“During my first months in office, when day after day there were decisions that had to be made, I had an almost irresistible urge – really a physical urge – to look over my shoulder for someone I could pass the problem on to. Then without my quite knowing how it happened, I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. I started looking up instead and have been doing so for quite a while now.” – from Ronald Reagan’s remarkable letters. I’ll be posting a review of them on this site early next week. (If you’re a subscriber, you’ll have it in your mailbox sooner.)
HITCH ON SAID: An appropriately kind obit in Slate. Best paragraph:
But it can be admirable in a way to go through life with one skin too few, to be easily agonized and upset and offended. Too many people survive, or imagine that they do, by coarsening themselves and by protectively dulling their sensitivity to the point of acceptance. This would never be Edward’s way. His emotional strength – one has to resort to cliché sometimes – was nonetheless also a weakness.
I do think Hitch’s writing has become even better since it has become more of a repository of internal tension and debate. It has humanized him, taken off the sometimes overly-arch distance which used to characterize his prose.
THE FMA’S TRUE AGENDA: Freudian slip, I’d say, in this recent piece about the Federal Marriage Amendment. My reading is that the FMA would ban all types of domestic partnerships, civil unions, or any arrangements that can strengthen gay relationhips far short of marriage rights – even if they are the democratic consensus of a state, and reached through legislative means. The spin from most of the best FMA advocates (such as Stanley Kurtz) is that it would narrowly affect only court-imposed benefits and if a state wanted to create civil unions through its legislature, fine. Here’s the money sentence in the Washington Times op-ed:
Most experts believe the amendment would invalidate Vermont and California laws that are virtually equivalent of marriage.
Now remember that California’s law is not court-imposed but passed by a duly elected legislature. The point of the FMA is clear: to prevent individual states passing any benefits to gay couples by whatever means. It’s time the supporters of the FMA came clean about this.
A REMINDER: Every week, I get emails from people who find the white on navy color scheme on this site hard to read. We have long had a fix for that, and it’s a little button up there called “Black and White.” Click on it and the colors will be reversed.
The Dish 