Two fight of center writers I generally like, Jennifer Roback Morse and Dorian Davis, both discuss gay marriage today in problematic pieces.
Morse’s column is more problematic. I normally like her a great deal, and I wholeheartedly recommend her pamphlet101 tips on a happier marriage. That said, here’s a bit of what she wrote today:
Well, it is official. You won. We lost. Same sex marriage is the law in California. We might win the amendment in the fall, but let’s face it. The momentum is on your side: the Inexorable March of Progress and all that.
Other states will recognize California’s same sex marriages? The Federal government will? (Answers: no and no.) Morse surely knows this, which is why much of the rest of her piece, giving advice to same sex quasi-married people has a less than happy tone:
Now that same sex couples can marry, there is no longer any excuse for the State of California to encourage non-marital cohabitation, by opposite sex couples or same sex couples. California should shut down the domestic partnership registries. Cohabitation is socially and privately inferior to marriage. The state should insist that couples either put up or shut up: get married or be single. No more half-way house of marriage-lite.
Few same sex couples have taken advantage of the opportunity to marry, even where it is legal. So far, Massachusetts has the highest rate of marriage among gay individuals: a mere 16% of the gay population has married. I somehow doubt that the remaining 84% are living celibate lives. Some of them are cohabiting. These high rates of same sex cohabitation have got to stop.
If there actually was genuine marriage available, I’d agree with her. But since there isn’t, I can’t. For sake of argument, I can’t marry a British man and expect the federal government to recognize the marriage for the sake of citizenship. We’re still dealing with marriage-lite right now. If a couple married in California moves out of state, I’d recommend they get a domestic partnership in their new state of residence because there’s no guarantee that their California marriage will be valid in Connecticut.
Still, I actually do agree with Morse on one key point in her column:
I have in my filing cabinet some model legislation that would make adultery a civil offense. That means that a faithful spouse has the right to sue an adulterous spouse for damages. Don’t get me wrong: no policemen will be peaking in people’s windows. The injured party gets to decide whether it is worthwhile, all things considered, to sue. My guess is that few people would bring such suits. But lawyers and marriage counselors who practiced back in the Bad Old Days before no-fault will tell you: the threat of such lawsuits deterred a lot of bad behavior. Now that gays can marry, you have just as great an interest in marital fidelity as the rest of us.
I’ve been looking for someone to introduce this legislation. Maybe if a member of GLBTQ caucus introduces the legislation, it will get some traction.
You who made the conservative case for same sex marriage convinced the public that same sex marriage would provide the same private and social benefits as opposite sex marriage. But marriage is more than just a set of benefits: marriage also is a set of obligations and constraints. Those of us in the Marriage Movement have been trying to help people see that there is freedom within those constraints. But it has been a tough sell. People want only the benefits and none of the obligations. People go for the short-term gratification and miss the Big Prize: lifelong married love.
Now that you can marry, I assume that you are on board. I look forward to hearing from you.
I’m not an elected official, but strengthening marriage with civil offense laws makes sense to me. Even though there isn’t gay marriage yet, of course. Given the confusing mishmash of state, local, and federal laws, today’s committed same sex couples get lots of extra obligations and fewer benefits. And I think having Dr. Morse speak at some couples’ retreats that I know some gay people do before commitment ceremonies would be a good idea. (See her pamphlet for more; I link twice because it really is among the best $4.77 you can spend.)
Dorian Davis (H/T) argues that Republicans should embrace gay marriage:
It also puts Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage on the losing end of a civil rights issue – the last place that Republicans can afford to be considering their already damaged brand. Indeed, the collateral damage from their same-sex marriage exploitation now could be the loss of much of a new generation of Republicans later – a fate more catastrophic, one could argue, than seeing Ellen Degeneres and Portia De Rossi married. In California, for instance, almost 70 percent of respondents under 30 support same-sex marriage, compared with just 35 percent of those over 65, according to the Field Poll. National numbers bare out the same idea. In their May 2008 poll, USA Today/Washington Post reported that almost 80 percent of the under-30 crowd considered same-sex marriage a “private” matter, while just 45 percent of seniors agreed. Of all the lost causes to pursue, then, a same-sex marriage ban seems not just futile but dangerous if Republicans hope to be competitive with the next generation of voters.
