Month: June 2013

Live-Blogging Marriage Morning

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12.10 pm. A reader writes:

I am writing from overseas where I live with my partner of 32 years in a sort of self imposed exile. He has been unable to obtain any sort of residency visa for the USA. We have been looking forward to this day. The phone is ringing off the hook and everyone is saying “you’ll be able to marry and come home.” I think I’m going to go light a candle and thank God and all the people who have fought so long and so hard to make all this possible. Bless you.

Bless the souls of those whose courage in extremis gave me and others the strength not to falter in pursuit of their dignity as human beings and their equality as citizens. We did it in part for those we left behind. And part of the reason I am crying right now is remembering them. I want them to come to the party. I want them to see they didn’t die in vain. Another reader:

I’m surprised by how moved I am – I’m a little choked up. I know I’m going to express this awkwardly. But the decision comes across to me almost like a ray of decency. There’s so much awful stuff coming at us all the time, but here, 5 justices have done something good and human and right. It doesn’t feel like a news story, so much as something good washing over the country. It’s really nourishing.

The world is a better place than it was an hour ago. How often can you say that?

Another:

I don’t know about you, but my head explodes when I read the following from Scalia’s dissent: “We have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.”

You mean like you invalidated a whole section of the Voting Rights Act (just yesterday!) and tried unsuccessfully to sink the entire Affordable Care Act? I’m not a lawyer, and my lawyer friends assure me that Scalia is brilliant, if extremist, but I read that kind of head-turning inconsistency and all I see is a hack, not a brilliant legal mind. And again, I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t the entire purpose of the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of legislation (democratically adopted or otherwise) and invalidate it when necessary? What a dipshit.

11.55 am Dueling tweets of the moment:

And I suspect Jesus’ tears were of joy – because more children of God have finally been given the dignity he offered the most despised and marginalized of his time.

11.44 am. Scalia’s dissent was worth a little wait. On gay cases, they are like operettas of dyspepsia, and this one didn’t disappoint. Money quote:

The majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malice — with the “purpose” (ante, at 25) “to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples. It says that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” ibid.; to “impose inequality,” ante, at 22; to “impose . . . a stigma,” ante, at 21; to deny people “equal dignity,” ibid.; to brand gay people as “unworthy,” ante, at 23; and to “humiliat[e]” their children, ibid. (emphasis added).

I am sure these accusations are quite untrue. To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act.

To be sure. But defending it from whom? Kennedy explains:

The House concluded that DOMA expresses “both moral disapproval of homosexuality, and a moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian) morality.” Id., at 16 (footnote deleted). The stated purpose of the law was to promote an “interest in protecting the traditional moral teachings reflected in heterosexual-only marriage laws.” Ibid.

When the Christianist GOP tells you in print that it is enacting a law to uphold moral disapproval of a class of persons, you really do get to animus. Religiously-inspired animus, but animus nonetheless. The subtler arguments – about, say, the federal need to maintain one standard for marriage recognition – were not part of that original debate. I was there. The whole thing was about “defending” marriage from those who would clearly demean it. The discrimination was explicit. At no point were the actual interests of gay citizens cited on the right. We were non-persons, because we were morally inferior and had no right to ask for that kind of equality. That’s how Scalia felt ten years ago, and he hasn’t changed. But he cannot change the legislative record or the rhetoric used at the time of the bill.

11.38 am. The president phones the couples and congratulates them.

11.35 am. Immigration equality is here. Again: after two decades of extreme anxiety, history wipes it away. You have no idea how much relief so many bi-national couples are now feeling.

11.23 am. Some have noticed how often Anthony Kennedy used the word “dignity” in his ruling. My own impression of the text is to note how Catholic it is. I mean by Catholic the sense of concern for the dignity of human beings that still resonates among the average Catholic population and, mercifully, now with the new Pope. This is the true measure of our shared faith: not a desire to use its doctrines to control or constrain the lives of others, but seeking always to advance the common good while leaving no one behind. No one.

The Church hierarchy’s Ratzingerian turn against this minority in 1986, its subsequent callous indifference to us during the plague years, its rigid clinging to 13th Century natural law rather than what or rather who was right in front of them … these were all tragic failures from the top. But not in the pews; not among lay Catholics; not among many of our families and friends. And that humane Catholicism is embedded in paragraph after paragraph of Kennedy’s text. He is talking about us, our relationships and our children as if we were human beings made in the same image of God with inalienable dignity.

