My take on Obama's address last night is here.
Month: June 2011
Obama To Fake Changing Mind
TNC is frustrated by Obama's "evolving" marriage equality position:
I think the thing that’s most troubling about the “evolving” fudge is it feels like someone is insulting your intelligence. This is clearly a move to back gay marriage as soon as enough Americans do the same. I’m actually fine with that. It’s positioning it as some sort of deep, internal struggle that rankles.
Greg Sargent's two cents:
By declaring that his position is “evolving” on gay marriage, Obama put himself in a position that’s fundamentally untenable. He let the world know that he believes in full marriage equality, and that he will say so sooner or later. All this succeeded in doing is stoking impatience among gay advocates for him to go ahead and say what he really believe.
Dan Savage has been wrestling with the question. Yep, it's excruciating. But we should stop wanting the president to somehow legitimize a civil rights movement. It is we who will legitimize him.
These movements must come from below; they must be sustained and propelled by organic social forces; and, at this point, the New York State Senate is where the action is. In the future it will be in other state houses and courts and kitchen tables and PTA meetings. The presidency is pretty much irrelevant now, especially since the actual things a president can do, like help end the HIV ban, protect gay couples in federal employment, and end DADT, have been done. The federal government should have nothing to do with civil marriage in America. And in refusing to back DOMA in court, the Obama administration is actually proposing to take us back to that federalist position.
At the earliest stages of the campaign, I snuck into a fundraiser for Obama that was OTR. I wanted to see the man up-close, to do a gut-check on his character, the way he interacted with people. It just so happens the mother of a gay son asked him a marriage question. He kept to his "equality apart from the name" position, and I believed him. He may simply be cautious about taking a clear leadership position on something that still divides the over-40s and deeply divides the over-60s.
But when we have done our job – the education, the debate, the grass roots work, the intellectual framework – he will not stand in our way. He is to the gay rights movement where JFK was with the civil rights movement: waiting to be dragged to endorse us with the clarity we deserve.
Obama and no president should ever be regarded as a savior. In America, we save ourselves.
(Photo: Getty.)
Jews In America And Israel
"Of course, I do think we all have a responsibility to make the world better – but specifically Israel, because I am Jewish? No," – Alison Benedikt, whose essay has kicked up an online ruckus.
Jeffrey launched a punchy attack on this provocative but obviously heartfelt and over-sharing piece. Then he admirably posted Benedikt's full response to it here, while less admirably describing it as "anti-Israel"; and has followed up with an accusation that Benedikt's personalized version of the Seder service is "un-Jewish". Phil Weiss, who highlighted the sentence above, argues that the piece:
crystallizes the Jewish moment. Beautifully and sincerely written, with wrenching confessions about her family's blindness and the important influence of her non-Jewish husband (yes just as my mother-in-law who smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital gave me a path on the issue), it signifies a crisis inside American Jewish consciousness that Peter Beinart and J Street and the New York Review of Books are going to have trouble catching up with.
This is not a fight I can engage with respect to who or what is authentically Jewish, although, like much of Jeffrey's work, it prompted me to educate myself better about the Seder (where I think I can see his point). But I can say that it should be possible for an adult to have a loss of innocence, without being decried as naive or jejune. What matters, it seems to me, is the underlying argument, not the "authority" or history of the person making it. Is Benedikt wrong that the occupation is destroying Israel's soul and its future? More to the point: isn't that what Jeffrey says he believes as well?
It also seems to me that the thoughtful rebuttal posted by Jeffrey from liberal rabbi Andy Bachman gets to the nub of the underlying matter here:
It may best be summed up by the rabbinic dictum, "All of Israel (read, "the Jewish people") are responsible for one another." How you respond to that idea from the Sages places you on one side or the other of the debate … A Jewish people without all its voices is not a people. It's an American denominationalist religion where land, history and language gather dust.
I stopped short at the dictum rendered thus by Bachman: "All of Israel (read, "the Jewish people) are responsible for one another". And not for those outside the faith, including those they may injure or oppress? Moreover, in a world of Diaspora Jews, can there really not be a distinction between being part of the Jewish people and being in favor of the policies of all Israeli governments? Or, more precisely, can there not be a distinction between being part of the Jewish people and being in favor of the policies of a Greater Israel government, an expansionist, occupying force, deliberately designed for the long-term annexation of neighboring territory, with all the attendant compromises of forcing an entire people into subjugation? At what point, in other words, is one expelled from the community because one's interpretation of a tradition leads one to oppose its current political manifestation?
Again, I cannot speak to this as a Jew, of course. But I can say that a tug between one's conscience and the current instantiation of a religion's authoritative institutions is very much not new to me.
I have struggled with it much of my life as a gay Catholic. Am I a "wicked son" for dissenting? Or an essential part of the sensus fidelium for the same reason? Is my position an expression of loyal dissent or am I un-Catholic or even anti-Catholic when I vent about sex abuse, the subjugation of women or the stigmatization of gays? The peril for a Jewish-American dissident seems even more parlous to me. I am not required to defend a sovereign state as part of my religion, and all its attendant moral compromises and evils. Defending a faith from an institution that became a global child-abuse ring was hard enough.