As I recall, the Equal Rights Amendment was also inevitable and had large majorities of the country behind it and then it flopped. Further, just because most people support an issue doesn’t mean that their support of it will determine their votes. For example, most polls show that gun control is popular in the nation at large; pluralities and majorities favor stricter gun control laws. But the gun owning minority cares much more about gun control as an issue, which is why most politicians try to be pro-gun rather than pro-gun control.
The overwhelming majority of people are straight, and most of them aren’t particularly hard-core supporters of gay marriage. I think most of us on this blog support gay marriage, but all of us (queer me included) are willing to vote for politicians who oppose gay marriage; it isn’t a make-or-break issue for us.
So, contra Morse, gay marriage isn’t here yet; contra Davis, it isn’t inevitable. Alas.
From Reason magazine (which really ought to look into changing its name to something more appropriate, such as Smugness)
Like many things Sailer writes, I didn’t realize it was so until I read it from him. But Reason, with the notable exception of their clips from the delightful Drew Carey, has got to be the smuggest journal of opinion not written by Communists.
P.S. Having just glanced at Reason’s home page, I’m curious if anyone knows why the Ron Paul campaign spelled revolution, “rEVOLution”? Every time I saw one of those signs, I just thought it was “love” spelled backwards, but that doesn’t really make much sense, especially in light of the Paul campaign. What was I missing?
Apollo posted this at 12:46 AM HKT on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 as Conservatism, Journalism
I hesitated to post this on the grounds that critiquing Moveon.org is like shooting an overweight Mola mola with a shotgun, but this ridiculous ad touched on a theme we’ve mentioned before:
To a certain kind of lefty, every 18-year-old who volunteers to join the military is a victimized child, while every 13-year-old who wants an abortion is an adult making an informed choice.
[I]magine your life without marriage. Meaning, not merely your life if you didn’t happen to get married. What I am asking you to imagine is life without even the possibility of marriage.
Re-enter your childhood, but imagine your first crush, first kiss, first date and first sexual encounter, all bereft of any hope of marriage as a destination for your feelings. Re-enter your first serious relationship, but think about it knowing that marrying the person is out of the question.
Imagine that in the law’s eyes you and your soul mate will never be more than acquaintances. And now add even more strangeness. Imagine coming of age into a whole community, a whole culture, without marriage and the bonds of mutuality and kinship that go with it.
What is this weird world like? It has more sex and less commitment than a world with marriage. It is a world of fragile families living on the shadowy outskirts of the law; a world marked by heightened fear of loneliness or abandonment in crisis or old age; a world in some respects not even civilized, because marriage is the foundation of civilization.
This was the world I grew up in. The AIDS quilt is its monument.
In his own way, David Frum provides an answer to what straight life would be without marriage:
My late mother was once asked by an interviewer: “Do you ever have dreams about being single again?” She answered: “I have nightmares about it.” One would fear not only losing the one you love — but also of losing the better self into which love has made you.
When I asked my wife to marry me all those years ago, I quoted Evelyn Waugh’s letter proposing marriage to his second wife: “True it will be nasty for you — but think how nice it will be for me!” It was — and it is.
I was mildly excited a few days ago when Obama delivered a speech saying that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Like anyone who has even a slight amount of knowledge on the topic, I know that whether Jerusalem should be divided is one of the big issues in the near east. I liked that Obama was taking Israel’s side.
Silly me, I should have known Obama never means what he says. He now claims that he didn’t know “undivided” was an important word in the region. The Reuters story defends him against charges of naivete. I’m not sure why that’s the issue; “ignorance” is a much better word. Obama was just mouthing off about something he doesn’t know much about.
Here’s a nifty trick: Obama says that Republicans will use his race against him. They’ve haven’t, of course. So Obama is here calling Republicans racist for something they haven’t done. He’s not waiting around to use his race as a shied; he’s launching a preemptive attack with his sword.
Also note, the end of the story mentions his Philadelphia speech, and the only comment on it is that it was “widely praised.” The fact that he’s since gone back on the actual substance of that speech, and that it now looks ridiculous, is unimportant; it was widely praised at the time. I’m getting a feeling that’s how it’s going to be with an Obama candidacy.
The Latin motto is “Vero Possumus,” which the New York Times translates as “Yes we can.” My knowledge of Latin isn’t great, but it looks to me like it says, “Truly, it is possible for us.” Any other possible translations?
Once, David Brooks liked Obama (he sounds almost like Andrew Sullivan in this first passage):
Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.