It will one day – perhaps even today – seem banal. And it is. But to get to that banality required a revolution.

11.19 am. Great to see Pete Williams analyze the opinion for NBC – a long time after he was brutally outed, even when he was always out, always principled, and in a relationship that has lasted much of his lifetime. Proud of you, Pete, for thriving through all of it … until you got to do this. Amazing, innit?

11.16 am. Photo above: The amazing lawyer, Roberta Kaplan (right), and Edie Windsor, whose case gave the legal civil marriages of homosexual couples full federal equality. Windsor said, “I wanna go to Stonewall right now!”

11.11 am. In the end, it is pretty simple. Are we homosexuals lesser than heterosexuals? Are our loves inherently worth less? Are our marriages inferior to straight ones? Kennedy’s final answer:

DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others… The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

11 am. I just called Aaron – just to tell him I love him. He’s in Ptown already as I wrap things up in New York. Dan had the same impulse:

Ditto. We still have the state-by-state struggle to include all of us. That fight will continue past this milestone. I just want to thank Dan for sticking up for me and Evan when we were far lonelier voices than today. I have to say that it is the most liberating feeling to hear your once near-solitary voice blend finally into a communal roar until it isn’t your voice at all any more. It’s the voice of justice.

We will all pass away (and so many dreamed of but didn’t live to see this day). Justice won’t.

10.56 am. Look how Kennedy uses Lawrence to advance his case and proves Scalia’s dissent in that case (that it paved the way for marriage equality) for him:

The differentiation [between heterosexual and homosexual couples] demeans the [homosexual] couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.

I wondered how the welfare of children would emerge in this case – and it did, in defense of the dignity of tens of thousands of them. Didn’t expect that the words of a SCOTUS ruling would suddenly give me a huge lump in my throat. This is more emotional than I expected. But how can you anticipate a moment like this one?

10.50 am. Even having lived through all this seventeen years’ ago, and kept my eyes open as hard right and liberal Clintonites joined forces against the handful of us then fighting for this cause, I am still amazed to read the plain truth in a judicial ruling. Kennedy again:

The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States. The history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.

My italics.

10.45 am. Tweet of the minute:

10.40 am. Perry is thrown out for lack of standing:

“We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here.”

10.39 am: Tweet of the minute:

10.34 am. Kennedy money quote:

Though these discrete examples establish the constitutionality of limited federal laws that regulate the meaning of marriage in order to further federal policy, DOMA has a far greater reach; for it enacts a directive applicable to over 1,000 federal statutes and the whole realm of federal regulations. And its operation is directed to a class of persons that the laws of New York, and of 11 other States, have sought to protect.

Translation: the feds may tinker with some aspects of a state’s civil marriages, but they may not remove an entire class of persons from equal protection. This is a conservative point – and DOMA was a betrayal of conservative federalism in favor of Christianist big government. I actually made that case sitting in front of the House hearings on DOMA. The Republicans were uninterested. They knew what they were about to do: gay-bait their way to re-election in 1996. And so Bill Clinton – a constitutional lawyer who signed this bill and who ordered his Justice Department to declare that it had no constitutional issues with it at all – gay-baited back. Today is as much a rebuke to the cynicism of Bill Clinton as it is to the fanaticism of the GOP.

10.27 am. What I’m now reading:

United States v. Windsor

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Have at it, Dishheads.

10.23 am. Rauch and I are name-checked:

10.19 am. Kennedy both defends federalism and basic due process and equal protection principles:

New York’s actions were a proper exercise of its sovereign authority. They reflect both the community’s considered perspective on the historical roots of the institution of marriage and its evolving understanding of the meaning of equality. Pp. 13–20.
(b)
By seeking to injure the very class New York seeks to protect, DOMA violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government. The Constitution’s guarantee of equality “must at the very least mean that a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot” justify disparate treatment of that group. DOMA cannot survive under these principles.

10.17. There may be a pause while I read the decision I’m actually trying to write about. Will post nuggets as I find them.

10.13 am. Tweet of the Day:

10.12 am. Some observers are noting language in the DOMA decision that seems to suggest that the Prop 8 decision will be a dismissal based on lack of standing. Not confirmed, but implied.

10.11 am. Now, through my unexpected tears, this from Anthony Kennedy:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

10. 10 am. “DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty.”

