According to polls (H/T), Catholics are more supportive of gay rights than the general public:
• Nearly three-quarters of Catholics favor either allowing gay and lesbian people to marry (43%) or
allowing them to form civil unions (31%). Only 22% of Catholics say there should be no legal
recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.
• Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Catholics favor laws that would protect gay and lesbian people against
discrimination in the workplace; 63% of Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian people to serve
openly in the military; and 6-in-10 (60%) Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt
children.
• Less than 4-in-10 Catholics give their own church top marks (a grade of an A or a B) on its handing
of the issue of homosexuality; majorities of members of most other religious groups give their
churches high marks.
• A majority of Catholics (56%) believe that sexual relations between two adults of the same gender is nota sin.
<Snark> Perhaps this data came about because Catholics are more likely than the general public to know a gay man: their local priest. </Snark>
In all seriousness, this is probably further confirmation that Catholics look to their own consciences rather than to the teaching of their church when deciding what’s right and wrong. In other words, they’re effectively Protestant.
Hubbard posted this at 11:22 AM HKT on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 as Faith, Here and Queer
Anyone else see the problem with this idea? By “repealing” Obamacare through an executive order, you allow the next Democrat president to, um, unrepeal it through an executive order. Smooth move, Romster.
Whether or not this would be an appropriate use of the executive order, why wouldn’t a Republican president try to get the law repealed for reals? I understand that going to Congress is no longer in style, but I bet if there’s a Republican president in 2013, there will also be a Republican Congress that is open to suggestions.
Provoked by my earlier reference to The Prince, I got out my copy (Mansfield translation, natch) to see what further insight I could draw out regarding the Libyan conflict. It occurred to me that of the two sides in the Libyan civil war, one (Gadaffi) is relying on mercenaries, and the other is relying on non-mercenary foreign soldiers, what Machiavelli would call “auxiliaries.”
As always, NM is timeless and cutting. On mercenaries (from chapter 12):
Mercenary and auxiliary arms are useless and dangerous; and if one keeps his state founded on mercenary arms, one will never be firm or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, unfaithful; bold among friends, among enemies cowardly; no fear of God, no faith with men; ruin is postponed only as long as attack is postponed; and in peace you are despoiled by them, in war by the enemy. The cause of this is that they have no love nor cause to keep them in the field other than a small stipend, which is not sufficient to make them want to die for you. They do indeed want to be your soldiers while you are not making war, but when war comes, they either flee or leave. It should be little trouble for me to persuade anyone of this point, because the present ruin of Italy is caused by nothing other than its having relied for a period of many years on mercenary arms. These arms once made some progress for some, and may have appeared bold among themselves; but when the foreigner came [i.e. the French invaded in 1494], they showed what they were.
He’s even more biting about using the soldiers of a foreign sovereign (from chapter 13):
These arms can be useful and good in themselves, but for whoever calls them in, they are almost always harmful, because when they lose you are undone; and when they win, you are left their prisoner. . . . Let him, then, who wants to be unable to win make use of these arms [HAH!], since they are much more dangerous than mercenary arms. For with these, ruin is accomplished; they are all united, all resolved to obey someone else. But mercenary arms, when they have won, need more time and greater opportunity to hurt you, since they are not one whole body and have been found and paid for by you. In them the third party whom you may put at their head cannot quickly seize so much authority as to offend you. In sum, in mercenary arms laziness is more dangerous; in auxiliary arms, virtue is.
Just to clarify, in Libya we are the auxiliaries. NM says, then, that we are more dangerous to the rebels than Gadaffi’s mercenaries are to him. I think that’s right – we don’t know what the rebels’ post-war plans are, but does anyone think we won’t subject them to our democracy project? Gadaffi might actually prevail in this war, and if he does he’ll once again have the run of the place. But the rebels will either lose or be under our thumb. They’ve asked for American help, and they’re going to get it good and hard.
Or are they?
I shall never hesitate to cite Cesare Borgia and his actions. This duke came into Romagna with auxiliary arms, leading there entirely French troops, with whom he took Imola and Forli. But when such arms no longer appeared safe to him, he turned to mercenaries, judging there to be less danger in them; and he hired the Orsini and Vitelli. Then in managing them, he found them doubtful, unfaithful, and dangerous; he eliminated them, and turned to his own arms [i.e. native soldiers]. And one can easily see the difference between these arms if one considers what a difference there was in the reputation of the duke when he had only the French, and when he had the Orsini and Vitelli, and when he was left with his own soldiers and himself over them; his reputation will be found always to have increased, but he was never so much esteemed as when everyone saw that he was the total owner of his arms.
