Jim,
I've made matters more difficult by being elliptical. What I meant when talking of 'disrespect for my choices' was the specific point that some people regard my transexuality and my lesbianism as cancelling each other out - until recently, I could have married my lover in the UK because the state did not recognize my transition legally for the purposes of marriage.
And, actually, I do regard the term 'disorder' as offensive. I regard my gender identification and my sexual object choices as fairly standard human variations - not ever variation is pathological and I tend to assume that only those which are clearly dysfunctional - and not just because Cardinal Ratzinger says so - are in any way to be regarded as such.
On the other hand, I did not stress this point when going through transition because I also live in the real world of needful compromises and had to get on with shrinks and surgeons.
Some of the choices you make are made through necessity.
I should probably stress a minor point of personal history here. As a boy, I was bi in terms of personal identification; gay in terms of the gender of the vast majority of my occasional and repeated partners; straight in terms of my one serious long-term sexual relationship; and bi in terms of my long-standing unrequited passions. I started identifying as lesbian a couple of years after surgery simply because that was the community in which I found myself living sexually at that point. It also helped that I realized that a lot of my non-casual relationships with men were very bad for me and probably for them. All of this is partly chance, partly necessity and partly choice.
The sexual histories of the significant minority of transwomen who identify as lesbian are quite varied, and I know I am neither typical nor unusual. Just so we're clear.
I mention all of this simply because it is a part of the background to my view that the Church's stance on this is simplistic to a degree unworthy of it. There are a whole bunch of possible responses to individual's personal sexual ethics that might be more helpful to people trying to lead responsible adult lives than any blanket statements.
For example, there is a real distinction in my mind between anonymous casual sex in which there is no sense of ongoing relationship and the sort of casual sex where you remain fuck-buddies or move on to a friendship informed by the fact that you have got the sex bit out of the way and don't have to worry about it very much anymore. The former is probably a bit of a dead end; the latter is a source of considerable grace and kindness and the creation of complex webs of personal relationship. And there is a huge grey area between the two which means that sometimes it is only possible to tell the difference in retrospect.
What is important is that you keep your heart open and avoid exploitation and take sensible precautions about health issues.
It seems to me that blanket condemnation of 'promiscuous sex' is not nearly as helpful as encouraging an ethic of responsibility and caring for all your neighbours including those with whom you have sex. Which in some cases might mean that you think about having sex with them and don't do it for their sake and/or yours - not because it would be bad, but because it would be unloving.
A lot of these issues are open for discussion - my objection to the Church's positions is that they seem rarely to be based on listening to actual experience. Part of the relevance of my experiences of telling doctors, at least some of the time, what they wanted and expected to hear, and of talking myself, for the occasion, into sincerely believing those things is that the one size fits all version of sin which you get in a lot of confessionals means that what the church knows about human sexuality is not necessarily the truth.
My confessors, in my Catholic teens, would listen to me talking about impure thoughts and never ask me the nature of those thoughts. I was surely not going to volunteer things which might be serious problems for them. Not least because had I been refused absolution, I would not have been able to receive Holy Communion alongside my sister and father or schoolmates the next day. The church has often, in practive, operated a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy which is, as I say, disrespectful of those of us who bother to think our positions through.
And I don't think for a second that the Church has no right to comment on these matters. I just think that if it is going to use its authority, then that authority must be considerably more responsible than it has been both in accurate understanding of experienced reality and in a sense of the consequences of what it is preaching.
If I didn't care what the Church thought, both because of my personal history with it and because of its objective power in the world, I would not be so testy about all this.
Jim,
Actually, you have a point. My memory is that I read a two or three line story in the Guardian or the Telegraph mentioning the OR story. It is perhaps the case that this was untrue and I am prepared to believe you are right.
Since, however, I was bisexual as a boy, and a lesbian as a transwoman, it doesn't make much difference to my feeling of rejection by the Church. And that feeling is not ameliorated by the fact that some people within the church would regard my transexuality and my lesbianism as cancelling each other out - disrespect for my choices is the idea here.
All of this matters less to me for my own sake - as I say, there are broader theological issues here - than because it means, for example, that my father died troubled that he would never see me again because we would not be in the same part of the afterlife.
