It’s hard to see where his extra votes are going to come from.
ANOSMIC DREAMS: More about life without smell.
O’REILLY: He’s against outing people, except when he’s in favor of it.
STANLEY AND THE DUTCH: I’m not going to wade again into the thickets of research on marriage, cohabitation, parenting and so on in Scandinavia and Holland and elsewhere. But I should note that Stanley Kurtz’s latest piece is striking not only because of how modest his claims now are. His latest forumlation is:
Gay marriage is not the only cause of rising out-of-wedlock birthrates. I never said it was and it doesn’t take a demographer to realize that lots of factors contribute to husbandless women having babies.
Round of applause, please. But some important context. Kurtz’s lede – which he portrays as some new consensus view in Holland – is that
a group of five scholars in the Netherlands issued a letter addressed to “parliaments of the world debating the issue of same-sex marriage.” The Netherlands was the first country to adopt full-fledged same-sex marriage, and this letter is the first serious indication of Dutch concern about the consequences of that decision.
Hmmm. My Dutch reader weighs in:
The Reformatorisch Dagblad is of course a small partisan conservative Christian newspaper, there are just 5 university professors who state their opinion (now what would you say if 5 Berkeley scholars would issue a letter “proving” gay marriage is healthy?) and the facts they try to connect are actually uncorrelated. Yes marriage is in decline in the Netherlands as it has been for decades and the bigger part of that happened long before gay marriage was legalized. In fact, there has been some increase in (straight) marriages lately.
The reason why out of wedlock births are on the increase is because it is simply possible to arrange proper contracts for joint parenthood quite easily without marriage in the Netherlands now and quite a few people like it that way. The insinuation that this results in unstable parenting is preposterous.
But Stanley is ghetting more inventive. Here’s the latest gambit:
[T]he meaning of traditional marriage was transformed every bit as much by the decade-long national movement for gay marriage in Holland as by eventual legal success. That’s why the impact of gay marriage on declining Dutch marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates begins well before the actual legal changes were instituted.
How convenient. Now, merely campaigning for equal marriage rights weakens marriage. So you can blame the fags for the decline of an institution they have had nothing to do with. A million sighs of relief go up from the social conservatives.
CAKEWALK?? An unusual lapse into political incorrectness at the NYTimes:
All this fumbling has left Mr. Obama, the smooth-talking, Harvard-educated law professor from Chicago, looking like the only candidate in a race that may make him the only African-American in the Senate. Voters who don’t know him yet surely will after the Democratic National Convention, where he will be keynote speaker. But it would be too bad if Mr. Obama cakewalked into Washington. Not just for Mr. Obama, who would take office with an asterisk (“*ran against incompetents”). Illinois voters deserve to see a capable opponent force him to answer tough questions and defend his positions. In other words, they deserve a nonludicrous race.
“Cakewalk,” a reader informs me, has two possible meanings:
1. Something easily accomplished: Winning the race was a cakewalk for her. 2. A 19th-century public entertainment among African Americans in which walkers performing the most accomplished or amusing steps won cakes as prizes. 1. A strutting dance, often performed in minstrel shows. 2. The music for this dance.
You learn something every minute in the blogosphere.
The Dish 