Rosenstrasse
(Reviewed August 20, 2004)
Margarethe von Trotta’s moving story of a few brave German women who successfully defied the Nazis after their husbands were arrested gets a bit lost in the complications of the telling
Full Review
We Don't Live Here Anymore
(Reviewed August 13, 2004)
A portrait of spiritual and emotional emptiness among the academic classes — that may or may not be spiritually and emotionally empty itself
Full Review
Danny Deckchair
(Reviewed August 11, 2004)
A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching
Full Review
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Diary
ENTRY from August 17, 2004
Homosexuals seem to want to have it both ways — if you’ll pardon the expression — about the McGreevey affair. In the Washington Post, José Antonio Vargas writes about married men who are closeted gays having affairs, usually with other married men, as a recognized feature of the homosexual subculture. "Whether they call themselves gay or bisexual," Vargas writes, "McGreeveys are everywhere: in Red America and Blue America, in suburbs and cities, in corporate offices and city halls (and the governor''s mansion). . . Regardless of their race, these men are living double lives, talking in doublespeak. "I''m gay," one says, "but I like to call myself bi." "I''m married," another says, "and I only play around with other married guys."
In such cases, marriage is apparently regarded as a mere impediment to self-realization. This is how McGreevey himself regarded it when he spoke of the need "to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world." In the face of such "truth" — a word which originally, as in its cognate troth, meant faithfulness — his marriage vows were a mere triviality, an obstacle in the way of being himself. Yet at the same time Jonathan Rauch, one of the most prominent public advocates of gay marriage and someone with whom I agree on almost every subject but this one, argues in the New York Times that this same roadblock on the way to happiness and self-fulfilment is really the means to the same, and that "alienation from marriage twists and damages gay souls." Gay men like McGreevey would presumably, if marriage to another man were available to them, choose that and with it the high road to happiness instead of the sham marriage which they actually did choose and which now stands in the way of that happiness.
But hang on. What is it that those twisted and damaged gay souls are alienated from? Marriage is the vows that Governor McGreevey willingly took and then, like many others both gay and straight, chose to defy for the sake of his unique and individual "truth." If he found that outside of his marriage, why can’t other gay men? And why is it a condition of their not being twisted and damaged that they should be free to burden themselves with precisely the obstacle to self-fulfilment that McGreevey had to free himself from? Is it one kind of marriage or two that the gay marriage advocates are asking for. If self-realization trumps the formal vows of Marriage I, why are we to suppose that the vows of Marriage II will suddenly become a fulfilment in themselves? Do gay people not grow and change and find their true selves in new places irrespective of whether they first contracted to a member of their own sex or the opposite?
Not Made Up But Unmade.
June 30, 2004.
What’s the difference between knowledge and information? If you can bear to read it, Bob Woodward’s book provides the answer — From The New Criterion of June, 2004 ...
Full Article
Obligations to "Spin".
May 31, 2004.
Richard Clarke, Howell Raines, Jayson Blair — all are the heroes of their own self-manufactured dramas to which they imagine we all ought to pay attention— From The New Criterion of May, 2004 ...
Full Article
Virgin Flight.
May 31, 2004.
What’s happened to romance? Who would have thought that it could survive in France, of all places?— From The American Spectator of May, 2004 ...
Full Article
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