Catherine,
I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make, and I can imagine that at some future point I might find myself in an emotional space where my devotion to a theoretical Church might overcome my repugnance about the actually existing hierarchy. But even if I could receive the sacraments or participate in services with a clear conscience - and there are other issues in play here like a radical dissent from anything the Church, though not all theologians, would recognize as belief in God - I would always have to do so in the sure and certain knowledge that I might be refused.
I take seriously enough the consciences of the priests in my own family to understand that there is not necessarily anything frivolour or malicious about such refusal - I just believe them to be seriously in moral error.
As to the idea that transexuals or homosexuals - and I am both - can somehow be the thing they are and not do the thing, well, that really does not work. Which bits of the gay thing is one allowed to do as a Catholic? Obviously not suck dick or lick pussy - but is one allowed to go to Pride as long as you don't hold hands? Is one allowed to listen to Judy or KD or are they occasions of sin?
Similarly, having had my gender surgically and hormonally reassigned, just what does repentance mean? Am I just allowed to say I am very sorry? Or does the church want, as it were, its pound of flesh? (At this point, the words 'firm purpose of amendment' acquire a distinctly sinister ring.)
Understand that I am not being sarcastic for its own sake, but pointing out that the present Pope and all who follow him in these matters show no sign of actually trying to understand the actual lives of actual people. Absent such sympathy, bland words about how we have not been thrown out, but cut ourselves off - sorry - from the Church are more or less meaningless.
Jim,
1) The excommunication of trans people was announced in Osservatore Romano some years ago - I cannot remember which particular part of the Church bureaucracy had decided upon it.
2) Most accounts of Vatican I - both at the time and since, see Acton and the UK diplomats - agree that dodgy pressure was put on eg the French cardinals to conform. I recently read a forthcoming book - David Kertzer's Prisoner of the Vatican - which mentions it in passing while concentrating on the extent to which Pio Nono wanted Infallibility as a consolation for losing the Papal States.
3) I take the point about the occasions on which the power of excommunication has been used for progressive causes - and yes, I find it iffy even there. However, since it has been far more common on the other side of things, I don't have much trouble in doing so.
4) Specifically, that which would be demanded of me by way of repentance would be a total reconstruction of an identity which it has taken me most of my adult life to come to terms with. I object to this as a matter of conscientious principle - in this respect ' I will not serve'.
But this has human costs - I attended my father's requiem mass and felt unable to read a lesson, or speak, and my sister - who has become an Anglican for complex reasons of her own - was in a similar position. Luckily, my nephew and young niece, who are Catholic, were there to take up the slack.
My issue with infallibility is not merely that it is nonsense, which it is, nor that it was imposed as doctrine, as opposed to sentimental belief, by a thoroughly corrupt process of bribes and threats to the members of the Council that declared it.
It is that it corrodes the intellectual framework of much of the rest of Catholic belief by making it dependent, not on logic or scripture, but on the asserted claim of the Pontiff.
Specifically, there is the problem of creeping infallibility - the doctrine as stated by Vatican I is quite limited ( I don't have the wording in front of me, but it is something like ' important matters of faith and morals, in accordance with scripture, the teachings of the Fathers and previous Councils of the Church ') and yet as Teresa points out one of its major uses was to declare as dogma a lot of ideas about the nature of the Mother of Christ which are hardly essential to anyone.
The present Pope has not, as yet, attached infallibility to what appear to be his own personal beliefs about the co-intercessorship of Mary, but he has done so by implication to a lot of other issues both of belief and practice.
Creeping infallibility is one of the issues that concerns me about the doctrine and the other, as I say, is the tendency under the influence of Ratzinger to make the magisterium of the Church a matter of 'because I say so'.
In one of his books - again, not to hand - Ratzinger places both sides of the debate about the ensoulment of the foetus in the balance, paying due attention to what Aquinas said. He then argues, and this is a point on his side, that given that there is uncertainty on this issue, the Church has a humane duty to argue for the ensoulment at conception.
