Imagine if a bevy of Christian Right fundamentalists argued at a public event at a university that a Biblical court should be set up in America that would allow Christians to put gays to death, as mandated by Leviticus. Imagine if such fundamentalists also called on their fellow believers to violate laws against anti-gay discrimination and hate crimes, and barred a gay lecturer at the university from the event. It would be a huge story – and rightly so. But it happened in Australia recently. Everyone looked the other way. Even the gay press ignored it. Finally, a left-winger, writing for something called “Green Left Weekly” blew the whistle. It seems to me that gay organizations need urgently to monitor Islamic fundamentalism and its threat to our very existence. To resuscitate an old slogan, silence = death. Literally. (Thanks to Tim Blair for alerting me to this.)
RAINES WATCH: Jack Shafer piles on again. Alas, it’s getting easier. He’s particularly befuddled by the Times’ weird no-news back-fill piece on steroid use. 3,000 words? For Pete’s sake: Why? I detect paleo-feminist hostility to men who enjoy being men; and the usual busy-body nanny-state hysteria about recreational drug-use. But I’m open to other suggestions. The only motive that seems unlikely is reporting the news.
THE MALE MIND: Why are so many cases of autism among boys and men rather than girls and women? Is autism culturally constructed? Or are the male and female brains subtly but distinctly different? The answer is obvious. It isn’t a matter of debate whether there are subtle differences between male and female brains: biologists know there are. Paleo-feminists will dispute this, but then they dispute whether there are any significant biological distinctions between men and women. Here’s an article thinking out loud about the social repercussions.
OSAMA’S LETTER: “I think the letter is filled with “pitch” paragraphs, pitches which hit on nerves around the world. It hit your nerve. It will hit others in a far different way. Break it down. It’s very, very good.” – all this and a defense of Alessandra Stanley on the Letters Page.
NOT-SO-FULL FAITH AND CREDIT: Some of you have emailed me to say that the real reason for opposing Massachusetts’ possible decision to legalize marriage rights for gays is its national implications. The argument is that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution would immediately mean that legal marriage in one state would be legal marriage in every state. Stanley Kurtz makes this point central to his case. I presume Stanley is simply unaware of Constitutional law in this respect. But the truth is: no serious legal scholar believes this at all. The best paper I know on this question was written by a very gay-sympathetic Constitutional lawyer in the Yale Law Journal (vol. 106, no. 7, 1997). Professor Larry Kramer (not the AIDS activist) is one of the leading experts in what is called the field of conflict-of-laws. He points out that marriage has never been legally subject to full faith and credit. In fact, all the legal precedents point to the opposite conclusion: that states can quite easily disregard legal marriages in other states for a host of legal reasons, most prominently through what is called the “public policy exception.” That is to say, if a state believes that another state’s marriages violates its own public policy, then those marriages can be void in that state. Of course, people could still try and sue for their rights, but, as Kramer points out, they sure shouldn’t expect results:
The brouhaha over Hawaii’s anticipated legalization of same-sex marriages is therefore a big dud from a conflict of laws persepctive. There is simply no problem: other states do not have to recognize such marriages, and they do not need special laws or federal legislation to make that clear.
Since Kramer wrote that, it’s even clearer. The U.S. Congress has passed the Defense of Marriage Act, enshrining gays as second class citizens under federal law; and many states have passed similar laws for their own domains. What was always highly unlikely has now become impossible. Any federal Constitutional Amendment is therefore completely superfluous as a matter of law and is being pursued out of what can only be called hysteria and malevolence. That’s why the White House opposes it. That’s why all intelligent and reasoned federalists should as well.
JUDICIAL USURPATION: A little history simply confirms this. The main legal precedents are in inter-racial marriage cases. Inter-racial marriages were long recognized in northern states before they were made legal in southern states. In fact, the discrepancies lasted over a century. If Full Faith and Credit worked the way Kurtz argues, Massachusetts’ inter-racial marriages would have been legal in Mississippi immediately. And when SCOTUS finally ruled against the ban on inter-racial marriage, it did so not through the “full faith and credit” clause but through equal protection. (I wonder how many conservatives today actually oppose that piece of judicial ursurpation of the people’s will. Polls in 1967 when the court ruled on inter-racial marriage showed higher opposition to inter-racial marriage then than to same-sex marriage now. I ask Stanley Kurtz directly: would he have opposed Loving vs Virginia as judicial liberal activism? If not, why not? It was classic court usurpation of an ancient tradition supported by huge majorities in the states involved.) In other words, the notion that marriage in one state means marriage in every state is false. It is untrue. It is not rooted in fact. It is an unfact. Its veracity is pushing up the daisies. Next time you read or hear someone making such an argument, make a mental note that he or she is either ignorant or happy to lie to advance his or her political agenda. (Shameless plug: the best collection of legal papers and essays on this issue, including the full analysis by Kramer, can be purchased here.)
TO GORE’S DEFENSE: Tim Noah rushes in to poo-poo the notion that Al Gore’s “fifth column” reference is anything comparable to my own qualified use of the term over a year ago. (I say ‘qualified” because I wrote “what amounts to a fifth column,” meaning it need not be a self-conscious or literal one. And in retrospect, I should add that I wish I hadn’t used that inflammatory phrase. But it was two days after 9/11 and my emotions were in full flood.) Noah defines the term by referring to the following definition: “a clandestine group or faction of subversive agents who attempt to undermine a nation’s solidarity by any means at their disposal. The term is credited to Emilio Mola Vidal, a Nationalist general during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).” Given that definition, it seems to me that my point was prescient. It’s now simply a matter of public record that some people – on the far ri
ght and, to a greater extent, the far left – really do sympathize with the enemy in this war, or certainly find the United States to be more morally suspect than al Qaeda, Saddam or the Islamo-fascists, or believe the alleged power of international Jewry is the deeper issue. I get daily emails from these people hailing every defeat for the United States and every victory for Saddam. Most weeks, I link to some statement of anti-Americanism from these fringe and not-so-fringe types. Is Noah saying that I’m fabricating these statements? And if I’m not, why should I retract a prediction that has turned out to be alarmingly on the mark?
NOAH’S COCOON: Noah may disagree. To which I have to respond: How would he describe the beliefs of someone who says, for example, that the real enemy in this war is the United States? What is his view of, say, ANSWER, the organizing group behind the anti-war rallies? Or the views of Noam Chomsky? Do such people exist on the American left? The answer is empirically yes. Among the academic class, this ambivalence about defending America and the Consitution from Islamofascism is endemic. I can see why embarrassed liberals like Noah don’t want to acknowledge the existence of such types; but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Now compare this to Al Gore’s statement about the “fifth column” in the media. What could he possibly mean? Does he mean that some journalists, under the cover of objectivity, actually favor a conservative agenda? If he does, I think he’s right. But it also surely applies (and to a far greater extent) to the left as well. But the use of the term “fifth column” is completely unnecessary here and deliberately inflammatory. And Gore doesn’t even have the emotional excuse of writing two days after a mass murder. Imagine, to turn the tables, if I had called Howell Raines a member of a “fifth column,” and argued that “most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks – that is, day after day, injecting the daily Democratic talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole.” This is, in fact, one of the themes of this blog, but I haven’t used the term “fifth column” precisely because of its inflammatory implications. If I had, do you think Tim Noah would have let it pass? Not a chance. Which just goes to show that Noah is precisely part of the problem he purports to be above.
The Dish 