10 am. Two preliminary thoughts. The first is how weird it is to be gay and married and waiting for this decision. It feels a little like waiting for your parents to acknowledge that you are their actual offspring, even though everyone has always known it. It feels both exhilarating and  humiliating at the same time. Nine people are going to decide the worth and equality of my civil marriage? Who the fuck do the they think they are? Well, they’re the Supreme Court of the United States, dumb-ass. And so the mind turns.

Then: how on earth do they still manage to keep all this so embargoed? No leaks, no gossip – it’s wonderful, and a testament to how seriously all those intimately involved in these decisions respect the need for the secrecy that enables clarity and order. But to do it in this era, when everything and everyone leaks, is a testament.

The Price Of Bacon, Ctd

A reader writes:

You’re completely correct about what will be viewed as the “barbarous and unimaginable” treatment of animals. Coming from the mind of perhaps one of the “new atheists” you’ve been pigsprofiling lately, I believe waste to be one of few true sins. It betrays a lack of appreciation, a failure to understand the interconnected nature of all things in the world, and a selfish hedonism that is driving our species (and others) towards some very unpleasant places. Furthermore, the careless waste of meat – of animals that (in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases) we ourselves brought into being only to live horrendous lives of invisible suffering and leave a trail of environmental damage, simply for our unthinking momentary pleasure – is especially disgraceful.

I’m not vegan/vegetarian, nor do I believe it is unethical to eat meat or to raise animals specifically for consumption. But I choose to eat meat judiciously, from better sources whenever possible, and more consciously. The current system is so profoundly wrong that I’m not sure it’s possible to be an honest and compassionate human being without changing our dietary behavior or to continue living with blinders on to the issue. We can, and must, do better.

For your unafraid and more self-aware readership, I highly recommend Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Eating Animals. It gives a factual yet personal, non-judgmental, and intensely affecting account of the meat industry and human values.

Another:

The reader who wrote about his response to the PETA video reminded me of my own experience.

When I was 18, a freshman in college, I took a course in world population, which stressed the environmental costs of meat production.  One afternoon we watched a film showing cows being butchered in a factory slaughterhouse. I was so sickened that I became a vegetarian that day. It has been 38 years since I’ve eaten red meat or poultry, and I can honestly say I haven’t missed it. Based on average annual meat consumption in America, I figure I’ve spared 1050 chickens, 35 turkeys, and a dozen or so cows and pigs.

Life as a vegetarian has become much easier in the last decade. Instead of having to make my own veggie burger mix or track down tofu at the food co-op, you can buy veggie food at any grocery store, and almost every restaurant (even Burger King!) has vegetarian options. And as an added bonus, my cholesterol level is about 110.

Cruelty to animals is only one troubling facet of the meat industry. Meat production uses about 30% of the earth’s fertile land mass and accounts for about a fifth of all greenhouse gases. It takes somewhere between 430 and 2400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, depending on whether you use industry figures (the lower number) or PETA’s (the higher number). Earlier this month, a group of MPs  began a campaign to reduce meat consumption in Britain to prevent a global food crisis.  I don’t support PETA’s practices in general, and I’m not out to evangelize anyone – my own life partner is a happy carnivore – but I applaud you for continuing this important discussion.

Another:

I am 43 years old and lifelong carnivore. But your recent post that linked to the “humane” killing of cattle led me to stop eating red meat. This is a big deal since I eat low-carb (lots of proteins) on the regular. In the back of my mind, I have been making a deal that I won’t think about pork until I no longer miss red meat. I think this post has gotten me there.

It also led me to do a couple of things today: research where the pork and poultry at my grocery store comes from, and to send them a letter asking when they plan on being “5-step”Compliant (here is the link). This blog is making me a better citizen in so many different ways.

(Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary)

Print-At-Home Sculptures

They’ve arrived:

In his living room in San Diego right now, Cosmo Wenman has two life-sized reproductions of the British Museum’s Head of a Horse of Selene, a magnificently life-like sculpture with nostrils flared that dates to around 432 B.C. The original in Britain is made of marble, about three feet end-to-end. Wenman’s copies, created with an older digital camera and a MakerBot 3D printer, are clearly reproductions as soon as you lift them up. Created out of plastic, coated in a bronze patina, they weigh about 8 pounds each. For the last year or so, Wenman has been casing some of the world’s great sculptures for at-home replication, photographing them from every angle in plain sight inside the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Britain, the British Museum and a few others.

