Month: February 2004

He was bankrolling parts of the anti-war movement. The Guardian has new details. Yes, the Guardian.

DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ: It can work. Of course it can. Don’t miss this astonishing story in yesterday’s Washington Post about how a young American is making history.

Part of the argument against marriage rights for gays has been that Massachusetts will change the entire country’s legal position. Such marriages will be forced onto other states, some argue. But this is simply untrue. First, the law and the constitution have always allowed states to refuse to recognize marriages in other states, if such marriages violate the public policy of said states. That’s why we had different standards for inter-racial marriages across the states for decades; and why we had different age-requirements; and different divorce standards. Marriage has never been federal in America. That’s particularly the case now because 38 states have their own “Defense of Marriage” laws, underpinning this fact. Think of it like a law license: it has to be re-credited in every state it is enforced in. Secondly, the federal Defense of Marriage Act makes this even more explicit. Thirdly, and less noticed, so do the regulations for marriages in Massachusetts itself. Here’s an obscure but vital provision in Massachusetts marriage law:

GENERAL LAWS OF MASSACHUSETTS PART . REAL AND PERSONAL PROPERTY AND DOMESTIC RELATIONS TITLE III. DOMESTIC RELATIONS

CHAPTER 207. MARRIAGE CERTAIN MARRIAGES PROHIBITED

Chapter 207: Section 11 Non-residents; marriages contrary to laws of domiciled state

Section 11. No marriage shall be contracted in this commonwealth by a party residing and intending to continue to reside in another jurisdiction if such marriage would be void if contracted in such other jurisdiction, and every marriage contracted in this commonwealth in violation hereof shall be null and void.

So a couple from out of state wanting to take their Massachusetts marriage and make it legal in, say, Alabama, won’t even have a legal marriage to carry! Federalism, in other words, works. In a country as culturally polarized as this one, I’d say federalism is an essential safety-valve for cultural conflict. Why not have different rules for marriage in San Francisco and Provincetown than in Missoula or Baton Rouge? Can’t we live with diversity? We do not need this federal amendment. We do not need it at all. And true conservatives – those who believe in states’ rights – should be in the forefront of opposition.

New research on the ways in which monogamous mammals form their bonds is beginning to reveal dopamine-related addictions triggered by various odors in the selected mate. Throw away that deoderant! In other words, monogamy is a form of chemical addiction, and that might have lessons for humans. One experiment analyzed the brains of students who described themselves as madly in love:

The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair [of researchers] conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes.

Fascinating. And depending on your particular chemical make-up, monogamy might be easier or harder. What the ancient philosophers understood – that lust, romantic love and friendship are very different states of being – is being slowly borne out by science. Friendship or long-term bonding is the most complex and important for social stability. But as humans, we are bound to screw it up – or at least be tempted to.

THE ‘M-WORD’: The marriage debate has come down to a word: who owns “marriage”? Here’s why I think it should be available to both straights and gays.

Thanks for your many emails. Here’s one I empathize with:

I had to take a class at the College of NJ called … hmmm… ah … SET (Science, Ethics, and Technology). A truly liberal-ating experience it was. During the Semester, a speaker was to give a lecture on the modern state. After the usual accolades, he began his lecture with his first point, “The final and greatest evolution of government is communism.” He later moved on to say that Gulf War I was pushed by the military to test newly developed weapons. Well I paid too much money and spent too much time in the military at Ft. Bragg to take his rhetoric any longer. I asked him openly “If communism is sooo great why did its bastion implode?” On the Gulf War point, I told him it was baseless and I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about. Anyway the rest of the semester I was attacked almost at every turn by brainwashed classmates. It didn’t matter. I got an A-. To the conservative students: do your homework; read ahead so they can’t trap you in an argument that they prepared throughout the 60’s and 70’s for.”