He then goes on to argue that in any case the authority of the church depends on consistency and the fact that in this instance that choice is consistent with what he has claimed as the humane option.
This looks like both a knock-down argument for one of the underpinnings of the opposition to abortion and for Infallibility. In fact, of course, it is a piece of rhetoric and nothing of the kind. If the church actually believed in ensoulment at conception, it would have developed rituals and sacraments on that basis in the way that some sects of Japanese Buddhism have. If uncertainties were always to be resolved on the humane side, the Church would take a far stronger position on war and hunger, and be far less dogmatic about homosexuality.
In the specific instance of ensoulment, the Father of the Church who actually discussed it, Aquinas, took a position diametrically opposed to the Church's current one. His view of course depends on outmoded Aristotelian science and cannot be held - yet the current doctrine is just as incoherent in its use of science.
Where the Ratzinger's arguments do depend on Aquinas is in their tendency to complete circularity. He knows where he wants to get and constantly shades his argument to ensure he gets there.
What he is actually saying is that a position with real human costs can be justified in terms of the benefits derived from the doctrine of infallibility. We are entitled to believe otherwise.
I go into this much detail on a fine point, because it relates to the intellectual corruption recognition of which, even before I lost my faith, was eroding my capacity to be a member of the actually existing Roman Catholic faith.
And yet, and yet, I miss that sense of connection one got from attending mass and receiving the Eucharist in the companionship of all believers past and present. I did specifically believe in the doctrine of particpation by doing so in the benefits of Christ's sacrifice - not hard to be an SF fan if you've been a Catholic, because you get to wrap your head around some seriously woo! concepts at an early age.
One of the things I hate most about the bureaucrats of the church is that they use refusal of that communion on a regular basis to police people's actions. Some years ago, it was announced that all transexuals are automatically excommunicate - so I can't go back even if I wanted to. The effective excommunication of pro-Choice Catholic politicians is not only a disgraceful intervention in the democratic process; it is a piece of refined malice in terms of what these people are supposed actually to believe. If he who says to his brother 'Thou Fool' is in danger of the judgement, how much more so those who assert their authority by this sort of blackmail?
And there we have the paradox. I am still fascinated by the intellectual process I was taught by the Benedictines and the Jesuits. I am a child of the Church even in the mode of my separation from it.
Getting back to the original point here, for a moment, one of the reasons why many progressives get testy around religion is that they are engaged in a constant struggle with the faiths that abandoned them, but still witter away in the back of their heads. Patrick is right to mention the anger of the abused, but one does not have to be have been abused to be upset by organized religion, while endlessly drawn back to it.
I was a cradle Catholic, and had an intense active faith until my second year at Oxford - my first political awakening into anarcho-pacifism specifically derived from my beliefs. And for as long as faith was a factor in my life, I could make a distinction between the Catholic Church of which I was a member and the Actually Existing Catholic Church which ran things. I could pray that Pope Paul would be guided by the Holy Spirit to a better understanding of e.g infalliblity (that heretical though Council-based belief which had more to do with the personal insecurities of Pio Nono than with anything in scripture) or oppositions to contraception (that doctrine which had more to do with Pio Nono's corrupt dealings with a birth-rate obsessed French republicanism than ditto). I even prayed regularly for Cardinal Ratzinger, whose obsession with the consistency of doctrine even then presented itself to me as a stumbling block for the Church's future.
My loss of faith had little to do with the intellectual unsustainability of these views, let alone with their historical irrelevance, though I do note these. It had to do, quite simply, with waking up one morning and ceasing to feel that communication with the spiritual realm, and other believers, which had sustained me for the previous few years. I had never known what people meant by losing faith, and almost overnight I found out.
This brought me face to face with a lot of issues I had deferred. I had been quite badly treated - no, not sexual abuse, or even serious physical abuse, just being picked on and mildly victimized - by the monk headmaster of my secondary school in London, and I had offered this up as a mortification rather than ever getting annoyed enough to complain. I had signally failed to deal with my sexuality and gender issues, to the point of developing a rich fantasy life involving a romanticism destructive of me and those around me. This habit of repressing legitimate anger and desire was closely connected with my Catholicism and once I no longer had faith to reassure me, prayer looked like a pretty dodgy safety valve.