Wenman thinks 3-D printing could change the way we learn about and experience art:

Art museums have been scanning pieces like this for archival purposes for years. What’s new is that just about anyone can now walk into a gallery—assuming that photography is allowed—and do this, too. “To me,” Wenman says, “it seems very analogous to the potential behind the Napster-like free-for-all of unauthorized reproduction and sharing and remixing of music.”

Schoolchildren, he suggests, could reproduce their own art instead of flipping the pages in a text book. Artists could use the 3D designs to create modern sculpture inspired by famous antiquities, in much the same way that musicians sample each other. Smaller local museums, in particular, might use this as a way of drawing attention to little-known collections. And, of course, any 3D printing amateur could download these files to experience art that lives thousands of miles away.

A Female Fap App, Ctd

Amanda Hess doesn’t think the new app that gives women instructions on how to masturbate is going to close the gender gap:

Female masturbation is a logistical challenge, particularly for women who share their bed with a partner every night of their lives. When a single woman fails to orgasm from a one-night-stand, she’s free to go home and privately finish herself off; once she’s partnered up, she has no other bed to run to. As the developers of HappyPlayTime note, “women in longer relationships tend to masturbate less.” And it’s not just because they’re getting enough pleasure from their partners.

According to a 2007 study on the sexual behavior of people age 45 and older, single men and women masturbate more frequently than those in relationships. Partnered men who are physically dissatisfied in their relationships also compensate by masturbating more. Not so for sexually frustrated females: Women who claim to be physically dissatisfied in their relationships still don’t turn to their own (battery-powered) devices.  …

[B]ecause men orgasm a lot quicker during sex—and some of them are still unwilling to admit that their female partners aren’t coming along with them—it can be awkward for women to get caught engaging in some furtive postcoital activity. The same women who profess to be sexually dissatisfied with their partners are also unlikely to be in the position to start a frank conversation about needing some private time. When it comes to increasing the rates of female masturbation, locating the clitoris is just the beginning. Women also need to find some time alone—and some long-term partners who are, once in a while, willing to make a graceful exit. I’m not sure you can make an app for that.

The Ministry Of Gaming

Liel Leibovitz looks into the videogames distributed by authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East:

The PC game, Special Operation 85 [seen above], came out in 2007, and is virtually indistinguishable from any American-made, war-themed first person shooter. The only difference is that instead of being named Huxley or McCullin, your character is Bahram Nasseri, Iran’s top agent, and his enemies—portrayed with the same silly relish reserved almost exclusively for Bond villains—are nefarious Americans and Israelis. The game sold tens of thousands of copies, a tremendous achievement in a country where technology is not frequently accessible and copyright laws are not frequently obeyed.

The game’s success was encouraging.

That same year, the Islamic Republic inaugurated the government-sponsored Iran National Foundation of Computer Game, which has proven to be instrumental in commissioning, financing, or otherwise supporting scores of games designed to promote the regime’s values at home and abroad. There’s Breaking the Siege of Abadan, which recreates one of the bloodiest battles of the Iran-Iraq War, or, for the more timid, Sara’s New Life, in which a young woman must “protect her morality” from carnal temptations.

But gaming only goes so far as propaganda:

Games, even the best ones, have no room for such uncertainties. They depend on a rigid and algorithmic progression. Couple that with an overt attempt at indoctrination, and you get the crudest sort of propaganda, the kind that appeals to none but the already convinced.

More recent Dish on the emerging complexity of video games here.

Losing Our Seat At The African Table, Ctd

Obama’s trip to Africa begins today. Like Howard French, Charles Kenny worries about China’s advantage in Africa. Kenny offers some suggestions to close the gap:

Beyond supporting expanded trade and investment links, the president should suggest how he’s going to ensure a greater movement of people from the U.S. to Africa and in the other direction. Migration has proven one of the most powerful tools for strengthening economic links between countries. Bill Easterly (PDF) points out that many of Africa’s “big hits” in nontraditional exports have been due to the personal connections of exporters who spent considerable time in other countries. For example, Andrew Rugasira, the founder of major exporter Good African Coffee, studied law and economics in London, and Harko Bhagat, the founder of the first fish exporter from Lake Victoria, studied in Canada. …

President Obama should use his trip to make clear how America will engage Africa as a dynamic economic partner while undertaking the moral imperative to support the region in overcoming the remaining—and tragic—human costs of absolute poverty. That would be a presidential journey well worth the jet fuel bill.

