Pandagon

Denied

A warning to any political operatives out there: my college hosts an annual tradition wherein men cross-dress. I have participated in it. Therefore, I cannot run in a Republican primary in Texas - sadly, my life hope.

A Gay Old Time

In a move that should surprise nobody, John Derbyshire is going to use the word "gay" a lot because he's pissed at homosexuals.

Outside The Box Thinking

The new solution to the same-sex marriage debate (and, some would say, the right one): marriages for none!

Prager's Prediction

Anyone remember when Dennis Prager said that the fight against same-sex marriages and the fight against terrorism were the same thing?

Expect to see I Really Do Hate Gay People II next week, on the heels of this story.

Popping Out Babies In The Heezy, Fo'sheezi

Donald Sensing writes an article about how the birth control pill and cohabitation have led to same-sex marriage.

It's a wild ride through a series of disjointed and ahistorical tangents, with yet another non-scholarly scholar declaring that marriage has always been about whatever it is homosexuals can't do. I'm sure that if homosexuality is genetic, marriage will all of a sudden have been about rewarding heterosexual chromosomes.

It's a strangely narrow view of marriage - the perpetuation of society through childbirth, children being the focal point of the bond. However, if you actually study the history of marriage, it has many different interpretations and focuses, many of which hold much different vales than Sensing's view. Throughout much of human history, various cultures have viewed marriage as the combination and transmission of material goods. The point was not raising children for children's sake, the point was having children to have someone to take care of your stuff when you died.

The idea of "redefining" marriage being a bad thing is ludicrous on its ear - it's the nature of marriage to be redefined as it fits society. And as is obvious by our marriage laws, the point of marriage in American civil law is to codify a legal relationship between two people who want it. That's why childless couples are still considered married.

He goes on to say that women have "trained" men that sex can happen outside of marriage. Now, human civilization has been around several thousand years. If Sensing somehow thinks that nobody ever figured out that you can have sex without being married, he's a complete idiot. Women wouldn't take the pill if they didn't think that sex and pregnancy had a causal relationship.

In this respect, Sensing is part of the problem, and not the solution. People have always had premarital sex (even in the glory days of marriage for all), and now they can better manage the risks of it. However, we've reached a point where we have the tools to better manage the risks of premarital sex, but instead of addressing it honestly, we're faced with abstinence-only loonies who try to shame kids out of sex and only make the inevitable backlash worse.

Good...except that this argument makes NO SENSE. Same-sex couples have never had the particular results of sex that Sensing is concerned with. For Sensing, it seems like the history of marriage is one long, gray tableau of loving Christian baby-producing unions until 1960 or so.

If the argument against same-sex marriage was that all real marriages had to naturally produce children, then the proponents of that argument lost a long time ago. Civil marriage has always been without clergy, because it's not a religious ceremony. If marriage is supposed to be defined religiously, we probably shouldn't be arguing over a civil process.

This entire thesis is making my head hurt trying to straighten out a Moebius strip of bad logic. Marital monagamy can exist without naturally produced children (which was a true statement before the Pill ever existed). Sex can be had with a reduced or even negated risk of pregnancy. People are living together in committed relationships without seeking civil marriage, and not producing kids (which I would think would be a good thing, all things considered).

The first person to link any of this with the pursuit of legally created and enforced monogamy for same-sex couples without ignoring or rewriting what Sensing says (and making sense while doing it) gets no prize whatsoever. I'm glad that he tried to make a "logical" argument...but this is silly. Besides openly insulting childless and adoptive couples, it also openly ignores what same-sex couples are seeking, which is a reinforcement of the important parts of a marriage bond - sexual and emotional fidelity - in favor of declaring that the only real marriages are the ones with 2.5 kids, nice and average.

If the sole point of marriage is childbearing, then churches can drop the whole honor and cherish, love til the end of your days crap, and just grant 20-year marriage licenses, at which point the man may terminate the marriage if the woman can no longer bear children. After all, that's the only *real* point of marriage.

Nowhere to Turn

It doesn't matter what we do. Seems that those gays are simply determined to ruin marriage regardless.

Effectiveness

Man...even gay people are being intimidated by the gay mafia.

My favorite part is that she generalizes all homosexual people (basically men, mind you) as the ultimate expressions of the hedonistic bourgeoisie, then says she doesn't want to overgeneralize. Then she finds two people who nominally back up her thesis...and overgeneralizes again.

I love how same-sex marriage is the paranoia-laced theory sounding board for the pretentious and precocious nouveau-scholars that many conservatives seem to want to be. "What if...gay marriage made cancer happen? That would be awful! And...and...it'll cancel Friends! They all love the arts, you know...but the Friends cast is all straight. And lovable, but not in a gay way."

