing of marriage from procreation.

Ross Douthat's Response to Marriage Equality in New York: Let's Find New Ways to Blame the Gays

I've said before on this blog that I don't usually pay much attention to what Ross Douthat writes.  I read Douthat the same way I read David Brooks.  Though centrist conservatives--an ever-waning and now infinitesimal minority within the movement that calls itself conservative in the U.S. (which has no solid foundation in traditional conversatism at all)--profess to find both of these spokespersons refreshingly moderate and deep, I find both embarrassingly shallow.  Both have succeeded in passing themselves off as profound thinkers offering cover to intellectuals who still find it respectable to affiliate themselves with a Republican party long since gone off the tracks intellectually, morally, in just about any sense one can imagine.

Ross Douthat on Monogamy: Moving the Goalposts as Marriage Equality Advances

When I first read Ross Douthat's recent op-ed piece in the New York Times about why monogamy matters, I briefly entertained the idea of blogging about it, and then thought better of the idea.  I can't find it in me, to be honest, to take Douthat seriously as a thinker.

Syreeta McFadden on Ross Douthat's Approach to Mosque Controversy: Sinister Subtext Appealing to "Seeming" Reason

A must-read piece today: Syreeta McFadden at Religion Dispatches on Ross Douthat's recent ground-zero mosque column.  Joan Walsh masterfully dissected Douthat's bigotry at Salon earlier in the week, and Eduardo Peñalver has sparked lively discussion of Douthat's column with a posting at Commonweal.

My point here is not to discuss Douthat's column.  I'll leave it to interested readers who have not yet read it to link to and read it for themselves.  And I do recommend Walsh's commentary and the Commonweal thread about the essay for further analysis of the piece.

American Catholic Centrists and the Closed Center: The Case of Ross Douthat

The American Catholic centrist blogs are hailing the appointment of Ross Douthat as Bill Kristol's replacement as the New York Times's conservative voice. He's young, he's Catholic, he's conservative but (they say) has a head on his shoulders. And he's one of us. Grew up in New Haven, went to Harvard, lives in D.C. (Straight, married, white, middle-class . . . .)

He has spent his life among those who make the news. And who then tell the rest of us what the news he makes means.

Why am I not surprised that someone with this pedigree appeals to the knowledge class at the center of American Catholicism? The pedigree is impeccable. It's, after all, the pedigree of just about everyone else in that central circle of American Catholicism that makes and interprets the news for the rest of us . . . while telling us that it speaks for a catholic church, a universal one that respects the voices of all and embraces all in a big, warm welcome.

It's the pedigree of those who know what's going on out in the heartland without ever setting foot in said heartland. Douthat has penned warm columns about how, beyond the rarefried parameters of Harvard Square, people out there in the grand middle still live mom 'n pop apple pie lives of the 1950s that make America proud.

It's so easy, you see, to tout the virtues of the solid church-going right as they're actually lived in places like Tulsa, Dubuque, Macon, Texarkana, and Lubbock, if you don't actually live there--and have to live with the Tulsans and Lubbockers and so on. It's easy to admire the virtues of hardcore believers while you knock back the Scotch you can buy without difficulty in D.C., New Haven, or Boston--Scotch that might not be so readily available in the many bastions of the heartland that forbid the sale and frown on the consumption of demon rum.

And Douthat's pedigree is also, after all, the pedigree of those who have been telling us for ever so long to admire those solid heartland virtues: of people like George W. Bush, also born in New Haven and a Yale graduate, whose ties to the Texas ranching land he so loves to love are more in the order of fable than of reality. So it's perhaps no accident that the New Haven-born, Harvard-educated, new Catholic writer for the New York Times, Mr. Douthat, wrote last August,

At the moment, I'm probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you're reading my commentary (here; H/T Alternet here)

Which means, I suppose, that if American Catholic centrists are lauding Douthat's appointment, even when they depict themselves as left of center, these entrists don't see anything conspicuously alarming about having Sarah Palin second in command in our nation's government. And they see few contradictions between the political, economic, social, and religious worldview Palin so passionately defends, and "the" Catholic worldview.

Which means the center is not nearly so leftward as it pretends to believe it is . . . and that the Ross Douthats of the world will always find a place there more readily than, say, Voice of the Faithful or Helen Prejean or Roy Bourgeois or just about any brother and sister Catholic who happens to be gay or lesbian.

Which means, I have to conclude, something is wrong with the claim of that centrist group to speak for the rest of us. Those Catholic centrists touting Douthat's appointment are gleeful that he will provide a Catholic voice to the Times and its editorial page.

A Catholic voice, perhaps. A Catholic voice very much like that of other American Catholic centrists, who tend to slip into we-they discourse very readily, assuming that their Catholic voice represents all Catholic voices.

It doesn't. And it can't, when it is divorced from--and so closed to--the huge variety of voices outside the incestuous geographic and educational network from which the voices of the American Catholic center are drawn.

If Ross Douthat's voice is the best the American Catholic church and its knowledge class can offer the culture at large now, if it is "the" Catholic voice of younger Catholics now taking the reins, something is awry. At a time in which our church needs to hear--to listen respectfully to and benefit from--many disparate voices, the best we seem able to do is to recycle the same old, same old voice of the center, and tag it the voice telling the world what we all believe.