And yet, I remain a cradle Catholic, no matter how anticlerical and agnostic I have become. The words of the Latin Mass are imprinted in me; at times of stress like planes in storms I find I have been saying my rosary without even noticing it. I retain a certain train spotter's interest in ecclesiastical politics and in canonizations and in new decrees about the Mass. Complete strangers sometimes spot me as a cradle Catholic thirty years after I left the church - Tim and Serena Powers knew within five minutes, just because of verbal habits.
The Gospels have a particular place in my pantheon of wisdom literature because they are so familiar to me. And because they seem no less wise than the bits of the Taoist texts that have at times appealed to me, and more in the world of practical dealings with others than much of what is best in Buddhism. The parables and epigrams attributed to Christ are often wise whether or not you believe that he was God Incarnate.
They also have comparatively little to do with the dark and hateful sayings of many of those who claim or have claimed to be his followers and to have divine sanction for their hate. Hate which is often directed specifically at groups to which I belong.
I still have an affection for the God of my parents and grandparents, for the world of religious practice I grew up in and which still moves me at the family funerals which are my only remaining contact with it. I know that many believers and ministers of religion are good and holy men.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who claim to be Christians, including the heads of many denominations, who either want me in jail or dead or in Hell or at least deprived of many crucial civil rights. Institutional sexism and homophobia is hard to reconcile with the loving-kindness that all of this is supposed to be about.
What makes it worse is that I was sufficiently trained in apologetics when young to know the pat answers. Oh they do it because they hate the sin and not the sinner, or because it is necessary to the Church's mission that it not change, or because it is important not to give scandal to third world people who might drift to evangelical protestantism or Islam.
And here's the thing. If I am not for myself, who am I for? I will not serve in a belief system that despises me, and the hooks it still has in my soul are such that I need to distance myself from it all the time.
I don't know whether or not I believe and trust in a god or gods - I know that I no longer connect my occasional experiences of the numinous with such belief or trust. Pantheism has rarely killed anybody, so you can maybe call me a pantheist because I do have a sense of the holy in nature and art and just the glorious detail of the mundane.
I have had the worrying experience of conversations with the dead, often in dreams, in which they told me small details that proved to have been objectively true and which I could not possibly have known, though I might have guessed. I don't necessarily believe in the objective validity of these experiences, but I have to accept them, and the extent to which they are commonplace among my acquaintance, as a reason no longer to rest in the materialism to which for a while I was drawn. If such experiences were valid, though, the friends in them talked of the numinous, and of an afterlife of exploration and contemplation and enjoyment, not of the Four Last Things in which I was brought up.
I mention this, because this is the closest I have come to a renewal of faith, and it is nothing like the faith in which I was reared and whose intellectual structure and art I still respect.
And from an agnostic standpoint, belief in survival after death is even more irrational than belief in God. So colour me confused, because I really don't want to trade in Catholicism for Paganism - the noise, the people. And I no longer have a home in standard liberal agnosticism any more than in the church of my parents.
Like a lot of people, I am confused and hurt and angry. And if at times I make remarks that treat on other people's toes of faith, let me apologize pre-emptively.
I have no memory of Cliff Jackson - like I say, though I knew people in Clinton's circle quite well, it was after he had left. They all spoke well of him - and mostly, in spite of disappointment with his Presidency, still do.
Madjayhawk
1. As Hitchens was very prone to pointing out during the Clinton era, there are no innocent dealings with whoever is in the White House.
2. As I keep pointing out, even if it were true, and some of the posters here seem to think it is not, that Bush was merely honouring a democratic mandate, he could have cut the gags about the Tucker woman.
3. Hitchens' attacks on Clinton over the death penalty referred primarily to a specific execution, of a man with brain damage, which did take place during the period when he was starting to put himself forward for the Presidency. Given how very smart and calculating even his worst enemies acknowledge Clinton to be, I don't think the weighing of facts involved is especially implausible.