Vote Your Bedroom

The New York Times runs an article today about gay Republican voters who are still supporting the President (some nominally).

A couple of points stood out to me:

That's a rather...charitable reading of events, in my opinion. If there was any hesitation on Bush's part, it was borderline invisible. He was talking months before he endorsed the amendment about legal steps towards codifying opposite sex marriage as the only type of legal marriage. He'd talked with Musgrave about supporting her amendment a month before he did. The only baby steps he made were towards public endorsement of the amendment, and even then there was maybe *a* baby step. McFarland can believe whatever he want, but that doesn't mean it's actually true.

In short, they're going to spend most of their time fighting the party until the issue peters out, at which point they'll make up and pretend the whole thing was just a bad memory.

Many of the people interviewed in the article take umbrage at the idea that they should even be considering not voting for Bush on this issue above others, although I've never found the "I'm a voter like everyone else" argument to hold much water. We're all motivated by one issue or a few issues above others. Sometimes they have to do with identity, other times with the personal effects of policies. But the little loophole of republican democracy is that although politicians have to present their constituents with comprehensive policy proposals covering any issue in the public sphere, the constituents themselves are under no such compunction. People generally choose to be politically active based on a few pet issues, and I honestly don't think it's wrong to assume that, particularly if someone is politically active based on their identity, that they might vote disproportionately according to issues which center around that identity.

I just have a hard time seeing how people can vote against themselves on such a clear-cut issue. It's a strange mix of partisanship and self-sacrifice, and one that I don't understand.

Insurance

Rather than wade through another interminably bad argument against same-sex marriage, I'll just deal with the strangest of William's assertions:

(You mean, like a marriage contract? That would be a pretty efficient solution.)

Let's look at this "give the money back" idea for preventing same-sex marriages. Instead of extending insurance benefits to same-sex couples, we just blow up the entire system of employers insuring workers, and give the workers the money. It tracks with the overall philosophy regarding same-sex marriage: if you can't restrict it to straight people, the whole thing's gonna go.

But, would this work? Short and long answer: no. Part of the benefit of employer insurance is that they can negotiate lower rates for bulk coverage. Suppose that a company with 50 employees negotiated an insurance rate of $200 for a married couple. Negotiating on their own, individuals are not going to be able to negotiate as low a rate as a company or corporation negotiating on behalf of all its employees.

So, you end employer insurance and force people to shop for their own insurance, which, most likely, won't cover nearly as much unless they're willing to pay more for the same coverage. This also presumes that, for some reason, if an employer stops paying for your insurance and gives you the premium money back, insurance companies will cover same-sex couples as they would opposite-sex ones (which is really the issue at hand here). This solution makes no sense whatsoever - in order to prevent same-sex couples from getting insurance benefits, you terminate the benefits, flood the market with individuals and couples seeking the benefits back at higher rates, and overall likely increase the number of the uninsured just so that Steve and Gary can't get the same benefits as Steve and Laura without doing a lot of extra work.

The man is an economist, by the way.

Terror In The Streets

Look at the homosexual warriors of Sappho who are threatening America's sanctity:

Multnomah County, Oregon will be handing out legal certificates of marriage tomorrow. The apocalypse is scheduled for Friday at 3:14 PM.

No, I Don't Care About The Oscars

You know, let's put something to the test here: Peggy Noonan's harebrained hypothesis that Republicans are better at communicating through speeches than through actually talking to people. If this were the case, Republican speechwriters would be remarkably coherent communicators in their own right, articulating powerful arguments in a manner that simply isn't possible in the back-and-forth of a television interview.

Nooners should call up Lisa Schiffren and tell her to get with the program.

He just had the culture wars he participates in discussed in the Washington Post...oh, wait. Liberal media and all that jazz. You clever, sneaky bastards.

I'm not sure, but I could really see this sentence equating the legalization of same-sex marriage with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, even though it says the latter is more important. There's gliding over the differences between concepts to make a comparison, but this is Hulk Smash Substantive Logical Differences time.

Bush has already sought or endorsed five separate Constitutional amendments. There's only 27 now. As a conservative, he's sought to expand the number of Amendments in the Constitution by nearly 20%. That's a lot of "big deals", don't you think?

Or, you know...like they were marriage licenses. (And I wouldn't be so quick to say in contravention of *all* law, considering that there are some really good equal protection arguments for same-sex marriages. But, what do I know? I'm a Democrat and I only work well when I'm screeching talking points. I'm sorry, audience, for not connecting with you. Especially you, cutie.)

By interpreting the law? Hold on, let me call up the entire court system and let them know that they can't interpret any law in light of any other laws without first getting a majority of the American public to vote on their interpretation. That shouldn't disrupt the American judicial system more than catastrophically.

