Good news that Massachusetts’ civil marriages are not going to be dealt with by the Supreme Court – at least in the foreseeable future. Interesting that it’s the anti-gay forces that are now forcing the issue in the courts. And encouraging that federal suits – on both sides – may not get very far. We need to let one state digest its own reform before any federal meddling. There’s no legal or constititutional reason that Massachusetts’ marriages will be foisted on any state that doesn’t want them. Beware the hysterics who will tell you otherwise.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “If one is to believe John Ezard’s account, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon, demonstrates a truly astonishing ignorance of her own subject in touting the “discovery” that Siegfried Sassoon wrote naively jingoistic poetry before penning his famously acerbic anti-war lyrics. The newly unearthed poem might be news, but the evolution of Sassoon’s own attitude is most definitely not. Anybody with the slightest knowledge of Sassoon’s life and character, as chronicled in his own published memoirs and fiction, knows that he traversed the familiar arc of initial enthusiasm, deepening bitterness and cynicism, and eventual protest, writing memorable verse all the while. In fact, you don’t even have to read the prose: it’s right there in the published poetry too. Look at “Absolution,” an early sub-Rupert-Brooke effort in which Sassoon emits the opinion that “War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,/And fighting for our freedom, we are free.” It didn’t take long for Sassoon to find his own voice: in “The Kiss,” written a few months later, the martial fury is tempered by darker untertones (the poem celebrates the bullet and the bayonet as “brother and sister,” and celebrates the latter’s “kiss” of the enemy soldier’s body). But the notion that Sassoon’s anti-war animus sprang full-grown out of nowhere is silly on its face, and I can attribute the needless attempt to refute this obviously dumb idea, and to advance an ill-considered and meaningless parallel between Sassoon’s personal journey and changes in the British public’s view of the Iraq war, only to an academic’s desperate quest for cheap notoriety.” More feedback on the smartest Letters Page on the web.
The Dish 