The Maureen Dowd Two Minute Mock

The Personal is Maureen Dowd

June 30, 2003

While reading Ann Coulter’s new book, Treason, I came across a passage that applied to our Whitehouse mountaineer, Ms. Dowd, like a muzzle on a Dalmatian. Coulter wrote: “Liberals write essays like little kids making up a melody. They meander along, issuing contradictory snide remarks about Bush, until they run out of energy and finally conclude with some incongruous, throaty peroration.” [p.14]

Ms. Coulter would be proud as today’s column concluded with the peroration “loosen up, Nino, baby.” Maureen has made up another fine melody about a Supreme Court Justice, but this time her snide remarks concern Antonin Scalia alone. In the piece, “Nino’s Opera Bouffe,” Maureen attacks Justice Scalia for having the nerve to dissent in the holy Lawrence v. Texas decision from last week.

She begins her column by letting the typical NYT reader know that Justice Scalia is a Christian and also a conservative which are major offenses in the world of Timespeak. After she gives notice of his extremism her clairvoyance is used to alert us that he’s “misty over the era when military institutes did not have to accept women, when elite schools did not have to make special efforts with blacks, when a gay couple in their own bedroom could be clapped in irons, when women were packed off to Our Lady of Perpetual Abstinence Home for Unwed Mothers.” All of these claims are fabricated and no evidence is provided to support her accusations. Yet, in her intellectual shantytown, being a Christian and a conservative is de facto proof of universal evil, so she has no need to justify any assaults that she makes.

Throughout this column, Ms. Dowd once again proves that separating the personal from the political is an absolute impossibility for her.

The Lawrence case overturned the previous Bowers case which outlawed sodomy. Dowd claims Scalia “relishes eternal principles, like helping a son of the establishment dispense with the messiness of a presidential vote count.” Well, there were pretty good reasons why he voted the way he did in Bush v. Gore but I’m sure Maureen wasn’t open to interpreting any of them. Further, three recounts proved Bush the winner, yet her real reason for mentioning this is to smear Scalia as a political animal. He is not one, but this shows there is no cheap shot or gimmick Maureen is above initiating.

She then compares him to Archie Bunker (I’m not kidding–hit the link) and that he “fulminated in a last gasp of the old Pat Buchanan/Bill Bennett homophobic conservatism.” Why? Did someone forget to inform Scalia that it is forbidden to dissent in politically correct cases?

Here she proves how evil political correctness is. It is all encompassing. Gays are nobility in the PC worldview so we must accept anything the NYT wants to shove down our throats. Is being homophobic the rationale behind Scalia’s dissent? Let us see.

Scalia argues that, unlike the Justices in the majority opinion, states have a legitimate right to legislate against incest, bestiality and bigamy and that the outcome of this case would be “the end of all morals legislation.” It is the court’s job to examine range of impact and not to confine itself to the emotional issue of whether or not gays should be allowed to fornicate. I, myself, have no problem with what they do in the privacy of their own homes and Justice Thomas, who also dissented, stated that he would vote “to repeal it” [the sodomy law] if he lived in Texas. At issue to him and Scalia is whether or not the citizens of a state have the right to make laws prohibiting social behavior and if those laws are in fact constitutional. They viewed this particular “silly law” as being within the proscribed limits of our constitution even though it outlaws sodomy (which the NYT would say perhaps is above the concept of constitutionality as it is the building block of any high-achieving society).

The Editors at The Wall Street Journal confirmed Justice Scalia’s concern on Friday: “The nine Justices are not legislators, however, and in deciding Lawrence they have once more usurped the electorate's right to find its own consensus on matters of social mores. The Court's opinion suggests that as those mores change the Justices have the power to reinvent the Constitution's privacy right along with it.” Link.

Intelligent minds can differ on this issue of whether this law was constitutional but not in the judgment of Ms. Dowd. To her, dissent equals conspiracy. She mocks Scalia’s opinion that such political decisions could cause a massive disruption of the social order and throws up the straw man of masturbation as proof. Of course, Scalia never mentioned laws against masturbation. Then she mentions bestiality through a reference to Justice Thomas but I think she makes a mistake by doing so. Incest and bestiality are the major reasons why Scalia’s dissent resonated with this particular citizen (and perhaps you) when I read it. She offers no response to the bestiality position that Scalia cited other than as a mechanism to slight Justice Thomas.

She continues to degrade conservatives by claiming that we fear lap dancing. Maureen, if you’re listening, incest is not lap dancing. There are valid reasons why a state should outlaw incest. Ms. Dowd then takes the opportunity to ridicule the institution of marriage: “[n]ote to the panicked right: Newsweek just reported married heterosexuals were strangers to sex. So, if you want gay couples to stop having sex, let them get married.” Surely Newsweek reported no such thing and this is just another way in which she personalizes her attacks on the opposition. Perhaps she is merely struggling in vain to find ways to reconcile herself to an unmarried state. I have no way of knowing. I don’t care about the angle from which she comes, but I do wish she’d stop pretending conservatives like myself give a darn about gay couples having sex or any of the other red herrings she throws around as if the feeder of an obese liberal Shamoo.

No accusation is spared in regards to Scalia. “Most Americans, even Republicans, have a more tolerant and happy vision of the country than Mr. Scalia and other nattering nabobs of negativism. Their jeremiads yearn for an airbrushed 50's America that never really existed. (The pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, which condemns homosexuality, proves that.) And the America they feared — everyone having orgies, getting stoned and burning the flag — never came to pass.”

In this passage we see why rejoinder must be given to Maureen Dowd. She pretends that she understands conservatives and that she even has a psychological understanding of Supreme Court Justices. Ms. Dowd has no better understanding of conservatives than I have knowledge of the conjunctive verbs in the Swahili language. She obviously doesn’t know any conservatives at all. I’ve never heard a conservative rail against orgies or marijuana before. The war on drugs is largely accepted by both parties and conservatives are far more tolerant of human failings than most of the anti-liberals I have met. We do not hold people to PC ideals. Conservatives accept that man has, and always will have, good and bad aspects.

Ms. Dowd is such an ideologue that she can not respect logic or reasoning if it differs from her ideology. She, not Scalia, is the political animal, as inherent to her presumption of being the center of the universe, everyone else must share her personality’s characteristics. Opera bouffe refers to operas that are comic and farcical, but what is comic about this piece is not Mr. Scalia’s words. It is the writer herself. Scalia is a serious man, not the type of featherweight who personalizes the law and his profession. Only Maureen Dowd could take a sophisticated, erudite opinion like the one he wrote and scream “homophobe” as a response. Ms. Dowd would do well to learn from his example and give those she disagrees with serious time and study. Justice Scalia’s dissent was not an easy read, but she’d do well to examine it.

Bernard Chapin