“The Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, called on that country’s Jewish community to wear baseball caps instead of skullcaps while not in their homes, in order ‘to prevent being attacked in the street.’ Daily newspaper Le Parisien reported in its Wednesday edition that Sitruk made the comments Tuesday in an interview on Radio Shalom, a Jewish community radio station.” It gets worse, doesn’t it?
BURKE AND MARRIAGE: Along with Hayek, let me suggest that Burke might also have been in favor of including gays in marriage rights, if he were alive today. He was a conservative but he was also a Whig. Unlike many of the Tories of his day, Burke favored American independence and had an independent streak. He believed that society changes and that laws and institutions should be open to accommodating such changes – not resisting them to the bitter end. And when you look at, say, civil society in Massachusetts today, you see that gay relationships are widely accepted. Many such couples have children. The state already provides all sorts of legal protections for these people and even the dissents in the Goodridge case had nothing against accepting the reality and dignity of gay relationships. Polls have shown a small majority of Massachusetts residents favor same-sex marriage. The legislature has considered granting them many of the benefits of marriage already. The court’s nudge of what is already a pretty wide consensus is not abject tyranny. Compared to what most Virginians thought of inter-racial marriage in 1967, the residents of Massachusetts are crazy homophiles. Gay marriage is already, in most substantive respects, a reality in that state. The question is whether the laws should now reflect that reality, and provide real protection for families that already exist. That’s why this move is far less radical than some are suggesting – and why it wasn’t crazy for the court to find no rational reason to maintain the exclusion. Sure, it would be a radical move in parts of the South, where gay families also exist, but do so in a climate of fear and hatred and widespread hostility. But that’s the point of federalism, isn’t it? It can be tried out in one state before it is tried out in another. The flip-side of leaving Mississippi alone is that we should also leave Massachusetts alone. Deal?
The Dish 