I'll blame the editor for the millennia slip (we may make mistakes here, too, but it's straight from our head to the screen...we live on the edge!), but I do have to ask: "our culture"? The American culture has only been around for a couple hundred years - not even a quarter of a millennium. Modern Western democratic civilization has been around an even shorter amount of time than that. Modern conceptions of property, the person, and legal marriage relationships have constantly evolved, and if you think that the conception of marriage in American society today is even what it was at the turn of the last century, you've got another think coming.

I hereby communicate to all childless couples: The Republican Party thinks your marriage is worthless, and hates you.

Marriage: it makes men immortal. Also, if your mother runs out on you, we'll just turn it into a sitcom, like we do all instances of single fatherhood.

So...we have a uniform national definition of private property and the rule of law? That's a pedantic point, so I'll get to the meat of this - we aren't talking about a uniform national definition. We're talking about a uniform national exclusion. The FMA offers no input on what a marriage is besides the genders of the people involved. It doesn't say what the rights and responsibilities are, the barriers to getting married, the criteria for entrance into or exit from marriage...it just tells you that people of the same gender can't get married.

For those people who do not have children, the legal benefits of marriage are what it exists for (other than love and companionship). If the purpose of marriage is to have kids, and people get married knowing they can't or won't have children, then what's their motivation for seeking a civil marriage? Are they crazy?

And consider the fact that there's still opposition to everything she just named on the parts of many conservatives. By the way, evolution only occurs when there's an environment to react to - "judicial fiat" is as much a part of that evolutionary process as a legislative act.

Actually, by the definition of a wedge issue, this is a wedge issue. Bush knows that the Democratic Party is split between significant factions who support same-sex marriage, same-sex civil unions, and no change at all. It is a sharply divisive political issue among its various sides, particularly with those on the left. How, exactly, are we defining a wedge issue here, if not as a wedge issue?

As the scare brigade has rolled out ("Gay marriage will bankrupt America!" "Gay marriage will force your kids to learn about kinky anal sex - not because gay people will force it on them, but because we'll snap and start trying to convince our kids that homosexuality is bad by trying to gross them out!"), we've seen more and more people become afraid that the coming Gaypocalypse will wipe out all vestiges of straightness, and we'll be left to roam a post-Gaypocalyptic world with roving bands of sodomizers and interior designers trying to turn our manly battle dome into a well-ventilated atrium/cohabitation space.

AND WHO WANTS THAT NIGHTMARE?!?!?

Anyone want to bet that when the Senate votes this down by amassing more than the 34 votes needed to stop it, someone will try to make the point that a "minority of Senators" are standing in the way of this nationwide debate and examination, an elite taking the power from the hands of the many? And if it passes the Senate (unlikely) and state legislatures vote it down (very, very likely), then we'll get calls to change the amendment process to bypass legislatures altogether and go straight to direct national referendums. If that doesn't work, then we govern by divine fiat, as told to us by Mel Gibson.

All this would be avoided if someone could make a coherent argument against gay marriage that didn't rest on protecting an institution that doesn't really exist.

Doing What's Right

A gay Republican official right here in Ohio has switched sides to the Democratic Party over Bush's endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment.

The Sullivan Rule is as follows: despite the fact that the Republican Party's core constituencies don't give a damn about any identity-based politics (other than conservative Christian ones), while they're taking care of your secondary concerns, you can convince the reasonable portions of the party to see the issues your way. Alternately, you can just reject identity-based politics altogether and pretend that promised Republican prosperity will be the balms that actually adressing issues wasn't.

It was first used to reach out to black and minority voters, then later to convince some gay voters that the party of "individual liberty" (but which talks in very, very communitarian terms) could actually mean individual liberty for them and not just their bank accounts.

Unfortunately, it simply doesn't work. Republicans are willing to ignore "specially" identified groups so long as those groups stop talking about their specific problems and support Republican issues. When push comes to shove, the most (and really, only) effective use that the Republican Party has for these folks is as counterweights and masks, in the main. Look at the President's "compassion" agenda (i.e., unfunded feel-good ideas and faith) - this is the closest the GOP has come to an outreach program to minorities in years.

I can only hope that a second group refuting this horrible logic will either prevent other minority groups from thinking the GOP will listen to them if they only help Republicans in other areas, or, heaven forbid, actually cause the GOP to listen and think of compassion as something more than the area of the website where you put the black children.

Oh, and we have Rick Santorum helping matters along quite nicely:

Now, the question here is - what toad did Santorum lick? Also, one might ask whether dissuading people from marriage who won't stay married is a bad thing, or, perhaps more importantly, HOW THIS CRAZY SHIT WORKS AT ALL, but we'll stick with the toad-licking inquisition until we get ourselves some.