The Best Of The Dish Today

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Dish-reading bisexuals told all; women with unshaved legs told even more. I gave Peggy Noonan some actual, you know, evidence that debunks her conspiracy hysteria. The prospects for immigration reform looked a little weaker, given the state of the white, old, nationalist faction now dominating the GOP. I loved Wilkinson’s brief description: “The tea party is interested in bald eagles, American flags, the founding fathers, Jesus Christ, fighter jets, empty libertarian rhetoric, and other markers of “authentic” American identity and supremacy.” Empty libertarian rhetoric. And dolphins should never be kept in a pool. Never.

Oh, and tips for a) avoiding a bath and b) picking a font for an exam paper.

The most popular posts were my take-down of Noonan (now almost a regular feature, but she keeps being ridiculous); and my dismay at the craven Washington careerism of David Gregory. The home page, by the way, still garners around 90 percent of the traffic.

I still can’t keep this post out of my head. Window view above: Bushwick, 3.43 pm.

The jet-lag is clearing. And tomorrow we will find out the future of marriage equality in America. Stay tuned. Amazing how this stuff never leaks, innit?

See you in the morning.

Putting “Service” Back Into Selective Service

Despite the fact that “it is not an auspicious time to begin a dialogue on national service,” Michael Gerson thinks it’s necessary (WaPo):

Instead of giving 18-year-old males a meaningless (to them) Selective Service number, why not also give all 18-year-old men and women information on the five branches of the armed forces, along with the option of serving a year or more in a civilian service program? National service, while not legally mandatory, would be socially expected.

Daniel Larison pushes back:

Conservatives should feel gratitude for our inherited traditions and institutions, and conservatives should want to contribute to the common good, but that doesn’t mean that they should want or support national service organized by the federal government. A person forced by law or social convention to do such service isn’t going to feel gratitude or affection. It is more likely that he will be made to resent the authority or the convention that so compels him. National service isn’t a “devolution of responsibilities.” It is an unwelcome redefinition of what a “responsible” citizen is expected to do.

Jordan Bloom argues that advocates are attacking the wrong problem:

Our betters at the Aspen Institute and other defenders of national service say the public suffers from a sort of civic ennui. But contra David Brooks, this has less to do with a nation fragmenting along economic or cultural lines a la Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and more with the fact that the civic institutions where meaningful participation is actually possible have been stripped of much of their significance. And not just in the sense that state and local governments have abrogated many of their roles upward, but also because the more mobile a society gets, the less those local affinities matter.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry takes on the dissenters:

[T]he only reason you enjoy this incredible, unimaginable privilege is because people who lived before you sacrificed, and toiled, and gave their lives so that you would have it. They fought wars and they gave their blood and their lives so that a certain political community to which you belong shall not perish from the Earth so that you could enjoy this. We owe this incredibly charmed modern life not just to scientific progress and capitalism. We also owe it to the stubborn fact that many of our forefathers were willing to put on a uniform, swear an oath, and lay down their lives, for us, their children and their children’s children. Your blessed life is built on the blood and bones of your forefathers. …

Tell me national service is too expensive. Tell me it won’t work. Tell me you want smart ways to deal with true conscientious objectors. Tell me it’s wankery, even. Heck, tell me why as a Christian you refuse to take up arms against anybody. Tell me all these things—really. But don’t tell me that there’s no social contract. Don’t tell me that you don’t owe anything to your country.

A Composite Author

Paisley Rekdal, who has a Chinese-American mother and a Norwegian father, ruminates on how being biracial has informed her poetry:

First: I believe that we are all fragmented, we all live “in between” identities at any one moment in time. Biracialism merely literalizes this metaphor we daily experience: the difference between how we understand ourselves, and how others understand us. Because of this, I am interested in the postmodern fragmented and multi-layered self, but I believe strongly in my need to write from a coherent, cohesive first-person position. In this sense, perhaps this most antiquated feature of my poetry is its most political: I get enough post-modernism walking into the classroom and being asked where I was born. The “I” in my poems may not always be me, but it is a cohesive self.

Second: I, too, am anxious about language’s inherent instability, the slippery ways in which it does not always connect with the world we experience. But when race, whether formally or thematically, enters into the poem, it serves no one’s interest to make the language more opaque to sound intelligent since the stakes (like it or not) have now been raised. Bad writing about race—including racist writing—is often unclear. For me the question has become: how can I allow people to experience the complexity of race, while never muddying my own thoughts? Clarity is just another expression of language anxiety.

(Hat tip: The Poetry Foundation. Video is of Rekdal reciting her poem, “Swallows,” which you can read here.)