Van Helsing: Gentlemen, we are dealing with the undead…

Scholar: Nosferatu…

Van Helsing: Yes, Nosferatu.

Well, there are lots of reasons to be creeped out by Ratzinger, but the whole “former Nazi” thing is unfair.

Ratzinger was 12 years old when World War II broke out. When he was 14 he joined the Hitler Youth because all teenage boys were forced to join the Hitler Youth by law. When he got older he was drafted into the military and he deserted his post at risk of summary execution. Ratzinger’s a lot of things, many of them bad, but a “former Nazi” isn’t one of them.

Of course you don’t want to criticize John Milton for not using inclusive language or Victorian authors for perpetuating the anatomical mystery of the vagina. These are more modern concepts of equality.

Well, why wouldn’t you want to criticize them for this? If positing men as the default is bad for women now it was bad for women then, too, wasn’t it?

Amp:

But we won’t do it, because it would require spending precious tax dollars, and too many Americans would rather see some poor pothead or shoplifter raped than pay higher taxes.

Well. There’s a lot of reasons to condemn popular attitudes towards prison rape (a lot of people continue to think that it’s absolutely hilarious when made into a broad joke). But I don’t think that the issue has anything in particular to do with tax rates. Legislators routinely raise taxes or issue bonds, with no particular political consequence, for building more and larger prisons and have been doing so for years. (Sometimes they even manage to Mau Mau 51+% of ordinary people into signing on to it in a local referendum on, e.g., building a new county jail.)

Voters ought to take rape in prisons seriously enough to ensure that something is done about it, and it’s a sad commentary that they don’t. But the primary source of the problem isn’t voters at all; it’s corrections officers and the prison bureaucracy, who have repeatedly shown their willingness to encourage a climate of sexual violence and terror as a means of internal control—either directly or by turning a strategic blind eye—and to protect each other behind a Blue Wall when guards are negligent or are committing the assaults themselves. Power corrupts, and unaccountable power corrupts without limit.

There’s plenty of money to solve these problems already. The problem is that the legislators don’t care and the corrections officers’ unions block serious reform efforts at every step.

“This view is shared by noted religious theologian Mel Gibson.”

That’s Gibson’s view but it’s not the modern Church’s view. Church teaching since Vatican II flatly contradicts it. Gibson is speaking here as a member of an apostate sect that rejects Vatican II entirely.

“Even in the most strict interpretation, the statement by Jesus does not preclude Protestants from reaching salvation.”

Neither does Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement. Church teaching since Vatican II (Unitatis Redintegratio) has been that trinitarian churches other than the Roman Catholic Church are doctrinally and liturgically “deficient” (which is why the Pope’s Catholic rather than Baptist) but that they participate in the small-c catholic church of Christ and that members of them can be saved.

The brethren divided from us also use many liturgical actions of the Christian religion. These most certainly can truly engender a life of grace in ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or Community. These liturgical actions must be regarded as capable of giving access to the community of salvation.

It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.

Ratzinger’s line in Dominus Iesus doesn’t contradict this; it repeats it. The emphasis is shifted to the deficiency rather than the grace, to be sure, but emphasis can shift depending on your purpose, and it’s important to note that in Christian theology saying a person can receive divine grace commits you to saying that they can receive salvation.

Not that I don’t think he’s wrong. I do. But I think he’s wrong because I think God doesn’t exist, not because I think there’s some antagonism here between Ratzinger and Jesus as we find him in the Gospels.

I think you are reading too much into it.

The ruling doesn’t indicate that Dworkin’s brief singled out the description of her as a lesbian as libelous (indeed the ruling says she doesn’t challenge that description in her brief). I’d have to see the appellate briefs (which may be out there, but which I can’t find on the Internet) to know for sure, but it looks pretty likely that Dworkin identified the whole passage as libelous, and that the four claims considered by the court were what the judge parsed out as the statements of fact contained in the passage, not anything that Dworkin singled out. It’s a short passage, and the claim that she’s a lesbian is contained in a single adjective rather than so much as a whole sentence, so it would have been hard to complain about a libel in it without including the sentence in which she is described as a lesbian—even if the description of her as a lesbian is not what she was calling libelous.

Andrea was, incidentally, openly a lesbian, as she attests not only in her address but also e.g. in her memoir, Heartbreak and in numerous interviews. (John Stoltenberg’s essay about living with Andrea recounts how the editor of the New York Times Style page refused to allow the writer to identify them as gay and lesbian, as they had asked to be identified, in 1985.) You might think that the fact that they thought of each other as “life partners” and “in love” with each other tends to disqualify her as a lesbian and him as gay. Without prying unnecessarily into their sex lives, this at least seems like good reason to think that they were intensely romantically connected. But that’s only true if you think that “lesbian” means “a woman only romantically involved with other women” and gay means “a man only romantically involved with other men.” Some people use the words that way and other people don’t; it’s important, if nothing else, to know that a lot of women in the lesbian and radical feminist communities in the 1970s didn’t use the word that way. So it’s not weird or unusual that Andrea Dworkin would describe herself that way.

