Giving Insufferable, Prudish, Paternalistic Prigs Everywhere a Bad Name

Jesus, read the latest by Douthat on gay marriage and more.  This is the thinking man's conservative. 

What the hell happened to this kid to make him hate sex so much that he has this overwhelming desire to inflict his notion of what's acceptable on everyone.  

Creepy, creepy, arrogant, creepy stuff.  

(I wish I had time for a more extended treatment, but then again, is it really necessary?)   

Comments

[Toast]

Do you think Douthat masturbates? Or does he abstain in the interest of noblesse oblige?

[oddjob]

...But again, I think it’s a little naive to assume that it will have no impact at all — that legal changes don’t beget further cultural changes, and that public definitions don’t influence private conduct. Maybe the potential consequences are so vanishingly minimal that they’re easily outweighed by the benefits to gay couples; that’s certainly a reasonable position. But looking out across America’ landscape of heterosexual dysfunction, it’s still a little hard for me to accept that what this moment demands of us is the legal formalization — indeed, the constitutionalization, if Judge Walker has his way — of the ideological conceit that marriage has no necessary connection to gender difference, procreation or childrearing.

What this means is that gay people's lives are to be used to buttress an ideology of marriage that straight people have already abandoned. Now, even if you make the worst assumptions about the impact of marriage equality as an idea in America, does it not strike you as, well, simply unfair to use gays as a way to lecture straights? Are we not ends in ourselves, rather than means to others' ends?....

[Stephen]

Douthat's column is completely incoherent, the worst such mess I've ever seen. He has no argument against marriage equality in the face of Judge Walker's ruling, and he knows it.

They all know it.

[kathy a.]

which planet is he from? he argues that divorce should be harder, but doesn't want no-fault taken away. you hear about good divorces sometimes, but easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy is not how i'd describe any i've encountered in real life. marriage brings legal obligations; those get messy to unravel. that's a risk with any marriage.

i just don't get whatever it is that he is arguing.

[Sir Charles]

kathy,

He wants people to stop having sex outside of marriage, he wants people who are married to stay so no matter how miserable they might be, and he wants women to carry all pregnancies to term.

He is a strange young man. Kind of an old Catholic prelate masquerading as a 29-year old.

[kathy a.]

he can, at best, walk the walk on only one of those situations -- and even that one might depend on the definition of sex outside marriage. NO, i don't want any details! but parents of boys especially -- did you never have discussions in early years about self touching that belongs in the bedroom and not the living room? i suppose his parents put it differently, that he'd go straight to hell and/or that one of the body parts involved would fall off. but in any event, HELLO, dude's not an expert in certain facets of human life.

[Sir Charles]

kathy,

What he doesn't know could fill up volumes.

Can you imagine that a left winger of comparable age and similarly extreme views could ever be hired by the Times?

[kathy a.]

i'm having trouble thinking of a 29-y-o unmarried pro-life pro-abstinance person of limited life experience having much valuable to say about marriage, childbearing, parenthood, or divorce. and even more trouble envisioning a left winger of comparable age and similarly extreme views -- what would the opposites be?

[litbrit]

kathy, imagine a 29-year-old married pro-choice, pro-sex-education-and-affordable-birth-control-for-all left-wing person. Now add twenty years to that person, plus a fair bit of life experience, including the first-hand variety when it comes to marriage, childbearing (three-time delivery room veteran here), and parenthood, and the general variety (travel, foreign language, different faiths, etc.)

I have just described myself. Quite accurately.

I can spell, I can type, and I've even been known to cobble together the odd pleasing sentence here and there--do you suppose the NYT would hire me? I've never applied, so I cannot say, with certainty, No they wouldn't.

Should I find out?

[Sir Charles]

Douthat is actually married now and may have a small child. I might be slightly more interested in his opinion on these matters in twenty years.

Then again . . . .

[Sungold]

I can say with near certainty that they'd reject you because you'd make MoDo look bad.

