Month: March 2004

Maggie Gallagher shows her cards today. She is not only opposed to civil marriage for gay couples but is also opposed to Massachusetts’ deciding to have civil unions as a separate but equal category in their Constitution. Fair enough. But it behooves the social right to be clear about where they stand: against all benefits and protections for gay couples and against any notion that gay and straight relationships are equal. Then she raises various bogeymen:

It will be open season on the Catholic Church and other religious groups and organizations that sustain a different vision of human sexual ethics. Hate-speech codes, yanking of broadcasting licenses, and termination of the tax-exempt status of traditional organizations – just a few of the legal threats looming. Far-fetched? In Europe and Canada it is already happening.

Puh-lease. There is something called the First Amendment in this country; and it protects freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression. If Fred Phelps’ constitutional rights are protected, then the much milder public doctrines of the Catholic hierarchy will be as well. And that is only right and proper. I have no interest in persuading people to approve of my life and relationship. To be honest, I couldn’t care less what others think about it. As long as I am treated equally under the law, I’m happy to be described as a pervert, an instrument of Satan, or even a Democrat. Bring it on! But don’t confuse your constitutional right to condemn me with your constitutional right to deny me equal protection of the laws.

If it could happen to Churchill… could it befall Bush? Why a wartime leader’s success can be his electoral downfall. My latest Time column is up.

CASUALTIES FALL: Good news from Iraq on two fronts. The U.S. military casualties in February amounted to 23 – half the previous month’s. It’s the lowest monthly number since the invasion and represents a very steep drop-off from the 110 casualties last November. The number of wounded has also hit a new post-war low. Credit goes to those trying to control the Sunni insurgency. There are front page stories when soliders are killed (and rightly so). But there should also be front-page stories when we make real progress. And that’s why it’s also good to see the New York Times trumpet Iraq’s rebound in oil production and revenues. Well ahead of schedule. When you put all this together with Ayatollah Sistani’s acquiescence to end-of-year elections and the new cooperation of the United Nations, you have the architecture of real success. Fingers crossed. I have, naturally, a question about this success. Could Halliburton have had anything to do with it?

Those mullahs so beloved of the Europeans are at it again. Having decimated the already powerless opposition to Islamist theocracy in their recent “elections,” they are trying to undermine Gaddafi’s policy of WMD disarmament. From the Telegraph:

Western intelligence specialists have learned from interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects, captured close to Afghanistan’s border with Iran, that a militant group of Libyan extremists is being protected and trained by terrorism experts from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Hmm. What a surprise: al Qaeda in league with Iran.

BUMILLER LOST: Wonkette has the best reaction to the last Democratic debate. For my part, it confirmed something I’ve suspected for a while. John Kerry is highly unlikely to put John Edwards on his ticket. And his spending plans make even George Bush look fiscally responsible. A must-read this week: the Washington Post’s analysis of Kerry’s big spending budget plans. It looks increasingly as if anyone who cares about fiscal sanity is going to have to sit this election out.

THE GOODS ON NADER: A liberal argues that Ralph Nader has not suddenly become a bane to pragmatic liberalism. He’s always been a vain, monomaniacal enemy of liberal reform. Jon Chait is on a roll.

AGAINST THE AMENDMENT: One site has accumulated evidence that 48 senators are now on record as either against or very cool to the religious right amendment to the constitution.

SCHRODER ON THE ROPES: He wasn’t just beaten in the Hamburg elections. His party was buried. The best blog on German politics also catches up on Der Spiegel.

GIBSON ON NON-CATHOLICS: They’re all going to hell. That includes all those evangelicals who are flocking to his movie and even his wife.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “The Constitution says that all men are created equal, and it doesn’t say that all men are created equal except for gays. Just like everyone else who is born in this country, gays are endowed by their creator, God, with inalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At birth, whether your are born in Russia, Cuba, South America, or New York, you are born equal. The difference is that our [American] babies grow up to live free.” – Barry Goldwater, my kind of Republican.

David Frum cites several examples of potential legal thickets over marriage rights and asks me to say what I think of them. He asks whether the federal government would be required to recognize Massachusetts marriages. Right now, DOMA says no. For the feds, same-sex couples don’t exist. The rest are all versions of the same hypothetical: that some legal challenge might occur that involves the legal standing of a Massachusetts civil marriage of a gay couple in another state. For example: “Two married Massachusetts men are vacationing in another state. One of them has a stroke. The hospital concludes he will never recover. Local law requires the hospital to ask the next of kin whether to continue treatment. Whom should it ask?” Legally, the most apposite statute is the following one from Massachusetts, delineating the scope of a civil marriage from that state:

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 deliberate attempts to bypass other states’ laws on the matter would seem to me to be fruitless. But what about when one spouse of a Massachusetts marriage is inadvertently traveling elsewhere, and something happens, as in Frum’s vacation example? I’d hope, for humane reasons, that a spouse would not be denied access to a hospital room elsewhere or ruled out of a precious medical decision. But I’m afraid, given DOMA, given the public policy exception of most states, such a cruel decision would be fully legal in other states. It is possible, of course, that a handful of “legal incidents” of marriage could be upheld by courts in other states – but that’s a long way away from the actual marriage being fully recognized. In other words, I would reluctantly acquiesce in a married couple being torn apart if they traveled across state borders. That happened often when anti-miscegenation laws were valid in some states but not others (a full treatment of the miscegenation precedents can be found in my anthology, “Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con.”) I’m resigned to it happening again.

TURNING IT AROUND: But let’s turn the question around. In every instance Frum cites, he wouldn’t only be happy to prevent such basic protections from being recognized in other states. He would ban them outright in Massachusetts – or any other state – as well. Frum also opposes all civil unions laws and domestic partnership laws for gays. He would keep it impossible, in other words, for any gay man to have even an iota of the privileges he enjoys as a heterosexual legal spouse. Or am I wrong here? So my question back to Frum is simple: which of your 1,049 civil marital privileges would you be willing to grant a married gay couple?