Month: November 2009

Maine In Perspective

David Link makes a very important point here that bears underlining. Tuesday was a great day for gay rights everywhere but Maine:

We won voter approval of (1) domestic partnerships in Washington; (2) an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo; (3) an openly gay city council president in Detroit; and (4) an openly lesbian mayoral candidate in Houston. That seems to say something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in this country.

I agree with David that public opinion is now decisively inclusive of gay people – on every issue but civil marriage. But even on that last issue, we are now essentially neck and neck in California and Maine, the last two states to have referendums on the matter, and we are over 50 percent in Washington state for domestic partnerships that are identical to civil marriage on a state level, but without the m-word. 

The anti-gay forces are fighting on the last ground they can win.

On the military ban, on employment non-discrimination, on civil unions, the failure to act is not a function of public opinion. It's a function of the Democratic party's general wussiness. On marriage, the only lever that is now working against gay couples – scaring parents about kids – doesn't work in the courts or legislatures because it isn't an argument as such; it's a feeling. So these referendums are grueling and the playing field is against us. In every other respect, we have won or will win if we can get the DNC to stop treating us as lepers. All we need is civil marriage in one state for a generation and the war is over. They will fight a rearguard action to humiliate, browbeat and stigmatize those of us building our relationships and families. But that is all they can do.

Karl Rove Discovers Fiscal Conservatism, Ctd

I was too nice in ascribing merely a trillion dollar deficit bequeathed to Obama, as a reader reminds me:

According to the treasury department's Bureau of Public Debt, the federal deficit went from $5,728,195,796,181.57 on January 22, 2001 to $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20, 2009. Bear in mind that the allegedly fiscally conservative Republican Party ran this government for six of those eight years. Roughly two trillion of that debt was added after Democrats took over Congress in 2007.

Adding $5 trillion in debt in eight years is unprecedented in US history outside the Second World War. But that's what Bush and Rove and the GOP did. And now they lecture everyone else about fiscal responsibility.

Here's my litmus test for the Tea Party right: when they hold up effigies of Bush and Cheney as socialists, I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're more partisan than principled.

Calling For Blood

Reacting to an article on a family that was savagely tortured and murdered, Sonny Bunch defends the death penalty:

Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty — as I did in the wake of another New Yorker piece, about a possibly-innocent man who was executed — I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line. I’m all for containing prosecutorial abuses. I’m all for reforms to the way prosecutors seek the death penalty…[But] those monsters — the animals who would do that to a family of human beings — don’t deserve to live, and I don’t buy the argument that it’s a harsher penalty for them to live out their lives in prison. I want the state to wreak vengeance upon them. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens. If this makes me a bad person, then so be it.

Will at Ordinary Gentlemen has mixed feelings. I do not believe the point of the law in the West is revenge. It's justice. In fact, avoiding revenge and filtering the emotions of crime through the restraint of the criminal justice system, with due respect for the accused, is what separates us from other less evolved places. And if the death penalty is used, it should not be to impose suffering. It should be to demonstrate deterrence and justice. I should add, of course, that I oppose the death penalty in all cases – because I do not trust government with the capacity to end a captive human being's life, because I do not believe any justice system is perfect enough to do that without error, and because I believe that murder is absolutely wrong.

Chart Of The Day

PEWEnrollment

Free Exchange is made hopeful by PEW's data showing record enrollment in higher education:

If the recession ended up boosting educational attainment at all levels, that would be the shiniest of silver linings. Deteriorating attainment in recent decades has played a role in growing inequality and poor performance of key parts of the real economy. This is absolutely a trend the government ought to be doing its best to facilitate, rather than looking to temporarily boost car or home sales. Increased school enrollment now would not only provide a lift to long-term economic performance; it would also reduce competition for jobs among low-skilled workers, generating a labour market turnaround sooner than would otherwise be the case.

Thinking Of The Children

A reader writes:

I think there is something missing in Weddingkids children are exposed to same-sex couples, they are often explained differently than the relationships of married couples (eg.”this is my friend/roommate”).

When this dynamic changes, like when a teacher gets married to someone of the same sex, it goes against prior experience and suddenly becomes worthy of notice, leading to questions.  Now try to imagine the conversation that follows.  Parents may be forced to deal with questions of sexuality and love at an age when these discussions would not otherwise take place. Topics that many parents already dread are now taking place earlier and on very unfamiliar or uncomfortable ground.  Perhaps the parents themselves have questions or concerns that they have never had the opportunity to explore fully. In the meantime, granting civil unions as opposed to full marriage means that no one has to worry about how they explain it to their kids when a woman calls another woman her wife or when a man calls another man his husband, and the matter gets to wait a while longer.  After all, no one is forcing them to drink at separate water fountains.

For the most part, I think this debate is far more about ignorance than it is about bigotry.  And I don’t mean the ignorance that is often invoked in these issues, I mean a true lack of knowledge or context.

What civil marriage does is end the invisibility of gay couples, place them on an equal public footing as straight ones, and, without any formal teaching in school, provokes questions among the young. This is indeed difficult for parents, because they are used to being able to avoid the topic entirely and because they have very different feelings about this issue when it comes to their own kids.

What the current anti-marriage equality forces have now been reduced to is exploiting these parental fears. But it remains a quixotic and reactionary gesture. Why? Because civil marriage for gay couples is the genie already out of the bottle.

It cannot be made invisible or unmentionable in the present, let alone the future. Unless you try to seal your kids off from the world they live in – a world where several states and many countries treat gays and straights identically – a conversation with kids is simply unavoidable on this topic, just as it is on any other number of once unmentionable things that now pervade the culture.

So the right has a choice. They either double down and wage a war to strip gay couples of existing marriage rights, and use that reversal of rights to try to increase the stigma of homosexual orientation among the young. Or they can coopt the movement and use it to teach the virtues of marriage and family all round, inclusive of gay people.

In some ways, this latter dynamic helps straight parents. Homosexuality is now unavoidable as a public issue. Explaining homosexuality to your kids is much more salubrious and PG if you can place it in the rubric of straight life – “they just marry someone of the same sex” – rather than in the rubric of dark and unmentionable sexual acts. In my experience, children get this instantly. Certainly my own nieces and nephews do. The younger generation sees it clearly. But adult fears and phobias keep getting in the way.

I’ve done what I can to persuade the right that embracing the emergence of gay people and bringing them into family life and communal responsibility is the most authentically conservative option. The trouble is: this movement has ripened just as conservatism has become a governing philosophy based on fundamentalist religion rather than pragmatic, conservative adjustment to a changing society. And so we are where we are. It feels at times like a tragic historical mismatch in which conservatism missed its moment. But one day it will come. As the truth becomes more and more unavoidable.

The Iranian Marathon

Ackerman reports on a NIAC meeting and our foreign policy response to Iran:

There are several bills moving through the Congress to place new economic sanctions on Iran, including one sponsored in the House by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and another in the Senate from Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). But retired Amb. John Limbert, one of the U.S. diplomats held hostage at the embassy in 1979 and 1980, pronounced himself “very skeptical” of sanctioning Iran. “It’s easy to talk about smart sanctions,” he said, “but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one.” Instead, Limbert contended, sanctions would most likely “create shortages and artificial, wonderful opportunities for hoarding” that benefit “those with the best connections to the regime” at the expense of the population. Thielmann agreed, saying sanctions risked “strengthening the regime, when it’s meant to do the opposite.”