As our democracy debates – as it should – responsibility for homeland security and the war against terror before and after 9/11, it’s worth remembering one important thing. Whatever you believed about the justice of the war against Saddam, Iraq is now an immeasurably freer place than it was under the hideous tyranny of Saddam Hussein. We who have never experienced such horror can easily forget the overwhelming moral case for intervention. Ann Clwyd, mercifully, hasn’t.
MASSACHUSETTS MOVES ON: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has now set in motion a process whereby its own constitution can be amended on the matter of civil marriage for homosexuals. The amendment would bar gays from equal treatment in marriage but, at the same time, would mandate “civil unions” that are, in so far as the state has the ability to confer rights and responsibilities, exactly the same as civil marriage rights. It’s an amendment to ensure both substantive equality and semantic stigma. No one can know whether it will succeed. Social conservatives may not vote for it because it grants civil unions to a group they regard as anathema; social liberals may not vote for it because it sustains discrimination against gay couples. I’m against civil unions because I think they will be extended to straight couples and so undermine marriage as an institution. I’m not the only one. But that’s now for the people off Massachusetts and their representatives to figure out. The amendment will have to go through several more steps before it gets placed in the state constitution, if it ever does. So we’ll see. But I’m glad the debate took place; and I’m eager for a further debate about whether gay couples deserve real equality or a separate-but-equal status. What no one can deny is that this process is a serious one; that it has involved all the branches of government; that the debate has been as substantive as it has been impassioned. That’s how it should be; and Massachusetts should be allowed to figure its own way through the thicket of debate that still lies ahead. Conservatives who believe that states should have the right to decide for themselves what marriage is and whom it should include should let this process go forward unimpeded by an unnecessary and unprecedented federal intrusion. And the governor of the state should not try to interfere with the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling mandating equal marriage rights May 17. Each branch of government should play its part: it’s the genius of the American system. Let gay civil marriages exist for a while, as the court has mandated; see if the sky falls; then move deliberately forward. If the brief experiment is a disaster, it can always be repealed in 2006. If it’s a success, it can be upheld and become a model for other states to follow or recognize. That’s called federalism. Now we’ll see who really believes in it, won’t we?
POSEUR ALERT: “That lapidary aperçu is perhaps the most valuable lesson buried inside this biography of the young middle-class woman who became famous as the Hollywood Madam after her 1993 arrest.
Jamie-Lynn DiScala (Meadow on “The Sopranos”) interprets the role of the 27-year-old brothel owner with coy vacancy, and her flat affect seems part of a broader postmodern approach to the material. “Call Me” is less a made-for-television movie than an extension of the 50’s French nouveau roman; Fleiss’s immorality tale is told without almost any conventional elements like dramatic plotting, moral precepts or psychological insight. And like the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is more interesting in theory than in practice.” – Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times.
The Dish 