That’s also from chapter 13. We don’t know whether the Libyan rebels have a Cesare Borgia in their midst, but certainly if they were able to win with our help and then unite the country (i.e. raise their own arms) independent of us, they would be able to resist our influence and rule as they saw fit. I find that unlikely; Cesare was what a statistician might call an “outlier.” It’s much more probable that the rebels will either lose, or be undone by pressure from the western allies. Which of these is better for the Libyan people is, I’m sure, covered in a different book.
Karol Markowicz makes some observations and asks some questions:
One thing we supposedly knew, though, was that Barack Obama wasn’t going to be a cowboy president. He was measured, intelligent and peaceful. He would never get us mired in a war.
Yet here we are, at the start of a third war. . . .
The Iraq war, he once told us, was a “war of choice.” As an American I would love for my president to inform me how he makes that war choice, how he made this particular choice. I have no idea why we’re bombing Libya, and unlike my friends on the left I’m trying not to jump to the same conclusions they did about our last president regarding our intentions toward their oil.
That we know zero about our purpose in Libya, the president’s rationale toward this war, what we may consider a win, all of it actually fits in with that empty suit who campaigned to be our president and who, in a time of confusion we actually chose. Are we removing Gadhafi? And replacing him with who, exactly? Will we build up the areas we bomb afterward? Is a Libyan democracy the end-goal? Do we have goals? Why is our president still in Brazil when we’re at war?
All good questions Obama will answer with a “let me be clear” followed by no clarity at all.
It’s very strange and odd that President Obama did not seek congressional authorization before launching strikes on Libya.
In his mind, he may have been signaling: this is a humanitarian police action (like Somalia or Bosnia), not a real war (like the Gulf war, the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq).
But he opened the door to his critics alleging: Obama is a liberal one-worlder who thinks that a Security Council vote can substitute for American democratic processes.
Did he possibly fear that Congress would say No?
Is he hoping that he’ll wrap this thing up faster than the debate would have required?
Is he signaling inner discomfort with his own decision, a preference for talking about almost anything else?
Or is he just recklessly forgetting the old rule: if you don’t invite them to join you at the takeoff, they won’t be there for the landing?
America seems to be backing into a war. The single person most responsible for America’s actions remains the president, in this case, Barack Obama. So understanding Obama is necessary for understanding why America is behaving thus.
First, recall Heinlein’s razor:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice.
The inhabitants of the fever swamps of the right are hellbent on a malicious explanation, and they’re as wrong as their left wing counterparts were about Bush’s war for oil. Perhaps the most sympathetic assessment of Obama came from Thomas Barnett:
By waiting on virtually every imaginable stake-holding nation to sign off — in advance — before unleashing America’s military capabilities, the Obama administration recasts the global dialogue on America’s interventions. All of a sudden it’s not the “supply-push” US intervention into Iraq, where it’s all “this is what America is selling and if you don’t like it, get out of the way!” Now, we’re back to the type of “demand-pull” crisis responses by the US in the 1990s, where the world (aka, “international community”) asks and America answers.
Moreover, by limiting US military participation up-front, the White House forces further “demand-pull” negotiations by our more incentivized allies (Vive la France!) and nervous neighbors as the intervention unfolds. That way, every step Obama takes can be justified in terms of the facts on the ground and how they make the rest of the world feel, while our cool Vulcan simply mutters in reply, “Fascinating.”
But again, the key revelation: This negotiating tactic does an excellent job of uncovering the actual global demand out there for America’s intervention & stabilization services. A lot of anti-interventionists (and sheer Bush haters) want to pretend that’s a myth and that there is no such demand for the American Leviathan, but the truth is, there’s plenty of demand out there. The question is US bandwidth, which Bush-Cheney narrowed considerably.
Obama’s approach — so long as it works, of course — is true genius. At a time when the US seeks to rehabilitate its national security image abroad, Obama’s Brer Rabbit shtick effectively de-ideologize US participation — essentially “laundering” our motives through others. Plus, it has the virtue of sheer transparency — as in, what you see is what you asked for.
