Frédéric Martel's In the Closet of the Vatican: Valuable Commentary — "A Dishonest System Cannot Demand Honesty"

I have not read Frédéric Martel's explosive new book In the Closet of the Vatican, about which there has been a flurry of commentary since it was officially released this past week as the Vatican meeting on sex abuse began. So I'm not able to comment on the book itself. I do intend to read it soon. 

Not Even Close: Knowing Exactly Who Roy Moore Is, Majority of White Alabamians — and White Evangelicals Overwhelmingly — Tried to Put Him in Senate

8 in 10 white evangelicals & 6 in 10 white Catholics & Mormons elected Donald Trump, claiming "pro-life" motivation.

I will not forget.

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) November 6, 2017

Charlene White, "In Alabama, black women saved America from itself – as they've always tried to do":

Hot Takes on Moore Defeat: White Evangelicals Did It! It's All About Abortion! (And Why Masterpiece Cake Will Likely Prevail)

Some takes on the Alabama election I should have anticipated, but did not:

1. Though 80 percent of white evangelicals in Alabama cast their votes for Roy Moore, Doug Jones won because — are you ready for this spin? — white evangelicals abandoned Moore!

Quote for Day: "Liberal Christians Often Pay Lip Service to Many Politically Radical Christian Thinkers and Activists While Lining Up Behind the Political and Economic Forces That They Fought Against"

At Religion Dispatches, Daniel José Camacho responds to a recent article at the same venue by Ruth Graham which argues that liberal Christians could, if they so chose, position themselves to retrieve the designation "party of God" under Hillary Clinton's leadership: Camacho demurs for the following reasons,

Claim That the Culture Wars are Over and Religious Right Is Obsolescent Links to Claim That Political Left and Identity Politics Are Responsible for Trump: My Take

One thing I suppose many of us can agree on about the current U.S. presidential election cycle is that it has been full of surprises. Not the least of those has been the surprising way in which Mr. Trump has risen to the top of the GOP heap, when one media guru and statistician after another — most of these folks living in media bubbles and elite enclaves set apart from the rest of the nation — smugly assured us as the campaign began that we could safely laugh at him, since he had a snowball's chance in hell of being the Republican presidential candidate.

Andrew Sullivan Breaks Silence: Democracy Is the Problem! Political Correctness Is the Problem! Liberal Smugness Is the Problem! — An Apologia for White Working-Class Support for Trump

Andrew Sullivan has broken his long silence (after he discontinued his blog) with an essay published yesterday in New York Magazine. His thesis: democracy is problematic.

Ashley Madison Leaks: Men, Women, and Nannies — When Gay Men Excuse the Sexual Shenanigans of Straight Men. Because Testosterone.

It's probably no secret to readers who have followed this blog over a longish period of time that I don't buy into all of the orthodoxies of the more "mainstream" (for want of a better word) LGBT movement. In postings here, I've criticized in the past, for instance, Andrew Sullivan's boys-will-be-boys approach to questions of masculinity — the proposal that men behave promiscuously and aggressively because of testosterone, and that it's fatuous and totalitarian for cultures (under the impulse of feminism) to try to curb and weed out this behavior, or to suggest that it's learned, culturally determined behavior and not behavior grounded in and excused by biology.

Andrew Sullivan, Shrillness, and the Commonweal Worldview: Please Discuss

"Shrill" is a gendered term, isn't it? Especially as it's used in popular-level American political discourse: "Once they started with all that shrill stuff, I stopped listening." 

Glenn Greenwald on Jonathan Chait: "What Made the Indignity So Much Worse Was That the Attacks Came from People These Journalists Regard as Nobodies"

As Joan Walsh notes in her valuable critique of Jonathan Chait's recent oy to the universe about, well, the astonishing way in which all those other people (black ones, brown ones, female ones, gay ones) now dare to talk back in the sight of God to well-placed hegemonic straight white men like him,

Vatican Colloquium on Complementarity of Man and Woman: Continued Rebranding of Catholic Church As Boys' Club for Privileged Heterosexual Males

The upcoming Vatican colloquium on the complementarity of man and woman: this is an attempt (in line with the latest conservative strategy to combat same-sex marriage) to elevate to iconic status, across religious groups, 

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":

Andrew Sullivan on Story of Paul Huff and Tom Wojtowick: Can the Church Survive in America?

KULR-8 Television, Billings, MT

Andrew Sullivan looks at the story of Paul Huff and Tom Wojtowick — two Catholic men who met in a Catholic church, sing in the choir of their parish, have been together over 30 years, and, at the ages of 66 and 73, have just been told they cannot receive the Eucharist because they are married — and asks, "Can the church survive in America?"

Testosterone, Castration, the American Political Right: A Consideration of the Narrative

When I expressed my impatience recently with theories that ground male misbehavior in nature (specifically, in testosterone), Colleen Baker responded with the following illuminating anecdote:

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." 

Andrew Sullivan on Mass Grave of Irish Babies Born to "Fallen Women": "That Is Not a Sign of a Church Gone Astray. It's a Sign of a Church Given Over to Evil"

Andrew Sullivan looks at the discovery of the bodies of 800 babies in a mass grave (they were stuffed inside a septic tank) behind a home for "fallen women" run by the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam, Ireland, and asks why such a kerfuffle ensued when the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture tried to indict the Vatican for "crimes against humanity" because of its cover-up of the mass rape and abuse of children. As he notes, what can possibly describe the story now emerging from Tuam except the term "crime against humanity"?

Quote for Day: "The Love Between a Black Man and a White Man Punches a Hole Through the Wall of Racism"

Andrew Sullivan on the kiss just seen 'round the world, between Michael Sam and Vito Cammisano:

Beverly Wildung Harrison on Connections Between Racism and Misogyny, and Story of Donald Sterling: These -Isms Hang Together in Web of Patriarchy

Recently, when I wrote about Andrew Sullivan's take on Jonathan Rauch's essay calling for special tolerance for those who oppose same-sex marriage out of sincere religious conviction, I concluded by noting, 

Andrew Sullivan on Jonathan Rauch and the "Theological Underpinnings" of Marriage as a Gendered Institution: My Take

Andrew Sullivan's take on the Jonathan Rauch essay calling for special tolerance for those who oppose same-sex marriage out of sincere religious conviction — an essay I critiqued yesterday: 

Richard Kim: Andrew Sullivan vs. Tony Kushner on Gay Rights — "Our Suffering Teaches Us Solidarity; or It Should"

Richard Kim writes in The Nation about the fundamental divergence between Andrew Sullivan's libertarian vision of what the movement for gay rights should be all about, and Tony Kushner's socialist vision: as he notes in his conclusion, if the movement for gay rights is all about rights for us and not for them, who needs it? If our suffering has been only about our suffering, what's it good for, in the last analysis?:

On the "Tipping Point" Metaphor, Gay Rights, and the Notion of Progress

Some of you pressed me this week (and here and here) about what it means to say American culture is at a "tipping point" regarding questions of gay rights. You were right to do so.