Author: Andrew Sullivan

Fatick, Senegal, 8.35 am

Not to me, alas, but maybe that will come. But this point seems to me to be the crux of it. Ross concedes, as does Frum, that his Catholic conception of marriage is no longer even shared by most Catholics. Instead, our common assumption now is that:

marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.

Since this is basically the theory that much of our society already holds, redefining marriage to include gay relationships is unlikely to have anything like the kind of impact on American life that, say, the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did. But again, I think it’s a little naive to assume that it will have no impact at all — that legal changes don’t beget further cultural changes, and that public definitions don’t influence private conduct. Maybe the potential consequences are so vanishingly minimal that they’re easily outweighed by the benefits to gay couples; that’s certainly a reasonable position. But looking out across America’ landscape of heterosexual dysfunction, it’s still a little hard for me to accept that what this moment demands of us is the legal formalization — indeed, the constitutionalization, if Judge Walker has his way — of the ideological conceit that marriage has no necessary connection to gender difference, procreation or childrearing.

What this means is that gay people's lives are to be used to buttress an ideology of marriage that straight people have already abandoned. Now, even if you make the worst assumptions about the impact of marriage equality as an idea in America, does it not strike you as, well, simply unfair to use gays as a way to lecture straights? Are we not ends in ourselves, rather than means to others' ends?

And the benefit of marriage is not just for gay couples. It is also for our straight families who want and need to be able to include us fully in their lives. The cost of the stigmatization of gay people is not just on gay people, just as anti-miscegenation laws hurt blacks and whites. We are all connected. Why would conservatives not want to bring a new minority into an existing institution, rather than, at best, balkanize them into a separate identity or, at worst, treat them as if they and their families didn't exist at all?

A reader in Finland writes:

On Sunday night, a freak storm hit Helsinki. Power lines were down, and some train lines were closed. This footage is otherworldly, and the Helsingin Sanomat website it's taken from said that people panicked, and ran away. Incredible.

Balko talks to law enforcement officials who favor charging and imprisoning citizens for recording encounters with police. Previous Dish coverage of this trend here.

Austin Bramwell uses the words of a radical anarchist to argue that open borders are untenable if we're to preserve society in its current form.

Lewis McCrary draws parallels:

Suddenly it seems so appropriate that Facebook was invented on a college campus. The more one reflects on it, the more the Facebook experience resembles what goes on in the hallways of college dormitories at universities everywhere: personal boundaries are reduced, many try on new slightly new personas every other week, and late-night bull sessions abound (leading to bleary-eyed mornings that also happen after too many late nights on Facebook). Like Facebook, in college we all had a “wall,” which enabled us to present ourselves to new “friends”—mostly through cheap posters purchased the first week of classes. We even had those little note boards on our doors where passers-by, even if only of casual acquaintance, could leave messages for all to see. Today, those non-digital forms of social networking all seem so 1999.

A reader writes:

The real issue with the 90,000 odd documents Wikileaks posted is not who is a journalist or not.  As the mother of a disabled Iraq combat veteran, I have some strong opinions about the media's complicity in the lead up to the war.  It was the mainstream media's mediocre coverage of the war during my Marine son's two tours – the initial invasion and later a tour in Ramadi – that led me to the wonderful and informative world of alternative media sites, even yours.  The real issue of the Wikileaks site is that it does, as Assange claims, reveal a picture of war completely unavailable through most US media.  It reveals a glimpse of the horror my child experienced and participated in, and that his family now lives with, that simply is not available to the average reader of daily newspapers with so-called 'journalistic cred'.

Moynihan can wrinkle his nose all he wants but I for one appreciate knowing the real world and only wish my son had known it sooner.

Another writes:

Defining the term journalist is like shooting at a moving target nowadays.

I can remember not so long ago when bloggers were derided as non-journalists. And yet here you are and many others, recognized for your contributions in the distribution of important information. Just because you and your peers may have arrived at your current occupation from the traditional (mainstream) media does not preclude that another individual may be approaching another form of news distribution from an entirely different tangent – say that of a hacker. In fact, such a person can only help light a fire under the asses of typical journos who are so quick to dismiss Assange.

Another:

I have to sort of agree with Yglesias on the whole Wikileaks/journalism debate; does it really matter? Whether Julian Assange is a journalist or not is a matter solely of definition – definitions which are chosen and biased based on personal experiences and worldview. Someone who considers journalism a good thing and is negative towards Assange for some reason is obviously going to try to deny him a place in whatever circle they draw to include journalists.

Today on the Dish, Fox News' Mr Gutfeld promised Cordoba Mosque a new neighbor– a gay bar that Andrew named this. Ben Smith gathered the 2012 candidate reactions to the Mosque, Gawker rocked out to the worst Anti-Manhattan Mosque anthem, and Andrew feared for the worst.

A top cadet at West Point resigned over DADT; blowback on Ross' column continued; and Andrew and a reader agreed: names mean something, and sometimes they mean more than politics. Asian-Americans outmarried, a Florida candidate offended, and we debated tax cuts, the budget and accountability here, here, and here. Gates whittled the military down but images of maimed Afghan children reminded us of the moral dilemma we're in. On the ground, Spencer Ackerman doesn't think we're leaving anytime soon.

For your philosophy fix, Andrew sketched the Oakeshott-Strauss divide between modernity and a past that will never return, and reconciled how he can support Reagan in the 1980s and Obama today.

Andrew's Bravo debut ended up on the cutting room floor, but he rejoiced over this kind of reader email. Other readers waxed realistic about weddings, your FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here and contest #10 winner here.

And of course, we dissected the Palin eye-roll. Our readers reamed her, we discovered the not-so drag queen theater teacher only directed Hedwig, and Conservatives4Palin.com admitted words don't mean anything, anyways. She might be allowed to go fishing, though.

— Z.P.

Tim Lee reflects on the country's impressive growth:

China is going through roughly the same phase of technological development that the Western world passed through in the first half of the 20th century: the country has mastered the basics of industrialization and are reaping huge gains from economies of scale and a more educated workforce. The engineers and bureaucrats who are organizing ever-more-impressive feats of industrial production have, like their Western counterparts of a century ago, convinced themselves that a society can be planned in the same manner that a factory floor can be.

This is unlikely to be any more true in China than it was in the West; it turns out that people don’t like being treated like interchangeable cogs in a vast machine. But as in the West, it will take a while for ordinary people to figure out how to organize themselves to effectively resist these schemes.

The NYT has an interesting companion piece on China's approach to energy efficiency. Fallows introduces a new Atlantic.com correspondent, Damien Ma, who will mainly cover environmental news – "arguably the very most important category of news for China's own future prospects and for its impact on the rest of the world."

Professor Matt Might crafted a visual guide for his students.