4. This row has been going on for some time and I am a latecomer to it. Many accounts of Hitchens' personal life when young have appeared, some of them penned by the man himself, and I thought it interesting to try and put the record straight - as it were - as I see it. Given e.g. Hitchens' claim to have slept with one of the same women as Clinton, and his own references to his past bisexuality, I don't think I have committed any great trespass. In fact, one of the things I was trying to convey is why we should care. This man was golden once, and now he is not - and this says something about political life in our time.
Yehudit,
1. While, yes, there were some US media critical of the war, the vast majority of it was supportive, or at least that was how it looked from abroad.
2. You are right to value independent thinkers - I am just worried that Hitchens has ceased to be one. And, to be very precise, since he has used the term Contrarian of himself, I think one is entitled to examine whether he is still entitled to it.
3. If I were engaged in PC policing, I would have written this piece some considerable time ago. Believe me, I know what it is to march to my own drummer - if I find myself in step with a more conventional leftism on this issue, so be it, but such has not, in the past, been my story.
The comments above, about David Perrin, strike me as so unjustified and unpleasant as to discredit their writer. Perrin's piece, an interesting companion to my own in a way, deals with his period as one of Christopher Hitchens' acolytes and their subsequent ideological estrangement...
www.citypages.com/databank/24/1179/article11370.asp
It seems possible, from a defence of Hitchens in my Live Journal, that Paul was referring to a lecture Hitchens gave at the White House. Which, OK, is not being a consultant. And yes, not quite that bad, then, if so.
But bad enough.
What would a younger Hitchens have said to anyone who went and spoke at the Nixon White House on the eve of Cambodia? Or the Reagan White House on the brink of its various military adventures?
Particularly if the speech were as full of self-serving claptrap as the attached extract: "I spoke about the difference between the rhetoric of Lincoln and the rhetoric of Churchill, strongly advocating the former over the latter for his qualities of philosophy and reluctance. I added, since the time for a confrontation with Saddam Hussein was then approaching, that I wished
success to American arms in Mesopotamia but hoped that nobody, Kurdish, Cypriot or Palestinian, would ever have to live under a Pax Americana without consent. I also argued that the United States was compelled historically to defend the idea of secular pluralism.... The question of Leon Trotsky didn't come up in any very marked manner, as far as I recall, but I did stress Karl Marx's energetic support for the Union cause, and the conviction of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine that the United States ought to be a superpower for democracy.'
This seems to me bad enough. If you are as smart and as silver-tongued as Hitchens, and have the oppurtunity to address the key men in the belly of the beast, you aren't rude, heavens no!, but you do tell them the righteous truth. And this is not it.
Either he was criminally naive in making such a speech to them at such a time, or he knew that he was being asked as a way of demonstrating their broadness of mind and as someone who was never going to say anything that was not, in the last analysis, safe.
And yes, it is more venial and less mortal to sell yourself for flattery and fine wine than to take silver - but it is still unworthy of the man Hitchens once was.
I should have included the URL of my source in the original piece.
http://www.thelibertycommittee.org/neo-conned.htm
Congressman Ron Paul claimed that Hitchens was a consultant to the White House in a speech to Congress. I am prepared to stand corrected if there is an innocent explanation, But to take White House gold would be consistent with Christopher Hitchens' evolution.
It seems to me that to support the Iraq war, at a time when the US media did so more or less en bloc, is not what one expects from a contrarian, especially one with a long and honourable record.
(I speak as someone who opposed it in spite of real problems with doing so - I first went on a demonstration for a free Kurdistan as long ago as the mid-70s.)
The idea of me as a Stalinist ideologue is one calculated to cause intense amusement to anyone on the Left who knows me. I should probably post about my own complex political evolution at some point.
I am a soggy moderate and proud of it - it is just that the world has moved to the Right around me.
I take the point, and have no excuse in respect of the details of Texas law. However, my substantive point remains.
Clinton used the death penalty as a political instrument for his own advancement, and appears to have been motivated by a belief in his own capacity thus to put himself into a position to achieve the greater good. This is, in my view, profoundly wrong, but is the immorality of a serious person.