Renaissance Spears

You know, I'm pretty sure that Britney Spears didn't envision that the pinnacle of her career, rather than being a song, a movie, or a performance, would be a walking reminder of how badly heterosexuals can screw up marriage.

I do, however, have an objection with this bit from Cohen (sorry, Brit):

The problem is, by endorsing the amendment, he isn't leaving the door open to civil unions, as we've discussed ad nauseum in the past. This vastly differs from Kerry's position, as does the endorsement of the FMA.

I guess the question here is who is it that doesn't understand what's in this amendment - Bush, or Cohen?

My Georgia Valentine

Amendment to ban same-sex marriage fails in the Georgia State House.

Hats off to the representatives who prevented it from being passed.

Massages Vs. Flowers

Let's see - one one side, people are arguing that manicurists and massage therapists are revitalizing the economy. On the other side, it's a really good time to open up a flower shop in San Francisco.

Now, think about this - as more and more people from around the world pour money into floral shops in the San Francisco area, the shops will need to restock flowers. This means that all of those flower providers will need to grow larger stocks of flowers, which means they'll need to either hire more people to take care of them, or install new systems to manage them. All of the attendant industries that provide flower-related products (fertilizer, food, gardening implements, etc.) will step up production and subsequently, sales.

The question is: can we afford not to legalize same-sex marriage?

Another Thought

It's looking like there won't be enough votes to pass the FMA (woo-hoo!), but this brings up something else: Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment. At least five members of his own party, according to Oxblog, aren't supporting it.

I think Bush's biggest problem coming out of this isn't losing on the amendment (they're incredibly difficult to pass to begin with, and you can be sure that all sorts of Republican flacks will let you know that), but rather than in a Washington environment where his party runs everything...Bush still can't get his whole party behind his endorsement of a constitutional amendment.

When you couple this with Bush's open antagonism to his party when it comes to government spending (he acts like Congress is run by aliens rather than the people who are supposed to be his ideological partners), it's becoming increasingly obvious that Bush considers himself the representative of a narrower and narrower political ideology that basically represents whichever groups he wants least pissed off at him.

Regardless of what happens with the FMA...can Bush retain the support and loyalty of his party?

Make It An Issue

This article shows that Republicans are desperately hoping that same-sex marriages will hurt Democrats more than they will Republicans, although one would think they would have drafted a better amendment that allowed civil unions if that was the case.

The issue for Democrats here is saying things not for the pro-civil rights left, but instead to rile up the Christian far-right. The proposed amendment obviously doesn't give legislative leeway for civil unions, which gives Kerry more than enough room even if he is pro-civil unions and anti-marriage. Bush has pushed his side of the debate well to the right, and the bad part for him is that he's pushing an agenda pandering to his right in an election where the important concerns (terrorism, the economy) cross political lines. The weakness of Bush's message is that it's geared in many ways for the right, but he's successfully hidden it by framing everything in more palatable terms.

Remember kids: compassionate conservatism means "I hug minorities!"

I think this is going to be worse for Bush, because right now, his leadership is what's on the table for the upcoming election. It's not that he's necessarily pushing a political loser in opposing same-sex marriage (for him, at least), it's that he's pushing a political loser in pushing his opposition to same-sex marriage over the issues that are actually pressing. People may have strong feelings on the issue, but it doesn't overwhelm the basic themes of Bush's tenure - his stewardship (or lack thereof) of the economy and the War on Terror. The more Bush is publicly pushed to the right, and the more right-wingers come out of the woodwork to push Bush on this, the less he looks like a legitimate representative of the American center.

It will also hurt him among Republicans who find themselves drawn to his economic and foreign policy platforms, but who lack the stomach for the cultural right that Bush is in bed with. If he allows this to define his reelection campaign, he is going to push away voters who were attracted to him because he seemed to show a steadfastness and competent focus on the issues that mattered. One of the strengths of the Republican image is that they supposedly focus on the "hard issues", namely money and war. And in an election about money and war, focusing on whether or not some people can get married draws away from the aura Bush is trying to maintain.

Of course, the fact that he's completely and utterly wrong and that his arguments make no sense doesn't hurt, either.

Agendas

Andrew Sullivan has a truly worthwhile E-Mail of the Day up at his site:

By giving in to the Christian Right's demands, Bush begins to hand them greater prominence, a louder microphone and a more pervasive media presence. As a group, the Falwell/Bauer subset make Americans profoundly uncomfortable and, by allying himself so publicly with their agenda, Bush risks making Americans profoundly uncomfortable with him.

The Talent Show pointed me to this cartoon:

It'd be even more effective if you bipaneled it next to the Christian Right's agenda:

Keep homos from marrying;
Keep homos from having equal rights;
Watch cartoons;
Break down the separation between church and state;
Get the Mexicans back to Mexico;
Breakfast;
You don't want to know.

