Month: July 2003

And other new terms. A glossary on all things bloggy.

The British Conservative Party will allow its deputies a free vote on gay marriage in Britain. One Tory MP writes the following today in an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph:

A carefully drafted civil registration scheme could command support from people of all political affiliations and of none. By instinct, Tories are, rightly, wary of change – especially change based on abstract egalitarian theorising. But we accept changes that remove justified grievances, that tackle particular problems affecting people in their daily lives. So I appeal to my fellow Conservatives, inside and outside Parliament, to see the case for civil partnership. Changing the law, in this case, is not about political correctness. It is about personal decency. A law that effectively pretends gay couples don’t exist is indefensible. As we do at our best, let us accept the need for change and concentrate on the detail of a Bill to improve the lot of a sizeable minority of our fellow citizens.

That strikes me as a genuinely conservative statement. The Brits, with their usual pragmatism, will avoid the stark moral arguments of Americans – pro and con – and go about fixing an obvious legal anomaly. It seems inevitable that Britain will have gay marriage in effect by the fall. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart makes the same pragmatic step. Are we reaching a “tipping point”?

The inevitable outbreaks of violence and dissension in Iraq are obviously worth covering and important news. But there’s an under-current of complete gloom in news reports that seems to me to be more fueled by ideological fervor than sober analysis. Given the magnitude and complexity of the task of rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, it seems to me we’re making slow but decent progress. The lack of a complete social implosion or exploding civil war is itself a huge achievement. And no one said the post-war reconstruction was going to be easy. So what’s behind this drumbeat of apocalypse? I think it’s a good rule among boomer journalists that every story they ever edit or write or film about warfare will at some point be squeezed into a Vietnam prism. The modern military has denied these people the chance to be vindicated during actual combat; so they will try and present the occupation in exactly the same light. Yes, there is probably considerable discontent in Iraq right now; yes, every death is awful; but no, this isn’t even close to being combat; let alone Vietnam. Of course, I won’t be completely certain about this until Johnny Apple writes a front-page NYT news analysis piece laying out the new consensus. Tick, tock. Or is he too busy touring Devon?

Jeffrey Rosen provides the most effective critique so far. I’m mulling a response.

THE GATHERING STORM: The Mullahs shut down Tehran’s universities for the week around July 9. More signs of how worried they are. We also know how viciously they have tried to stop the student revolution in recent weeks:

The government itself now admits to having arrested 4,000 demonstrators, of whom some 800 were students. The student movement says the numbers were even higher, and the actual number could well be upwards of 6-7,000. Many were killed.

Michael Ledeen, as usual, has the goods. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

An interesting report that suggests the Americans could learn a little from the more laid-back British approach to colonial transitions. (But, hey, the Brits have a little more experience in these matters, don’t they?) I was impressed by the following story. In a firefight, two innocent Iraqis were killed by British soldiers. The Brits were worried about tribal retribution:

So the next day two British officers, two Iraqi lawyers and a translator go to the hospital and ask how the locals deal with this sort of thing. The concept of “Fasil” or blood money is explained to them. A couple of days later, the word spreads that the British have paid 15 million Iraqi dinars in blood money to the families of the two Iraqi men. Further bloodshed was stopped. Perfect.
I am not discussing the moral correctness of blood money. This is the way things are done here and if this money will stop any sort of revenge killings then it is worth it. No, I only have one comment: being foreigners, they paid too much. Habibi, everything is bargainable here, and paying 15 million in blood money will ruin the blood money market – it is way too much. You should improve your tribal connections and get someone to bargain for you.

I cracked a smile at that one. But what a perfect example of British pragmatism.

LILEKS ON UNIONS: Captures their essence beautifully:

What does it say about my industry that the worst paper in the English language is our official newspaper, the Guild Reporter? It manages to sum up everything about unions that gripes me- the joylessness, the complaining, the looming doom, the whining about how the world is set up entirely for the wishes of small cartoon men in striped pants and top hats who own everything from Baltic Avenue to Boardwalk. It always has the flavor of the smart but unfashionable kids with no social skills sitting around the high school cafeteria bitching about the jocks, with one exception: top union management would be the only subculture that could become hipper by getting into Dungeons and Dragons. At least it would give them a new set of descriptive terms for their foes. I’d love to pick up the union paper and read “Management takes cue from Mordor, hires scab-Orks” – it would suggest they have a sense of humor.

Perfect. The aesthetic case against organized labor is, I think, irrefutable.

The fall-out from the BBC’s continuing campaign against the Iraq war is now spreading. Janet Daly has a splendid op-ed in today’s Daily Telegraph, making weirdly similar noises to those of us who wrung our hands over the Howell Raines’ abuse of power at the New York Times. Money quote:

[T]here is a question that needs an urgent answer: should the BBC, which has a virtual monopoly on serious news and current affairs coverage, the budget of a small country and enormous influence on the democratic process, be setting the parameters of reasonable political opinion in such a pre-determined and partial way?

Of course not. Meanwhile, a former BBC journalist and now member of the Blair government, Ben Bradshaw, has launched yet another attack on the BBC’s reporting techniques. The critical mass of criticism could soon prompt a Raines-like denouement. Stay posted.

