You thought the media blood-lust was abating? Now it’s Gary Condit’s brother’s turn to be roasted on an open press fire – this time by the Associated Press. Will it help find Levy? Who cares?
GO MICKEY: Valuable deconstruction of the New York Times’ military ballot non-story by Mickey “Hanging Chad” Kaus.
NATIONAL REVIEW GETS BLUDGEONED BY READERS: Take a look at these letters and see if, like me, you think National Review’s hysterical support for an unprecedented anti-federalist Constitutional Amendment on marriage holds up under fire. I hope they don’t mind my saying so, but the editors’ response is lame. Presumably aware that this proposal trashes any semblance of states’ rights, the editors and my friend Stanley Kurtz make the point that the Amendment is designed to avoid such a national solution imposed by one state’s judges. To quote Kurtz, “Precisely because of the “full faith and credit clause,” there has to be national agreement on the basic definition of marriage. Otherwise, a single state court can impose a radically new definition upon the entire country – a possibility that never even occurred to the framers.” That sentence is simply wrong. Some same-sex marriage proponents at one point hoped it might be true but it clearly isn’t. (And, for the record, if it were true, I would oppose it for exactly the same reasons I oppose an Amendment that would impose one federal rule for marriage on every state and state constitution.) The full faith and credit clause has always been interpreted to mean that legal “judgments,” i.e. documents ruled legal in a court, like ownership of property and so on, must be portable from state to state. But a marriage has never been deemed a “judgment” of this kind. That’s why when northern states allowed miscegenation, they didn’t automatically mandate legal mixed-race marriages across the South. Today, one state’s same-sex marriage would also not be automatically endorsed by every other state. It would be decided on a case by case basis, and all the constitutional and legal history suggests that, in most cases, such marriages are not portable. To read more about this, check out the Constitutional Law section in my anthology, Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con.” I wish the editors of National Review had. There is simply no basis for their hysteria on this – let alone a basis for violating conservatism’s traditional distrust of federal solutions to state problems.
The Dish 