An argument stands or falls on its own merits, not on the appearance of (or any other facts about) the person who is giving it.

You might say that biographical facts about Dworkin (or Flynt or Goldstein) can be useful to understanding why they argue the way the do, or why they focus on what they focus on, or what have you. That’s fine, but that’s not the same thing as evaluating the arguments that they give (which is a matter for logic, not psychoanalysis).

If you try to argue (as obliterati does above) that Dworkin is unattractive and therefore does not need to be taken seriously when she gives moral and political arguments against pornography. This is just an argumentum ad hominem (abusive form). A rather sleazy one, in this case, since it involves nasty personal abuse and participates in well-worn misogynist gambits. Part of the point here is that nobody would think it’s appropriate to treat male scholars this way: if you went around saying things like “Harold Bloom is a fat old pervert. Who cares what he argues about love and sex in early modern literature?” or “Norman Mailer is a ghastly little garden gnome; what does he know about pornography or sex in contemporary literature?” you would (rightly) be regarded as a twit.

Argue with the text, or don’t bother.

See, that’s quite a lot of work when the books are mostly crap. But lets go through a summary of stereotypical “Dworkin thoughts”, which really is all you’re going to get out of an amateur of course . . .

Have you ever read one of her books? I mean, actually read it, from beginning to end? If so, why not talk about that book and the specific lines of argument that you find especially weak rather than pulling out a few unsourced quotes that you don’t have the context for? If not, then how do you have any idea whether or not “the books are mostly crap” in the first place?

This is important, because many of Dworkin’s critics accuse her, without any particular reference to her work, of things that she never said or advocated. Here’s an example:

You start randomly outlawing erotica like she wanted and you give rise to just about every bad thing there is about censorship and morality police and invasion of provacy.

But Andrea Dworkin never proposed “outlawing erotica” (let alone doing so “randomly,” whatever that means). She was a very harsh critic of pornography—and you can give arguments for or against her critical analysis of pornography—and she proposed laws which would allow women to sue pornographers for violations of their civil rights if specific abuses were committed against them because of the production or distribution of pornography—and you can give arguments for or against her model civil rights ordinance. But she was opposed in principle to both “obscenity” law and the use of criminal law to ban pornography. You might know this if you had read some of the things she’s written about it.

To suggest that *my* use of porn for instance, might somehow be involved in the plague of rape, which her writing states clearly, or that casual enjoyment of porn somehow condones rape, causes rape, necessarily profits from rape, …etc., is a despicable twisting of the facts of porn.

That’s an interesting assertion you’ve got there. Care to give the argument for it?

… the market for visual stimulation, which is a place where she has no business being.

This is, frankly, a useless cheap-shot. A sleazy cheap-shot that you ought to be embarassed you engaged in.

But even besides her legal and porn studies and everything else, much of her work is bland emotional outpouring about why no one loves her. Here’s another quote for you:

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.

Nota bene: this passage is neither bland, nor particularly emotional, nor is it about who does or doesn’t love Andrea Dworkin (she does not mention herself at all). These are all things that you have read into the passage without any clear grounds for doing so.

Which is bullshit, as a theory on love, and I’m sure you agree.

You presume too much. First, because it’s not Andrea Dworkin’s “theory on love”; it’s her description of “love” as portrayed in pornography and as experienced under the conditions of a male-centric society, something which she takes to be a man-made social reality but something that can and should be changed. (You’d know this if you’d read The Root Cause, the essay from which the quote is taken from.) Second, because you presume that it is obviously false to anyone who reads it. But it’s not. In fact, it seems to me that it’s a rather obviously correct reading of how love has been portrayed, over and over again, in our culture—in literature, in pornography, in psychology, in religion, and everywhere else. Now, you may not find that convincing yourself; that’s fine, but you ought to give some arguments for why you think it’s unconvincing, rather than just pointing to the quote, declaring that it is bullshit, and relying on the fact that this is obvious to you (and therefore to everyone else?) to carry the day.

You know who is really ugly? Larry Flynt. Slimey, incoherent, drooling, pug-ugly Larry Flynt. If there is someone I would never, ever want to think of having any kind of sexual contact whatsoever, it is Larry Flynt.

You know who else is really ugly? Al Goldstein. If there’s someone else I’d never, ever want to think about having any kind of sexual contact whatsoever, it’s definitely Al Goldstein.

Strangely, the people who are so firmly convinced that their sleazy little snickers at Andrea Dworkin’s appearance are absolutely vital to understanding and replying to her arguments on pornography don’t seem interested in my pain-staking research into the absolutely vital issue of how ugly Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein are.

I wonder why that is.