GOOD NEWS ON AIDS: More drops in HIV infection rates and gonorrhea incidence among men who have sex with men in San Francisco. The “sub-Saharan” epidemic predicted in the New York Times only two years ago (and questioned in this space) still hasn’t happened.

SANCTIFYING RACHEL CORRIE: The young American woman killed by an Israeli bulldozer has now become an icon of some sorts. Oliver Kamm, an excellent new blogger based in London, has the goods on the factual distortions required.

Libel laws may not apply to bloggers.

Couldn’t agree more with Jonah Goldberg’s thoughtful column on NRO today. I guess I should say so clearly: I have no problem with one state deciding not to recognize the legal marriages of another. The genius of federalism, after all, is that it allows for a compromise where some states, like Massachusetts, Vermont or New Jersey, can have equal marriage rights and other states, such as Alabama, Arkansas or Colorado, can retain the heterosexual privilege. What better way to figure out exactly what same-sex marriage means? My own preference is to avoid a divisive, emotional and deeply polarizing show-down over national marriage rights in favor of a gradual federalist development. The only issue here is what the federal government should do. If DOMA turns out to be unconstitutional, why can’t the feds simply recognize any marriages that are valid in a single state, as long as the spouses are residents of the state? Bottom line, Jonah: If that’s the compromise, count me in. But the religious right won’t compromise. If they had already, they wouldn’t be in such a precarious position.

His financial prowess is impressive – but then we knew that. Maybe he’ll begin to mellow a little in public debate, which would be a real advance for his campaign, and stop winging the facts in public. The reason he’s doing well though, I think, is partly the awfully insipid nature of his competition (can anyone imagine John Kerry as president?) and partly his willingness to be at least occasionally a full-throated partisan. That may hurt him later but it’s giving him electricity now among the base. If I were him, I’d make fiscal responsibility my main platform – as long as it contains some serious proposals for real spending restraint. This is Bush’s weak point: the damage he has done and continues to do to this country’s fiscal health. Bush’s answer to this – that deficits don’t matter – doesn’t persuade any but a handful of true believers. Right now, his prescription drug benefit will add more untold billions of debt to the next generation. At some point, when the deficit reaches the stratosphere, this issue will come back to haunt the White House. And fiscal responsibility combined with social liberalism is a great way to appeal to the center. Dean could even, I think, benefit from being ahead of the curve on equal marriage rights. If Dean can get over his unelectable foreign policy – a massive if, of course – he could be a real player.

FRIST’S THEOLOGY: Since when was marriage a “sacrament” among Presbyterians? A blogger fisks Frist.

Jacob Levy has an excellent post on the impact of Lawrence Vs. Texas as a political matter. He doesn’t buy the backlash “this is another Roe” argument:

Sodomy in 2003 will not attract moderates to social conservatism. The number of people who feel deep moral horror or revulsion at its legality is much, much smaller than the number who feel that way about abortion. The “ain’t nobody else’s business” argument is much, much stronger in the case of sodomy than in the case of abortion (which, according to its opponents, violates the harm principle). Republican and conservative elites will try to play the judicial overreach card; but they will not be able to play anything analogous to the “we’ve got to save little babies!” card. Even John “buggery, buggery, buggery” Derbyshire is unwilling to actually defend sodomy laws as a good idea. With all due respect to my former professor Robert P. George, who co-wrote a brief trying to convince the Supreme Court of the merits of the Texas statute, that argument’s just not a political winner.

That’s why, of course, they will now shift to marriage rights. The critical point here is that public debate is in flux on this. We’ve seen considerable change in public attitudes toward homosexuality in the last couple of decades – change that is now percolating upwards to SCOTUS and elsewhere. On themarriage question alone, support for equalmarriage rights keeps growing – and is now at 39 percent in the latest CNN/USA Today poll (up from 27 percent in 1996). The social right has therefore one option: to shut down the debate now – before the numbers move even more swiftly against them. They want to designate gays as a class of people constitutionally denied equality for ever. They want the term gay relationship to be anathema to what it means to be an American – before the public dialogue shifts any further. So they will soon launch their nuke against gay men and women trying to form stable relationships: a constitutional amendment to keep gays permanently outside the possibility of equal citizenship.

A RUSH AGAINST UNDERSTANDING: And, yes, this is tampering with the Constitution. What SCOTUS just did was apply settled principles in Constitutional law to a class of persons previously vulnerable to majority whim and privacy violation. That’s called applying the constitution, not tampering with it or changing its text. The difference with the past can be seen in the difference between Sandra Day O’Connor’s argument and Antonin Scalia’s. O’Connor sees gay people as fully-fledged people, with lives and loves and needs like everyone else. Scalia sees them as people who for some bizarre reason do immoral things with their body parts. O’Connor sees that homosexuality is what people are. Scalia thinks that homosexuality is what some people do. Once you accept O’Connor’s premise, Lawrence is not tampering with the Constitution, it’s applying it, given what we now know about sexual orientation. If you accept Scalia’s premise, you can see why he thinks the door is now open to raping children and marrying German Shepherds. The reason I support O’Connor, at a very basic level, is that I know she’s right. I know as well as I know anything, that being gay is an integral part of someone’s being, not some facile choice but a complex and profound human identity – equal in all its facets to the heterosexual human identity. So for me, the issue is clear: the equal dignity of citizens and human beings. That’s why I feel so strongly about this – as do so many others.