That’s good advice. But then you never know when it’s going to come flying at you:

This past fall term at the University of Oregon, I was taking a Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu class. The teacher decided that on Columbus Day, he would give the class a huge lecture on how evil it was for our government to celebrate a man who not only is to blame for the extinction of countless Native American cultures, but is indirectly a cause of Hitler’s Holocaust. This went on for an entire class, and at one point he even made a comparision of Bush to Hitler using what Bush was doing in the Middle East as his justification for that. This led to a diatribe on the evils of capitalism and the Oil Industry. Before that class session, I always thought that Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu was just about grapple-style fighting, little did I realize that if I were to be a true Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu artist I would have to battle the evils of genocide and capitalism as well.

And then there’s simple social bias, which in previous times, we’d have called snobbery:

The professor was explaining to her grad students — presumably all of like mind and background of course — that blue collar workers like police officers were a rather sad lot since they possessed little respect for formal education and consequently destined their children to a similar “fate” by failing to instill an adequate appreciation of higher learning and the personal and social benefits to be accrued from it. When I assured her that this was not the case seeing as my own father was a street cop who wanted his son to have more career opportunities, she was absolutely flabbergasted (and somewhat contrite, I like to think.) I couldn’t resist turning the screws a little by informing her that he had also earned a Masters degree while on the force. Since I was at one of the more prestigious universities, I eventually grew accustomed to the occasional disparaging remark directed at those who have to dirty their hands for a living, but whenever someone raised the topic I always remembered that time when my father took me to Dunkin’ Donuts after his shift (there’s some truth in stereotypes, of course). A member of some pacifist sect approached my father and said sanctimoniously, “I used to be a police officer once, and then I put down my gun.” My father replied calmly, “And the only reason you could do that is because I won’t.”

Reminds me of president Bush in Iraq. I’ve been overwhelmed with responses, so please only send some more if they’re really memorable. I find them all revealing in different ways.

Just as we can now get real pictures from liberation in Iraq, so we can get real pics of the first gay Americans to have their love and commitment solemnized by their own government. Thousands of them. In an act of civil disobedience. Yes, I know this is breaking the law. But Rosa Parks broke the law as well. Civil disobedience has always played a role in civil rights movements. If the religious right want to stop this, they should move to arrest the mayor of San Francisco or impeach him; or they should move to arrest the newly married couples. Then we’d really have a media spectacle. I think the real reason for the outrage is that these couples have finally shown what this is about: couples trying to solidify their love for one another. It is preposterous to believe that this can harm anyone. Once these marriages exist for real in Massachusetts, the public in that state will realize how cruel, wrong and baseless it is to attack couples for doing something constructive, real and social. And then the nation will.

“I’m an undergrad at Princeton and feel like I need to challenge this whole professorial bias business. I know it’s fun for you to receive letters about intimidated conservatives and cherry-pick the most shocking stories for publication, but (in my experience) these kind of stories either don’t happen or, at best, are very rare. I took a class called Discrimination and the Law that was taught by a very, very liberal professor, and was lucky enough to have her for my small-group discussion. Despite her personal politics, she would often pull the discussion to the *right* in our left-leaning precept if it was becoming too one-sided. In that class, just as in those taught by Robbie George (who is, by the way, one of Princeton’s most popular professors), students who make good arguments are rewarded regardless of political philosophy. If the writers whose anecdotes you printed had better thought out their positions beforehand, maybe they could have shot back and impressed their TA or professor.
Of course, this is just my experience, but it’s definitely not uncommon.”

Apart from that, the story holds up.

Kaus goes boldly where no Edwards supporter has gone before.

While the Republicans expand government at a phenomenal rate, the British Tories are daring to ratchet it back a little. It’s still peanuts compared to what we need to do to bring government back to a reasonable size – the proposals would reduce government’s take on national wealth from 42 to 40 percent. (I can’t see why it should ever be more than a third). But at least the Tories haven’t completely lost their smaller government vision.

The Iraqi police forces could have responded to a recent attack by seeking help from the nearby American military. They didn’t. They asked for more ammunition.