I know which group scares me more.

One Little Word

Why, asks Alex Knapp, does George W. Bush get some much more heat than John Kerry when their positions on gay marriage are essentially the same?

Probably because their positions are not essentially the same. I know it's only a one word change, but "I do support an amendment prohibiting gay marriage" is quite different than "I do not support an amendment prohibiting gay marriage".

Hittin' The High Points

What about the children?

Apparently the new line for marriage rights is that we can only give marriage rights to those who "are raising or have raised children". And, of course, we can't let same-sex couples get in on the gravy train of raising children, and if they aren't going to raise any children, then they shouldn't get married, because Lord knows that the legal system only respects marriages due to children, and totally disregards marriages which haven't produced any children at all.

You mean, it doesn't? But the rest of her article must be chock-full of sense and facts, right?

Does this make sense to anyone else?

Here is the relevant law on Canadian survivor benefits. How can a new marriage between people who are alive qualify someone for retroactive survivorship benefits for a dead person? If I'm missing something, let me know, but...damn. It works virtually the same way for American survivorship benefits as well.

How do you justify giving it to straight people?!? Especially those who don't have kids? In fact, these issues have nothing whatsoever to do with each other...but it sure is fun to try and find a different injustice to complain over. Especially considering that the author's apparently never heard of claiming dependents. And is she arguing that caretakers deserve the same legal standing with those they're taking care of as a spouse does to his or her partner?

How can we allow same-sex marriage when this person can't do a Google search for claiming dependents? It would be a travesty! (By the way, I'm using American tax laws because she's arguing this in light of the American legalization of same-sex marriage.)

Marriage is mainly an arrangement for the benefit of adults, considering that laws relating to children and parenting still apply, in the main, even if the parents aren't married. Changed somewhat, but you're still allowed to be a parent and claim tax and insurance exemptions for your children. The case is stating that a two parent household where both parents are of the same gender is an acceptable environment for children to be raised in.

Let's look at a red state's adoption laws. Namely, Mississippi. Now, same-sex marriage is about as likely to pass Mississippi's legislature as I am to ask Lucianne Goldberg for her hand in marriage. But, look who can adopt:

Mississippi allows single persons to adopt! Is this more or less of an affront to child-rearing than allowing homosexual couples in a stable, two-parent household to adopt? I'm waiting...

GOVERNMENTS CAN'T FORCE CHURCHES TO PERFORM RELIGIOUS MARRIAGES FOR PEOPLE THE CHURCH DOES NOT APPROVE OF. Any lawsuit would be thrown out immediately.

1.) Churches don't perform civil marriages. One need not ever step foot in a church to be legally married.

2.) Churches can discriminate in their rites against pretty much anyone they want to, because their rites have no legal bearing. Therefore, there would be virtually no ground to sue, particularly successfully. The Catholic Church can forbid divorce from any of its members, even though you can get all the legal divorce and remarriage you want in the civic sphere.

Does this woman know anything about the law?

Long story short: if you believe a bunch of shit this "Learned Hand Professor of the Law at Harvard" just made up about American laws, then allowing same-sex marriage is wrong, wrong, wrong. However, if you've actually looked at the law, you realize that these arguments are silly, silly, silly.

Making DeLay Look Good

When Tom DeLay thinks you're too much of a reactionary, how #$%$#% crazy are you?

Goose, Gander, Duck Sauce

Gay Democrats in Indiana are asking the state GOP to reveal the marital histories of Republican legislators.

Personally, I think a far more effective tack is to show long-term monogamous same-sex couples. Instead of saying, "We're no worse than you all would be," tell them that "We're as good as you could ever hope to be." I know quite a few people who were not necessarily homophobic, but anti-gay marriage, who looked at the pictures coming out of San Francisco and who have become more open to the idea of civil unions and even civil marriage.

I just don't like the idea of justifying same sex marriage by saying that gays and lesbians can't harm it any more than straight people are already doing.

Bush Endorses Marriage

In a *yawn* huge event today. Bush has announced his support for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. His endorsement is full of words like civilization and clarity and foundation, much like we'd expect. He's got some odd rhetorical framing going on, couching his endorsement with the rationale that he was forced to because the Courts had made marriage such a confusing topic. I'll stay away from the easy jokes here and just offer my full throated indifference to this entirely expected and completely symbolic act. Discrimination for electoral, rather than legislative, gain. That's my America!

FMHey, Hey, Hey!

Ramesh Ponnoru is attempting to fend off criticisms of the FMA from conservative and liberal commentators, but he importantly demonstrates the nonsensical balancing act going on among its more "moderate" defenders.