The penultimate quoted paragraph is somewhat confusing: how did Bush-Cheney narrow the bandwidth? Does Barnett mean that America’s other military commitments make for less troops that are able to flow? Or does Barnett mean that literally and we can’t process an overflow of data?
Still, perhaps the most glaring weakness of letting other countries determine when America uses forces is that America gets cut off at the knees if these countries change their minds. Which they frequently do. It might be that 70% of Americans support a no fly zone, but that number will almost certainly drop if more American planes crash. The bulk of the blood and treasure is going to come from the United States, and Obama has outsourced the responsibility to others.
He is almost certainly hoping that they’ll behave responsibly. We hope they do. But the Europeans and the bureaucrats of the UN now have (American) power without any clear responsibility to the American people. This is a formula for mission creep and fuzzy thinking, which gets good people needlessly killed.
This post from TigerHawk, which includes a lengthy discussion from George Friedman of Stratfor, is the best analysis of our surrent situation I’ve seen. Frieman comes to the same conclusion I’ve been coming to, which is that our military action seems to be geared toward saving the rebels from destruction without us actually being on the rebels’ side. He also concludes, like me, that this doesn’t make sense. His discussion, obviously, is better and more informed than mine and should be considered required reading.
One of the things Friedman gets at that is worth pointing out is that Gadaffi has a lot of supporters in Libya. Too often in the West we think of all tyrants as having no popular support and ruling by force alone. Certainly they rule through force, but they always come to power with a base of support (otherwise, how would they come to power), and the smart ones, like Gadaffi, use their power to make more friends and punish enemies. In most countries with successful tyrants, the tyrant would probably win a fair election. This is no secret to us Machiavellians, but we are few and must constantly reteach the lessons of The Prince. Unfortunately for all involved, I don’t think Gadaffi needs any refreshers.
In this Telegraph story about the first American plane to crash in our new Libyan operations (both pilots survived, and one has been recovered so far), we get a feeling for how ill-thought-through this war is:
But after Defence Secretary Liam Fox suggested over the weekend that Col Gaddafi could be a “legitimate target”, No 10 sources insisted it was legal to target anyone killing Libyan civilians.
The controversy blew up as Col Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli was hit in a second night of coalition air strikes aimed at suppressing the regime’s air defences and command and control structure.
Following a meeting of the newly formed Libya subcommittee of the National Security Council, chaired by David Cameron, Gen Richards was adamant that it was not permitted to target Col Gaddafi.
“Absolutely not. It is not allowed under the UN resolution and it is not something I want to discuss any further,” he said.
At a Ministry of Defence briefing, Gen Richards’ spokesman, Major Gen John Lorimer, stressed that the international military intervention was in support of the UN no-fly zone.
“It is very clear that, in support of the United Nations Security Council, we are there to implement and enforce the no-fly zone,” he said.
“The targets we are attacking are command and control facilities and the integrated air defence system. They are legitimate military targets.”
In what way is Colonel Gadaffi not a legitimate military target? He was a soldier who seized power in a coup, who has governed his country through a military dictatorship, and is now using military might to threaten the civilian population. Which is where we come in. He’s a military commander whose actions as a military commander have caused us to intervene. It’s difficult to think of a more legitimate military target than our enemy’s commander.
“I’m not going to speculate on the targets,” [Foreign Secretary William Hague] told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “That depends on the circumstances at the time.”
Dr Fox also discussed the possibility at the weekend, although he stressed the need to avoid civilian casualties in any attack.
“Well, that would potentially be a possibility but you mention immediately one of the problems we would have, which is that you would have to take into account any civilian casualties that might result from that,” he said.
Decades of Western pussilanimity in the face of the human shield tactic have gotten us to this point, where every tin pot tyrant who faces Western military might can simply surround himself with civilians and we act like a vampire confronted with a cross. We have taught Gadaffi that this is how to ward us off, and he is doing as we’ve tought him. This tactic will be used in every future conflict we have until stop letting it work.
I don’t like the idea of killing civilians, but let us never imagine that these people are innocent. A fundamental tenent of Western political thought is that the people are responsible for their government. We’ve moved beyond the age of divine right, where the people and the government could be morally severed. To step back to the philosophical past, to say that somehow a people who have let a terrorist and a tyrant govern them for decades, whose sons have served in his army, are so innocent that we cannot legitimately kill them when they are protecting his life is a rebuke to every liberal advance going back to John Locke.