Bush may not have any power of clemency in particular cases - though I refuse to believe that, as governor, he had no power to argue for e.g. greater care in the prosecution of capital cases as a general issue. And it is legitimate to say that however serious-minded he had been in the rubber-stamping of death penalties, dead is still dead. What remains objectionable, and objectionable at a wholly different level to Clinton's behaviour, is the frat-boy frivolity with which he treated signing death warrants - the one in the Tucker case in particular.
And there is a blitheness to this approach which oddly parallels the preparedness of Trotskyites and other Marxist-Leninists to condone the terror execution of whole classes. When upper-class boys like the young Hitchens give intellectual assent to e.g the shooting of the Kronstadt mutineers, they are, it seems, on a slippery slope which can lead to condoning any killing anywhere.
What really worries me about this is that it has the feel of the sort of thing groups do to initiate people. Cannibal gangs make people eat human flesh, because after that you cannot go back.
The American public is being persuaded to let there be these trials without proper defendant rights so that afterwards there is nowhere to go but further on the path to dictatorship...And eventually there will be summary executions without proper trials.
Every time the whole thing gets ratcheted up.
A paranoid brutal US is what terrorists want - because it justifies who they are. The important thing is not to play their game.
It is a good thing that people fought internment and jury-less courts in Northern Ireland and that, even when suspects were jailed on dodgy evidence, there were still people who fought e.g. the Guilford appeals. It is also worrying that at least one judge took the line that, if the agencies of the state had lied, they should be supported in that lie. After all, there was a war on.
The interesting thing about Reed, and the thing that made 'Reds' an interesting film if not a great or a good one, is that he is so American. He wanted to do good and thought he had found a way to do it. He was one of your golden boys and signing up for the Bolshevik crusade was the way in which this manifested itself.
I think that is a cautionary tale for our times.
Carter was not a very good President; he is however quite good at being an ex-President, which involves a different set of skills.
There is a very good case for disliking John Reed who deliberately turned a blind eye to aspects of the Soviet regime that were obvious to e.g. Emma Goldman at the time. And she had no qualms about rocking the boat by mentioning them in public.
It is, however, not on to refer to Reed as Stalinist given that he died before Stalin's accession to the Soviet leadership and none of us can know, with certainty, what his reaction to the events of the 1930s would have been. A man cannot be held accountable for crimes committed after his death - only for those which he countenanced when alive. In the case of Reed, these were significant.
But only if we are prepared to be judged by the same standard.
Reed after all was engaged in an act of weighing. Weighing the bloodshed of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War against the bloodshed of the First World War, the famines and epidemics and ethnic massacres that followed in its wake, the collateral damage of heavy industry, the Mexican civil war and so on. All of which he regarded as the outcome of the capitalist system whose overthrow he desired, and which he saw as likely to be achieved by the Bolsheviks.
We all of us make these calculations, left, right and centre. We are all prepared to some degree to fight to the last drop of someone else's blood. And Reed was at least not an armchair radical - he put himself in danger for the causes in which he believed.
There is genuine heroism on the Right, of course there is - sometimes. I respect all the people who smuggled philosophy texts into Cold War Czechoslovakia whether they were left of centre like those of my friends who were involved, or right of centre like Roger Scruton. The point of my sarcasm is that, if the Right wants its story told, it needs to pick those heroes about whom a heroic story can be constructed.
Meanwhile, I think we have had a serious attempt to construct a dark myth of Clinton for the last few years. I am no great fan of a man I regard as having sold much of what was once good about him in order to become Presidential timber - but let us be clear that the reason why Nixon works as charismatic Richard III figure and Clinton does not is that Nixon actually did some of those things.
Doug Rivers said:
'I'd like to see the flip side movie of Erin Brockovich.'
Hmm, how's that again? A film about a heroic industrialist who does his bit for economic growth in spite of the tragic realization that there will be collateral damage in the shape of unavoidable cancers among the populace, who is brought down by unqualified legal assistants chipping away at his self-respect?
Or is that not what was meant?
You are right, this is moving, and I am glad that I can still be moved by it even though I disapprove of the war so strongly. It is a matter of such sadness that such men as Tom Calhoun find their essential dignity in the bloody business of war and yet, without them, it would be so much worse.
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