That's the Federal Marriage Amendment in all its glory. Ponnoru says that all the supporters declare that the second sentence would allow for the creation of civil unions - which isn't actually an argument that it does, mind you, but an argument that certain people say it does.

The major issue at hand is "legal incidents thereof". Ponnoru ducks and dodges around this issue, talking about how much conservatives want to fight this battle in the legislatures. However, the amendment specifically states that not just marriage, but legal incidents thereof cannot be required to be given to any unmarried group - either civil unions will have to confer rights that married couples don't obtain through marriage, or we'll have to change marital rights to rights that are conferred upon everyone - which is problematic in and of itself.

There's no real way to say that "we'll give these rights to you because you're married, but we're not giving these rights to because you're married", which is what Ponnoru is proposing. He argues that you can abolish an incident of marriage, but then he turns around and argues that you can reestablish it as an incident of marriages and civil unions.

A legal "incident" is anything which is dependent upon or a result of another legal status. For instance, your ability to vote is an incident of your being 18. It would seem to me that even if you redefined an incident of marriage as an incident of marriage and civil unions, it would still be an incident of marriage, and therefore unable to be transferred to any other coupling of people. The only way to get around this would be to declare that legal incidents of marriage which you want to make available to couples in civil unions are available to any two people, regardless of legal relation. Otherwise, any right which is specifically conserved for married couples, even if married couples aren't the only group that is supposed to be able to participate in them, can only be given to married couples.

The amendment either argues that no benefits which are conferred upon the legal state of marriage can be transferred to any other coupling, or it simply restates an obvious facet of law for no apparent reason, and is therefore meaningless: that any right or privilege conferred solely upon a married couple is non-transferable. As it is, it seems to be arguing the former - if married people get it, nobody else does. It doesn't allow for civil unions that share any legal aspect of marriage.

Anyone's welcome to correct me on any point.

Everything Is Everything

Yes, I really do want this man to be president.

I also want some unanesthetized, back alley root canals for my birthday. Think you can help me with that?

Redefining Marriage

Josh Marshall has a good post up on gay marriage, and he says some things that need to enter into the larger debate:

1) You don't get to choose these battles. It's very hard to make something like gay marriage an issue. For some reason, the time is right and the floodgates have opened, there's nothing we can do but fight the fight that has landed before us. The outcome of this fight will decide gay marriage for the foreseeable future, there are no quick do overs.

2) This isn't like trade policy or Medicare where you can pass a decent bill now and improve it later. Let's say civil unions are floated as a compromise. Then that's what you get. There will be little popular support or even tolerance for more activism on this issue. Most Americans will feel the "Gays" got civil unions, time for them to sit down and shut up.

That said, Josh is right. Gay Marriage is not an issue with electoral support. But I think there's a way to change this whole debate. I think we need to grab the values at the root of marriage and pull. The Conservative groups are right, marriage is being utterly ruined. 60+% end in divorce, drunks can jet to Vegas and get married because it seems like a good time and more and more children are being born out of wedlock. It's amazing to think that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report in the 60's saying that 3 out of 10 African-American children were born to a single parent and that this could become a problem in the future. The number is now 7 out of 10 and it is a problem in the present.

I think it's time marriage got harder. I think it's time we defined what marriage entails and created a system around that. For that reason, I think the Democratic nominee, whoever he may be, should latch on to the value of commitment. Use Britney Spears' recent Vegas marriage as an example, use the statistics on out of wedlock births and publicly commit to an agenda that will rebuild and strengthen the American family. People should have to wait a week for a marriage license, you can't just go to Vegas. Birth control and prophylactic information will become part of school curriculums because it's better to do that then see more out of wedlock births and, worse, more abortions. Bush's floated idea to spend money teaching couples how to communicate, resolve conflict and be better partners should be resuscitated and turned into a Democratic proposal. The base of this whole platform would be "Encouraging Commitment". We need to define marriage as a commitment between two people to each other and to building a life together. If they're gay, fine. As long as they're willing to wait for the permit, they can get married. If they're straight, fine. As long as they're willing to wait.

I haven't thought enough about specific policies that could be used in this framework, but I do believe they're out there. The idea has to be that marriage in the eyes of the State is a privilege and not a right. You can do what you want in Church, but if you want the many benefits conferred by state licensed marriage, you have to earn them. Through that, gay marriage will recede as the main issue and marriage will emerge. With that dynamic in place, we can launch a real attack on the Bush Administration's horrific attitudes towards sex education, birth control accessibility and women's health in general. They're creating the conditions for shotgun weddings, teenage mistakes and, worse, terminated pregnancies. When kids don't have the information to make smart, informed decisions, they make stupid, ignorant ones. We're willing to end that.

Why Gay Marriage?