My own view is that the interests of the US require pressuring Israel to agree to a reasonable two-state solution soon. Maybe I'm wrong. But could a Jewish person convinced of the same argument remain a Jew in good standing? I suspect that's where the issue hinges. Is a commitment to Zionism in defense of Greater Israel a disqualifier from being part of the Jewish people? Benedikt notes that her position in the end is not that much different from Goldblog's stated position:
I bet I land, uncomfortably, about where you land: If the decision comes down to brutal occupation forever to maintain the Jewishness of the state or true democracy, which would mean no Jewish state, I would have to choose the latter–but there is nothing easy or wishful in me writing that, and I hope it never comes to that (though more and more it seems like it will).
She's right, isn't she? So why the outrage?
The Lame State
The gory new anti-smoking ads, intended to dispel the notion that smoking is cool, make Robin Hanson question the influence of government:
We the masses are supposed to each decide what we think is "cool," and we are not supposed to accept declarations by teachers, employers, etc. on the subject. Whatever authorities recommend as a good idea, it can only accidentally be "cool." "Cool" just doesn't seem the sort of thing government can actually regulate.
Dish readers sound off:
I am an occasional social smoker. I don't consider myself addicted at all. But the first thing I thought when I saw those labels was, "Cool, time to collect all nine."
Another:
My husband and I were talking last night about these new pics (we are both ex-smokers) and thought that a new market will emerge for cigarette cases. He thought about those sleek, shiny cases, as seen on "Mad Men", and I thought about those crafty crocheted beaded cases that my grandma used to make for her cigarettes' packs.
Another sends the above image:
I'm surprised they didn't go with the Canadian "impotence" warning label.
Update: A reader notes that the Onion got there first.
Huntsman’s Slim Chances, Ctd
Like Chait and Massie, Douthat sees a tough road ahead:
Huntsman doesn’t just have to thread the moderate-as-insurgent needle, he has to do it against a moderate frontrunner whose profile — competence, business experience, Mormonism — is remarkably similar to his own. If Romney were still the candidate of talk radio and Jim DeMint, Huntsman might be able to outflank him in states like New Hampshire by positioning himself as the more electable and more independent-minded candidate. But as it stands, it isn’t clear how a rich handsome well-coiffed Mormon RINO distinguishes himself from the more famous, better-funded rich handsome well-coiffed Mormon RINO who’s currently leading in the polls.
(Photo: Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former Republican presidential hopeful and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speak to the media during a press conference at the Million Air FBO March 27, 2008 in Salt Lake City, Utah. By Danny La/Getty Images)
A Man-Made Earth
Adam Frank believes we are witnessing the advent of the Anthropocene, a unique geological age where human activity, not natural processes, is the principal driver of planetary change:
The first point to absorb is that there are no politics in the designation. It is neither a value judgment nor a critique. Instead, it is simply a recognition that human activity has now come to be the most significant … [force] driving the various interlocking systems that define the current "state" of the planet. Scientists digging through sediments millions of years from now should easily be able to identify the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. From the fossilized remains of our cities to changes in the carbonate content in sea-floor sedimentation, the Anthropocene may appear as clearly to future scientists as the Cretaceous appears to us.
The Economist did a feature on this last month.
Oversized Houses
Susan Orlean rails against them:
My husband and I built our house in New York about five years ago, and right before we began, I fell under the spell of the small-house movement; I had dozens of Post-Its in my copy of “The Not-So-Big House” marking author Sarah Susanka’s recommendations for designing a house that was efficient and inviting without being pointlessly gigantic.
Are Anti-Interventionist Republicans All Talk? Ctd
Larison, like the Dish, sees a real shift:
When I described a shift in conservative attitudes towards military intervention a few weeks ago, I wasn’t arguing that the shift was huge, but I would insist that it is significant.
I was careful not to make extremely broad claims that this proves that the GOP is undergoing a massive shift on foreign policy, much less that it is going to be reliably non-interventionist or antiwar in the future, but there is some real movement going on. It is important to emphasize that the actual antiwar votes for the Kucinich resolution in the House represented a minority of Republicans, and the most vocal opponents of the Libyan war among the 2012 candidates are generally considered second-tier or long-shot candidates. Even so, the number of antiwar votes was remarkably high, and the number of candidates opposed to the Libyan war is much greater than anything we’ve seen in the past. Republican and conservative opinion on military intervention has never been monolithic, but until recently skeptics and opponents of such policies have been almost completely unrepresented in Congress and in presidential debates.
San Quentin’s Tennis Court
Marc Howard visits it:
Some inmates actually have the option to be in a lower-security facility within California, but they still request San Quentin, which they insist is the best of the state's 33 prisons, for one simple reason: the programs. There is no other correctional institution where prisoners can take courses taught by world-class instructors ("I'm taking a great Sociology class right now," Raphael, the team captain, told me) and play sports with people from the outside. It's almost enough to make them forget about that tiny cell where they spend most of their time.
(Photo: A view of the California State Prison at San Quentin May 15, 2009 in San Quentin, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Criminal Justice Myths, Ctd
Balko counters more misconceptions. On the regularity of false confessions:
Minors and the mentally disabled are especially prone to false confessions, but anyone under considerable duress or who has endured an unusually long or harsh interrogation can be susceptible. Rob Warden and Steven A. Drizin point out in the book "True Stories of False Confessions," an anthology of reports of 48 people who confessed to felonies they didn't commit, the confession often puts a halt to the investigation, even when the confessions "aren't corroborated or don't fit the facts of the alleged crimes."
The Dish 