A nugget of wisdom in Eve Tushnet’s complicated narrative about the history of queerness (“Paired,” November) is surely that intense and lifelong friendships between LGBT persons have always had the same potential as pathways to holiness as heterosexual marriages do. As Tushnet writes late in her essay, queer “friendship reflects the relationship of Christ and his Church as well as marriage does.” That is beautifully put.
What strains credibility beyond breaking is Tushnet’s claim that queer friendships are such pathways because they are celibate. Even more strained is her insistence that the Catechism’s call for queer persons to embrace “disinterested friendship” amounts to a radical call to embodied love (2359). She says we miss this radical call to love because we individualist moderns are caught in the mistaken view that “friendship is for childhood, while romance, sex, and marriage are treated as the adult forms of love.” She thinks Luther is the source of this mistake, though she provides no evidence.
I don’t know about Luther, but I do know Tushnet misses that, in the twentieth century, official Catholicism began to embrace a married couple’s sexual life as precisely the place where God comes to meet them. For the first time ever, the papal encyclical Casti connubii (1930) saw marriage’s holiness as coming from its “communion of total life” (24). And Gaudium et spes made clear that sexual love is constitutive of this communion: “Authentic married love is caught up into divine love…so that this love may lead the spouses to God” (48).
Tushnet is wrong about the Catechism. The consensus understanding is that the source of its term “disinterested love” is Stoicism’s distrust of particular friendships and conviction that all relationships of a truly virtuous person are marked by “indifference.” In his biting critique of the Stoics, Plutarch put it this way: “They reject and spurn common experience as indifferent and useless and insignificant for happiness.”
Kudos to Tushnet for rescuing the goodness of the “ardent” same-sex love that has long been lived by committed celibates. But her tendentious understanding of friendship leaves LGBT persons in the same old place: we are fine as long as we do not act on our deepest desires. There is absolutely nothing Catholic about that.
William McDonough
St. Catherine University
Minneapolis, Minn.
False Populism
Having avoided commentary in major news media on the outcome of the presidential election, I looked forward to reading the set of targeted commentaries supplied by Commonweal. Rand Richards Cooper’s (“The Normies Take Flight”) and Alexander Stern’s (“Will 2016 Never End?”) online reflections, in their respective ways, tack to what is quickly becoming the canonical view of the 2024 election. They fault the Democratic Party and its nominee for political myopia and insensitivity. In leveling this criticism, they subscribe to the view that the Democratic Party is an educated elite that has been out of touch since 2016. That criticism has a limited, and in any case strictly temporary, validity while masking a positive danger: as a self-criticism, it is not only self-subverting but also corrosive, for it sows doubt in the value of the very thing on which informed civic consciousness rests: namely, sound education.
Trump has profited not only from the erosion of confidence in public institutions but also from a decades-long leveling down of informed public consciousness. Naked appeals to prejudice and mere opinion have reached new heights in the self-congratulatory atmosphere of numerous media outlets and websites. Cooper reaches back to William Jennings Bryan for a precedent to Trump’s performances and his manifest effect on audiences. The comparison is superficial. It seems motivated by a desire to find any American precedent at all for the Trump phenomenon, when the truth is that among the major parties’ nominees for the presidency, there is none. William Jennings Bryan was a schooled orator who could speak at great length in complex sentences on a subject without losing focus. Trump is unschooled: he reads nothing and cannot be bothered to be informed on a subject. His speeches, such as they are, have no focus except an indistinct sense of grievance that the United States is not what it once was. Cooper sees, and even seems grudgingly impressed by, Trump’s ability to establish an effective rapport with his audience. Yet he does not examine the tenor or the pitch of that rapport, which is altogether different from Bryan’s example. Bryan was a populist, but he was a progressive populist who opposed American imperialism and the power of trusts and corporations and advocated for greater federal intervention on behalf of farmers and the working class. Trump’s true exemplar is Silvio Berlusconi, who, like Trump, entered politics without having held elected public office and thrived on division by appealing to citizens’ sense of grievance.
Trump’s victory proves how deep-seated American suspicion of the federal government remains. Alexis de Tocqueville already noticed this in the 1830s. The difference today is the extent to which Americans’ lives are penetrated in barely perceptible ways—not by the federal government (“the deep state”), but by corporations whose insidious domination brooks practically no resistance, least of all from the halls of Congress. It is in this respect that both the Democratic and Republican Parties may be said to have failed the American people. To be roused from this malign combination of indifference and complicity, the political parties must first receive impulses from the people themselves. The impulse to resist, however, is diffuse and scattered. In another time, labor unions served as the focus where impulses for resistance and change coalesced and became an articulate force. But in the twenty-first century, with the decline of churches, labor unions, and more local forms of social cohesion (see Robert Bellah), focus is diminished and ephemeral. This is the true myopia. In the absence of any real vectors for change, the nearly fatal character of American individualism evinces itself. As Trump and the Republican Party demonstrate, the boogeyman called federal regulation can always be summoned to trump and silence any live movement to the contrary.
Journalists and commentators are announcing what a hard road the Democratic Party must take. If the Democratic Party were aware of that, it would already be one step ahead, because the future of the Republican Party and of the American republic is the same hard road.
J. M. Baker, Jr.
Malvern, Pa.