I know I'm not blogging today but I had to quote Morford's insanely eloquent statement on San Francisco's gay marriage stand:

Knock It Out The Park, Luke

Jacob T. Levy writes in extended terms about the impact of the FMA, and how it actually does ban anything even remotely resembing a same-sex marriage, as the National Review decides "Homosexuality? NO! Polygamy? Ehh..."

That Old Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used To Be

I love the fact that the marriages in San Francisco are showing people that same-sex couples actually aren't flamboyant, fire-breathing hetero-killers whose unions will lead us into a new age of depravity and destruction that will cause our children to run naked in the streets with a Filipino pimp named Gustav clapping them on and flogging them for pocket change and sexual favors.

Which simply makes this John Cole post all the sadder.

Not "whimsically", necessarily, but I wouldn't say there's anything "whimsical" about the decision to remove gender restrictions on marriage. I can only assume that Cole means that marriage is divine in nature, which is simply ludicrous as we're talking about civil marriage here. More importantly, he seems to be making the case that marriage has never changed, in conception or in practice, over the course of human history.

At this point, I'd like to direct the class to any point in human history which is not now. Polygamous marriages, marriages between young teenagers, bethrothed marriages, single-race/single-religion marriages, marriages which held one spouse as the property of the other, legal inheritance rights through marriage...in fact, there are few consistent practices around the world which have changed more than marriage, with no divine hand playing any role in it whatsoever.

For decades, some people have refused to cede that Elvis is dead, JFK was killed by a single assassin, or that the South lost the Civil War. That doesn't mean they're right.

I'm wondering what that "period" is for, because it's either punctuation or menstruation, and in that sense it's either redundant or biologically impossible. Guess what? People's gender identifications do not make those gender identifications valid or universal.

If I ask you to think of a secretary or a nurse, most everyone who does will think of a woman. If I ask you to think of a doctor or lawyer, most everyone who does will think of a man. Does it mean that these strong gender identifications should dictate to us the genders of those professions?

Could you actually find a person who would answer "yes" to this question?

Tradition isn't an argument because tradition isn't even tradition: it's the gloss of whatever particular set of values you want onto the past, as evidenced by the bizarre assertion that marriage has never been changed by human beings. Simply put, how people think of themselves, their relation to others, and relationships between other people does change, and it changes because of humanity's actions.

We call it "same sex marriage" because it's what we're talking about, and it's what the fight is currently over. We talk about "interreligious" and "interfaith" marriages, yet we don't consider either of those invalid (because we...changed the definition!). By this standard, any time I apply any adjective to anything, that adjective-laden noun is not actually in the same category as the noun by itself, because I added words to it. The entire regime of adjectives is actually an anti-traditionalist concept used to undermine our God-given, totally unchanged principles of what that noun is and how it is understood.

Humans generalize concepts. Whether it be gender, race, architecture, design, whatever - if I ask you to think of a general concept, you will give me an image of it, but that doesn't mean that other images can't also be held under the same conceptual umbrella.

See what I did there? I used the word umbrella, but it didn't refer to a literal umbrella! Go me!

Why I Hate America - A Primer

I hate America because when I see cute old lesbian couples in love for decades get married, it makes me want to fall in love with someone, get married, and be with them for the rest of my life.

How can I be so backwards?

Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Which Republican pundit's marriage and/or engagement is going to end because of this?

After all, in the Dungeons and Dragons game that is marriage, same-sex relationships equal a +1 Straight Divorce Event, with a subsequent boost to all Straight Relationship Trouble Attributes.

Those damn Queer Chaos Mages.

Gay Marriage

Bush is going to come out in favor of a gay marriage amendment. All candidates are going to need a good answer. Kerry has flirted with support, the others oppose gay marriage. DO NOT SUPPORT THIS AMENDMENT! It is potentially the stupidest thing one can do. Do not talk about homosexuals or marriage. Instead, just talk about values. Just talk about what our grandchildren will think if we write discrimination into the Constitution. Just speak of how future generation's will view us when they repeal this amendmetn in order to make real the dream of equal rights. This is not a battle to avoid, but it is a battle we must fight correctly.

Binky The Doormat

Calpundit wonders what the specific wording of the FMA proposed by President Bush actually means.

As far as I can tell, it would technically allow civil-union status for same-sex couples...it's just that civil unions could not actually confer any "legal incident" (meaning any of a myriad of legal rights and priveleges reserved for married couples) on those who participate in them.

Basically, you could get a civil union, but it would be little more than a piece of paper declaring that you were a part of one. The major legal incident of a civil union would be the civil union itself, making the entire thing redundant. It would be like gaining the legal status of "Mumblat", but the only thing that being a Mumblat entailed was that you could call yourself, legally, a Mumblat. It does nothing, it means nothing, and it signifies just about that much.

