Sullivan, Moralism and Morality

W. Kiernan WKiernan at concentric.net
Thu May 31 16:30:41 PDT 2001


LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
>
> ...You would think that it is a piece of cake for everyone, and that no
> one ever experiences any difficulty.

Well, that was a good thought, and in ASCII TEXT, yeah!

My initial impulse is, gotta agree with you, just as a personal distaste it nauseates me to have the press ram details about other people's sex lives down my throat, to where I yank my eyeglasses off before I go into the checkout line so I won't involuntarily read the tabloid headlines.

But, while I didn't really want to know anything, not a single thing, about Andrew Sullivan's personal life, I can't read this as an attack against him personally, it's an analysis of his professional product. A press review. Writing about sex, including his own personal sex life, in a nationally distributed magazine, is this guy's job. When you buy a copy of the New Republic, you're purchasing that work, and as a customer you're entitled to analyze and discuss the quality of it. For him to complain about invasion of privacy when someone merely fact-checks his editorial writing is like Madonna Ciccone complaining because someone's distributing nude pictures of her, and she's so embarrassed.

OK, in this magazine article or that, Mr. Sullivan writes so-and-so about gay monogamy vs. promiscuity, saying in effect "This is my true opinion." Paying customers want to know: is this guy speaking from conviction or is he bullshitting us? You say:


> ...His big crime is that he thinks that monogamy is an individual and
> social good, for homosexual as well as heterosexual.

Caveat emptor, turns out he doesn't actually _think_ that, he just says it.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list