That just might be as good an argument as any for applying!

[kathy a.]

litbrit, nice try, but none of the experiences/views you expressed are "similarly extreme." because they aren't extreme.

i've got nothing on hiring practices of major newsrags such as NYT.

SC, sorry -- i don't follow these things very closely, but we can chat again about his opinions in 20 years.

[minstrel hussain boy]

the easiest of my four divorces was the one where i walked into my attorneys office and said "throw money at the bitch until she leaves" and walked out. it was either 2nd or 3rd. neither of them had any children to sort through.

no fault divorce. jeezus, i fucking wish.

here's my divorce zen koan:

if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it still my fault?

usually the answer is a resounding yes.

i read a couple paragraphs of douthat (is it just me or does that make a real easy "douchebag" pun almost inevitable?) once when he first signed on. egad he sucks out loud.

[Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle]

Sir Charles:
re: Douchethat, I just wait till TBogg does the summary. Much easier reading, and less bashing head against the desk, that way.

[Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle]

litbrit:
No way!! Although it is telling. You know they gave Douthat a blog too, right? I don't think I've ever seen a Douthat blog post get 40 comments. Just about every Krugman blog post gets hundreds of comments, plenty of them pissed off RWNJ's. Most blog posts by Big Media Matt(Yglesias) get more than 40 comments, and he doesn't have the platform Douchethat does.

[kathy a.]

MHB, i read his name as "doubt that." the name's not his fault, but his writing reinforces the first impression.

[litbrit]

I know what you mean--being married with children, being pro-choice (as in, you get to choose what you do with your own body), being for solid, age-appropriate sex education in schools and affordable (or free) birth control, particularly condoms, for everyone...well, how is being all those things in any way controversial or extreme?

I have friends who are devout Catholics who nonetheless use birth control and are pro-choice. They deal with the cognitive dissonance by simply not talking about how old-fashioned and dangerous the church's actual teachings are. Well, they talk about it with me and with other women around whom they feel safe discussing life as it is actually lived as opposed to some pantomime life they have to put on for the church and the family elders. *sigh*

One such friend admitted to me that she hadn't actually participated in Mass for many years, although she still attended the ceremony. This was because she had not been to Confession. I asked her how long. She said, "Oh, twenty five years. What am I supposed to say--Forgive me father, for I have sinned...it has been twenty five years since my last Confession...during that time I had two abortions and married a Jewish guy?" She wasn't saying this to be funny, either--my friend truly believes and worships as a Catholic, and is devout enough to think that not going to Confession means you can't have Mass, but not self-aware enough to see how she, herself, does not believe in the teachings of the Church, and perhaps that means the Church is wrong, and finding a faith more aligned with who she is and what she believes--and worshipping in a different venue--might be the way to go.

I can only offer a friendly, non-judgmental ear, but if it were me, I'd have a really difficult time, year in and year out, sitting through sermons and listening to people tell me I would burn in hell for actions and beliefs I knew to be my own.

[Sir Charles]

D.

It's been a really long times since I've been to a mass that was neither funeral or wedding related -- probably not since Ford or Carter was in the White House -- but my sense is that on a local parish level a lot of priests avoid topics that will make the congregation feel like such egregious sinners. I think divorce and birth control are off the table and a lot of priests only discuss abortion when the hierarchy makes them read some approved letter on the issue.

Nevertheless, I don't understand why people remain in a church whose basic doctrine is simply not in line with the lives that its congregants live.

[Stephen]

Nevertheless, I don't understand why people remain in a church whose basic doctrine is simply not in line with the lives that its congregants live.

It's terribly easy to do. If your faith is important to you then it's hard to leave it - whether that means giving it up entirely or simply changing to a different group within it.

What makes the Episcopal church so refreshing to my wife and me is that we're finally free to be who we are and to believe whatever we want without fear of judgment. There are retired priests who are at least as liberal as me, if not more so, and people my age who are pretty conservative - and we give each other the grace to live and believe as we choose.