It's also very cleverly worded - it prevents any law, no matter how poorly written or reasoned, from ever being construed as allowing same sex marriage or conferring any section of marriage benefits onto same-sex couples. It's not simply restricting the legal status of marriage to opposite-sex couples. It's preventing same-sex couples from being meaningful legal entities, whether married or not.

It's the "Only Straight People Count" Amendment. It's what a lot of anti-gay conservatives have wanted for a very long time - a Constitutional declaration that heterosexuality is the only valid sexual orientation.

Church & State & Main & Starsky & Hutch

I've been reading some arguments against gay and lesbian marriage, and I've found a recurring sentiment (referenced here, via World O' Crap) that the state is dictating to the church who they must marry.

Um...where did this come from, and why don't people know the law?

Snarky As An Arrow

Question: this bill allows for marriage between "one man and one woman". Well, the bill never specifies what relation that man and woman must have. Can a related man and woman get married? Can a grown adult marry a little child? Is it a human man and woman?

This could open the door to a whole range of opposite-sex depravity. These damned activists.

Gay Penguins

This piece on gay penguins is sweet and touching. It's unimaginable to think that these creatures, by nature of their devoted relationship, would be condemned to hell:

All Or Nothing

Massachusetts Supreme Court rules that in order to satisfy their previous ruling, only legal gay and lesbian marriage is suitable - meaning that Massachusetts can't pass some sort of cropped civil union act and call it marriage.

Unfortunately, however, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and my state apparently got the luck of the draw.

The Reagan Left

This is utterly disgraceful. Front Page Magazine interviews Andrew Sullivan and attempts to blame the Left for the AIDS crisis while polishing David Horowitz's knob as a political prophet:

Bad Anti-Marriage People

Jim Henley directs us to a series of arguments against gay marriage on the Marriage Debate blog, many of which are simply laughable.

From "Ogre":

So, saying that two people of the same sex can't get married isn't discrimination based on sex. Right. By this logic, we should be able to discriminate against people based on religion as long as some religion is allowed to participate.

Apparently, "better" = "the same" now.

Maureen Mullarkey:

Note both the insinuation that homosexuality equates to promiscuity and that you have the "freedom" to marry because you can marry someone of the opposite sex. Yes, and you have the freedom to practice whatever religion you want, so long as it's Judeo-Christian. Woot.

Does that also remind anyone of old arguments against interracial relationships/marriages? "You can already date or marry whoever you want - why isn't your own race/the opposite sex good enough for you?"

There's plenty of other fodder, but I'm just struck by how poorly arguments against gay and lesbian marriage are constructed: ignoring the basic foundation of how rights, legal and Constitutional, are conferred and interpreted, and not really being able to make anything that's a semblance of an actual argument above and beyond "we like what we've got now."

Marriage Is A Sacred Bond

Many people regard marriage as a spiritual, sacred step, and ask that the government not legalize civil marriages between gay and lesbian couples for that reason.

It first ignores the fact that civil marriages aren't religious and that the courthouse isn't a churchouse. But, I can understand the confusion, since there's all these words that begin with 'C'.

The part about it being spiritual and religious in nature will also hopefully be mitigated by steps like this.

Of course, these aren't Christian marriages, so...

Keeping Score

Worth 175 points on the red-state citizenship test: keeping archaic and unconstitutional anti-homosexual laws on the books, just 'cause.

No better way to uphold American principles than to uphold unconstitutional laws to show homosexuals that they're really, really not wanted. (By the way, they're passing a law currently that would ban sodomy in public places, but they also want to keep their previous, farther-reaching law that would simply ban sodomy outright. As a felony. In either case.)

Not Married With Children

Want to know the extent to which gay couples are destroying family life in America? Well, not only are they adopting children, but they are returning to the idea that one parent should stay at home to raise them!

Oh, God

Boston Archbishop Sean O' Malley is encouraging lawyers to "use their knowledge of the law" to stop gay and lesbian marriage from becoming legal, because it will destroy family life. By, uh...providing an outlet for gays and lesbians to form tight, monogamous family units.

Why do all of the "pro-family" advocates sound like petulant children who can't value the gifts they've been given because the kid down the street got the same thing?

Holiday Questions

To Cal Thomas: what are the legitimate "downsides" of homosexuality, intrinsic to that sexual orientation, that aren't either made up or shared by all people, regardless of sexual orientation? Having to read insipid condemnations of their lifestyle?

Request

Would the first anti-gay conservative who references this story as proof of the sordid nature of homosexual relationships do me a favor and save the biting of my ass until after the Bengals/Rams game on Sunday?

And no incisors, please. I'm looking at you, Novak.