Yes – and on video as well. The chef is French, naturellement.
CONSERVATIVES ON IRAQ: The best guide I’ve read so far is from my trusty aide, Reihan Salam, in the New Republic.
INTEGRATION DAY, CONTINUED: Noam Scheiber profiles Barack Obama, the Illinois Senate candidate.
BACKLASH FIZZLES: A new Gallup poll shows an historic high for support for marriage rights for gay couples. To the question: “Do You Think Marriages Between Homosexuals Should or Should Not Be Recognized by the Law as Valid?” 55 percent said no and 42 percent said yes. That 42 percent is the highest number ever recorded. It was 27 percent in 1996, and had been 31 percent as recently as last December. The public remains equally divided on the matter of a constitutional amendment, even when it is framed in a positive formula, and is split down the middle on civil unions. All in all, the shift in public opinion is clearly in favor of those supporting marriage rights. We are slowly winning this debate. Two leading conservatives recognize this: Cal Thomas, who says this debate is over, and Max Boot, who represents the younger conservative generation’s attitude. Meanwhile, pro marriage-equality politicians in Oregon, including those in Multnomah County who were targeted by the religious right, just won re-election handily.
CONTRA KURTZ: Stanley Kurtz’s argument that marriage rights for gays in Scandinavia somehow led to a decline in marriage rates for heterosexuals or an increase in children born out of wedlock is thoroughly rebutted by M. V. Lee Badget in the current Slate. The evidence, to put it mildly, simply doesn’t exist. In fact, heterosexual marriage rates have stabilized and even increased after gays were allowed to marry. Money quote:
In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.
Badget then demolishes Kurtz’s bizarre assertions that giving gays the right to marry somehow causes straights to have children out of wedlock:
Parenthood within marriage is still the norm – most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.
This mini-debate, at least, is now over.
The Dish 