Two items of news today caught my eye:
- Pope Benedict XVI referred to arguments for recognition of same-sex relationships as “dismal theories.”
- The New York Blade recapped a UCLA study (cited in my Weekly Political Roundup last week) claiming “New Jersey florists, caterers, hotels and other businesses would bring in more than $100 million in additional revenue per year if the state allowed gay couples to marry there.”
I was going make a crack that economics being “the dismal science,” this would seem to indicate the pope is right, what with recognition of same-sex relationships stimulating the economy.
I discovered, however, that “dismal science” was first used by nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle to denigrate the views of those who supported the emancipation of slaves. As two modern professors of economics explain: “It was this fact—that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty—that led Carlyle to label economics ‘the dismal science.'” Maybe, therefore, the pope is closer in spirit to Carlyle when he refers to “dismal theories.”
What made me really laugh, however, was the sentence in which Carlyle first used his famous phrase: “Not a ‘gay science,’ I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”
This means we have the pope equating things “gay” and “dismal,” and Carlyle, similarly arguing against the idea of liberty for all, contrasting them. Carlyle means “gay” in a different sense, of course—but the juxtaposition of the two terms again gave me a chuckle. (It’s possible that doing last-minute holiday shopping with a three-year-old has addled my brain.)
With that, I’ll leave you to don your gay apparel for the holidays.