The talk of targeting Col Gaddafi also appeared to alarm the Americans, with US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warning that it could undermine the cohesion of the international coalition supporting the no-fly zone.
“If we start adding additional objectives then I think we create a problem in that respect,” he said.
“I also think it is unwise to set as specific goals things that you may or may not be able to achieve.”
What? Robert Gates is a smart man, and on its face that last sentence is nonsense. He cannot possibly mean what that sentence literally means, as that would preclude ever setting any goal.
But, frankly, why does the cohesion of the international coalition supporting the no-fly zone matter here? If we kill Gadaffi, there’s no more need for a no-fly zone, and the coalition can simply dissolve. Yesterday I linked to a comment from John Bolton, that removing Gadaffi “apparently remains our political objective, but not our military objective.” The most appropriate way to see these comments from Gates is as a jawdropping response to Bolton: if we achieve our political ends, then our military coalition will fall apart.
Well, yeah. That’s what it looks like when you win a war. Could it be that victory is such an alien notion to us that we have forgotten this?
At this point, this war looks exactly like what the Left 8 or 9 years ago said Iraq looked like: we’re launching an illegitimate attack on an oil rich country that posed no threat to us, at a time when our resources are needed elsewhere, and we have no exit strategy. In Iraq, though, our leadership never waivered in what we were aiming for: a WMD-free, Saddam-free Iraq that was governed by some sort of representative government. We never turned away from that goal, and though it’s taken us longer to get there than we wanted, we’re basically there.
What is our goal in Libya, and how are our military actions aimed at achieving that? Judging by the comments from our government and our allies, I don’t think I’m the only one who can’t answer those questions.
I’m not the biggest John Bolton fan, but he seems to view the situation the same as I do: “Bolton warned that Obama is leading the U.S. into a potential ‘quagmire’ by not making ousting Qaddafi a top military priority. It has become clear, he said, that President Obama’s use of military force is ‘not intended to overthrow Qaddafi — that apparently remains our political objective, but not our military objective.’
Whatever it is that we are doing other than killing Momar Ghadaffi, it’s immoral, it increases human suffering, and it does not advance our cause.
It’s not about your feelings or Congress’s avoidance of formal gestures. Either there is a serious constitutional safeguard here or there is not. If there is, it doesn’t disappear because you are comfortable without it or because Congress holds back. If there is a constitutional safeguard, it is a permanent guarantee that goes to us, the people.
I’m quite disappointed in the fact that the House has not taken up our president’s new war as priority #1. The Senate, of course, is full of boobs and blowhards, like Graham, who think that the Constitution is all about their power. I expected nothing less from them. And, obviously, I had no expectations whatsoever that President Obama would obey the restrictions on executive power on which Candidate Obama waxed. But the Tea Partiers in the House need to step up here. Our president just started a damned war, and the Congress seems not to care one whit.
I’m still not sure what to think about the fact that we’ve just gone to war with Libya without a significant public debate, or without our president consulting the Congress (he went to the U.N. and the Arab League, but not the Congress).
That being said, I think I’m sure regarding the manner in which we should conduct our new war. First, this is plainly a war with Ghadaffi; there is a single individual whose actions have caused us to enter this war. Second, this is nothing other than us involving ourselves in a civil war.
It follows from these observations that the first, last, and only thing we ought to be doing is killing Momar Ghadaffi. We’ve determined that left to his own devices he will crush the rebels and slaughter civilians. If we merely involve ourselves enough to prevent the massacre of civilians but not enough to allow the rebels to win, then neither they nor Ghadaffi will drop out of the fight and a low-level civil war will continue into the indefinite future. This strikes me as obviously immoral – to enter a war that would have come to a short but bloody end, and use our power to convert it into a war that will drag on for years consuming, most likely, a similar number of lives but with disruption of civil society stretching out for years on end. Moreover, does anyone think we’re going to keep guarding the rebels for more than a few months? A year, at most? If we do nothing but cause a stalemate now, we’ll get tired of this sometime around election season, stop the bombing, and then Ghadaffi will slaughter the rebels as though we were never around. It’ll just take a lot longer and probably result in a greater loss of life. And if Ghadaffi wins despite significant Western involvement, it’ll be, at least, the worst hit to Western power since Vietnam.