The key word in any Obama speech is “you.” Other politicians talk about what they will do if elected. Obama talks about what you can do if you join together. Like a community organizer on a national scale, he is trying to move people beyond their cynicism, make them believe in themselves, mobilize their common energies.
Later, he started getting concerned; one could almost see Brooks’s furled brow:
In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.
Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.
If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.
But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.
For what it’s worth, I think that after liking Obama too much, Brooks has gone overboard and is now fearing Obama too much. If Obama was so brainy, he would have left Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko behind years ago. My own contribution to the field of Obamology is that he has no core identity, so he adjusts to each environment—Hawaii, Harvard, Chicago, Washington—as he needs to. It’s oversimplifying to say he’s a phony, which is the term my Jerry Brown loving mother gave him, but it does have some truth to it. To borrow a phrase from the self-declared Ayatollah of the Assembly, Willie Brown, Obama has “ice water in his veins.”
And in the exhaustive and exhausting coverage that envelopes a modern presidential campaign, the chill in Obama won’t stay hid for long. Remember his comments about voters being bitter? There’s a certain chilly rationalism there, the heart of a political scientist rather than a person: I think that’s the real Obama speaking. Knowing what Obama’s really like leads to perhaps the only way for McCain to win the presidency.
If McCain can drown out the media narrative of him being ancient and cantankerous and Bush’s third term with his own warmth and humanity, then he’ll beat the cold Obama.
Hubbard posted this at 2:29 PM HKT on Friday, June 20th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
Two studies suggest that men who are narcissistic, psychopathic and Machiavellian tend to have large numbers of sexual conquests.
The traits are said to be epitomised in Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent with a licence to kill, 007.
Scientists believe the reproductive success of “dark triad” men explains why the traits persist in the human population, despite the harm they can cause.
Narcissists are self obsessed and manipulative, psychopaths are impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous, and people with a Machiavellian nature are deceitful and exploitative. There is evidence that the traits have an up-side – they lead to men having a prolific sex life and fathering more offspring. As a result, they have not been “weeded out” by natural selection.
A team of US scientists led by Dr Peter Jonason, from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, conducted personality tests on 200 college students designed to rank them for each of the “dark triad” traits.
The students were also questioned about their attitudes to sexual relationships and their sex lives. They were asked how many partners they had had, and whether they were seeking brief affairs.
Those who scored higher on the “dark triad” personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short flings. But this pattern only held true for males — no link between promiscuity and the traits was seen in female students.
When asked how the human race should communicate to aliens, biologist Lewis Thomas said, “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”
When the Voyager spacecraft carried music representative of the earth, Bach was the most represented artist. One of the selections was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major. Interestingly, the Brandenburg Concerto was originally part of a job application on Bach’s part. From Wiki [emphasis added]:
Perhaps the finest concertos in all music, and Bach was turned down. Today’s job applicants, take note: some of your interviewers may be almost as clueless as Margrave Ludwig.
If you think the next appointments to our Supreme Court are important, you know that elections matter.
If you live in the City of New Orleans, you know that elections matter.
(APPLAUSE)
If you or a member of your family are serving in the active military, the National Guard or Reserves, you know that elections matter. (APPLAUSE)
If you’re a wounded veteran, you know that elections matter.
If you lost your job, if you’re struggling with your mortgage, you know that elections matter.
(APPLAUSE)
If you care about a clean environment, if you want a government that protects you instead of special interests, you know that elections matter.
If you care about food safety, if you like a T on your BLT, you know that elections matter.
(APPLAUSE)
If you bought poisoned lead-filled toys from China or adulterated medicine made in China, if you bought tainted pet food made in China, you know that elections matter.
After the last eight years, even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.
More than that: my dog was a happy, healthy mutt when President Bush came into office. She’s dead now. Whaddaya say to that Bush? Huh? Huh!?
Tom posted this at 2:18 PM HKT on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 as Buffoon Watch
Pretty much any time a news story involves numbers, you can count on journalists and editors to screw up basic arithmatic. Here’s the latest example:
According to a report released in April 2004 by the Congressional Research Service, the average price for petrol in the United States during the summer of 2003 was 1.74 dollars per gallon (around 3.5 liters).
Today, gasoline prices across the United States are around 3.5 times higher, averaging more than four dollars per gallon.
3.5*1.74=6.09. The day may come when gas will top $6, but it is not this day.
Apollo posted this at 1:58 PM HKT on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 as Journalism