No, we’ve weighed in on the side of the rebels, and we must ensure that the rebels win. In doing so, we could provide them justenough support to help them gradually push back Ghadaffi’s forces, ensuring a bloody struggle with the maximum destruction and casualties on each side. This strikes me as obviously immoral, and counterproductive to boot – the rebels would feel like we used them as a tool to get at Ghadaffi, and that they could probably have won without us.
If we’re going to be in this, we need to be in this to minimize death and destruction, and to maximize the degree to which the ensuing regime reflects our values (otherwise, WTH are we doing there? are missiles about to go out of style?).
So we kill Ghadaffi, and as many of his followers who feel like being around him when when the bombs come down. We eliminate the cause of our intervention, and we create maximum indebtedness to us for our intervention without having the bad effects of an occupation. The West: “We Cared Enough to Kill That Guy You Hated, but Not Enough to Occupy You.” TM. At that point, either they’re a people capable of self-government, in which case they’ll form a republic of some sort, or they’re not, in which case they’ll get what they deserve. At any rate, we’ll get out of there with minimum effort, having significantly reduced the amount of death and destruction and with our ultimate goal attained.
Three questions: 1. What is the problem with this plan? 2. Is there a chance in hell that this is what we intend to do? 3. Is it obvious to anyone else that we seem to be involving ourselves in a manner that will increase casualties, destruction, and resentment?
The increasingly few of us who remember the world Before Barry (that is, before his presidency) might remember that he once opposed the “rush to war” in Iraq. Back in 2003, after several months of intense national debate, a national election that hinged on that debate, a Congressional vote that involved lots of debate, and several trips to the U.N. to debate the matter, lots of people, including a young, inexperienced Barack Obama, still thought we were “rushing” to war.
Since then, though, a bunch of people who weren’t me got together and voted to make Obama the president. Okay, whatever. But given this context you can imagine my surprise when I finished washing my car tonight and came inside to find that we’d gotten a resolution from the U.N. authorizing us to start bombing Libya.
Wasn’t it just, like, this morning that we were still refusing to take action and allowing Gadaffi to crush the rebels? This revolt has been going on for some time, and it never seemed to me that we were serious about getting involved. Now, after very little warning or debate, Mr. “Stop This Rush to War” is getting us into a war without so much as Congressional approval.
Huh? I may or may not support us getting involved in Libya; honestly, I haven’t thought about it because our president has been giving the distinct impression that we weren’t going to get involved. But the next Democrat who ever mentions the “rush to war” in Iraq should be struck by lightning. This is ridiculous.
Apollo posted this at 11:00 PM HKT on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 as CHANGE!
Has our federal government done a single thing in the last 10 years that would lead you to believe our “officials” are more competent than the Japanese?
If the Japanese say they’re getting things under control, and one of our trillion dollar nitwits, looking at the situation from 10,000 miles away, says they aren’t, I know who I’m believing. I hope our experts are providing whatever genuine assistance they can to the Japanese, but the boobs providing anonymous scaremongering to already ill-informed journalists need to STFU.
I determined that most of Meghan’s flaws – such as her unbearable narcissism, delusions of persecution, anti-religious bigotry, and mendacity – couldn’t be chalked up to her manifestly below-average intelligence. These are blameworthy traits born of a malfunctioning moral compass, and they are laid bare in spades on every page of Dirty, Sexy Politics. Furthermore, it is important to address them because Meghan McCain’s book is an active attempt to split the Republican Party in two and thereby destroy its ability to win elections. And even though she is an idiot, she is a useful idiot in the hands of the media and other assorted Democrats, who also want to achieve this goal.
Aren’t you forgetting a thing or 2? You’ve got them chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Walker has got to go” — but what do they know about Scott Walker? That he’s done something the teachers don’t like. So, maybe some day, when you do something they don’t like, some kid might start “Hey hey, ho ho, [TEACHER'S NAME] has got to go.” Today, you’re pleased to teach them “The children, united, will never be divided.” I’m picturing them repurposing that chant back in the classroom.
This confirms my long-standing observation that while you can’t dismiss a political cause because some jerk brings his kid to a rally, you can go a long way toward that when they start coordinating bringing their kids and teach them sloganeering.
Added: On reflection, I was entirely wrong to say parents shouldn’t bring their children. Bringing a child to a political rally so they can observe and learn about about our civic process is a laudable thing to do. However, the children depicted in this video are actively participating in the rally, indeed chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” in response to an adult’s call (I sure hope our democracy doesn’t look like a bunch of 3rd graders!).