Author: Andrew Sullivan

A comic book goes there.

TNC lands some blows:

One reason that black people grimace at invocations of their history to justify the struggle du jour, is because, very often, the invokers really don't know what the fuck they are talking about. Put bluntly they have no deep knowledge of the black struggle, and are not seeking any. For them, black history is a rhetorical device, employed to pummel their ideological foes, and then promptly discarded for more appropriate instruments.

E.D. Kain defends himself and TNC pounces again:

I am sure that, in some ways, the Holocaust is like the Middle Passage. I am also sure that, in some ways, the Holocaust and the Middle Passage are like pet euthanasia. I'm also sure that all three are somehow like a steak dinner. And so on. If your mission is to make yourself right, there are an abundance of pathways.

But if you're mission is to clarify your own thinking, and understand the experiences of other people, then you tend to shy away from defending analogies which, by your own lights, are "full of holes and designed to inflame more than enlight."  Sometimes, you go so far down into a hole, and you forget why, and how, you got there.

Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker writes:

I think it is safe to assume that anyone nominated to the Supreme Court by a Democratic President is explicitly or implicitly committed to the proposition that gay marriage is a constitutional right. If you think that is bizarre, stop voting for Democratic politicians.

His analysis might look less silly if before posting he'd read David Boaz:

Judge Walker was first appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, at the recommendation of Attorney General Edwin Meese III (now the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation). Democratic opposition led by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA) prevented the nomination from coming to a vote during Reagan’s term. Walker was renominated by President George H. W. Bush in February 1989. Again the Democratic Senate refused to act on the nomination. Finally Bush renominated Walker in August, and the Senate confirmed him in December.

There's more:

Coalitions including such groups as the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force worked to block the nomination.

In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

This was a victory for gay conservatism in many ways, not that today's conservative movement wants anything to do with us.

Kain observes:

I think some conservatives view Gingrich as a guy who knows what he’s doing – a policy expert, someone who can navigate Washington, beat the Democrats at their own games, etc. I think he’s a pretty standard, boiler-plate Big Government Conservative more interested in playing war than making government work effectively. The mosque business simply confirms this. But I think at one point a lot of conservatives viewed him as the moderate, rational, wonkish leader they’d like to have instead of say, Sarah Palin. That the two are becoming more and more indistinguishable is hardly surprising, but it certainly speaks to his character.

If you believe that the blockade on Gaza was unsustainable, then you'd be Binyamin Netanyahu. Or one of the few congresspeople prepared to argue for what she believed was in Israel's vital interests – and the interests of the US. Well, she got what she asked for, didn't she? If you do not toe the AIPAC line, this happens:

Andrew Exum is disgusted by the National Review's editorial against the mosque:

Writing as a Christian, I am firmly within the majority in the United States. As a Protestant Christian, I am also within the majority. And as an Evangelical Protestant Christian, I belong to the largest subset of all Christians in the United States. I treasure the way the 1st Amendment protects my rights to worship. But I also understand that the 1st Amendment — the "first draft" of which was written by one of my ancestors — exists more to protect religious minorities than those of us in the majority. It's an amendment written with Huguenots and Quakers and Catholics in mind. Where the Bill of Rights really has its value is as a check against the tyranny of the majority. It's for times like these when the passions of Americans — stoked by the memory of September 11th — cause us to do and say things that spit in the face of the freedoms we claim to cherish.

Andrew gives me hope. There must be many sincere evangelicals who feel the same way.

In Maryland, a federal police officer shoots a dog at a public park and gets away with it. Radley Balko reacts:

I’ m certain that if I (or anyone else who isn’t a cop) pulled out a gun and shot a dog at a dog park in a residential area, I’d be facing criminal charges. And rightly so. Even if the dogs were fighting, there’s no justification for shooting one of them, particularly around other dogs and people. It’s reckless, trigger-happy, and dangerous. It’s also safe to say that if this had been anyone other than a cop, the local police department would have no qualms about releasing his name to the press.

This sort of thing happens with startling frequency in Maryland. And elsewhere too. Mercifully, a backlash is underway.

And right in my face? Clive Thompson notes how retro it is:

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

The iPhone and AT&T are doing their best to help.

(Photo: Stan Honda/Getty.)

Drum doesn't think the Supreme Court will uphold Judge Walker's decision:

[Walker] essentially ruled that bans on same-sex marriage are nothing more than an "artifact" of history, and I have severe doubts that this is going to withstand scrutiny. At the Supreme Court level, the briefing attorneys won't be limited in their presentation of the law, and all they have to do is show some rational reason for existing bans. It doesn't have to be a great reason, and it doesn't have to be a reason that anyone mentioned at the district level, just one that's not plainly looney. I'm not sure that Vaughn was persuasive in ruling that no such reason exists.

Here's where Walker may have over-reached:

If you think genders still have any distinct role in society at all, then there's a rational basis for prohibiting same-sex marriage.

The question here is: what does a distinct role mean? I'm a strong believer that men and women are deeply different and yet I do not and cannot see that as a reason to oppose marriage equality. Why? Precisely because such differences are too profound to be somehow weakened by a tiny proportion of the population being included in an institution no longer designed to perpetuate men's control over women. It's when you really break down this argument that you find there is none – except an expression of heterosexual superiority. Maybe that feeling is what this is all about. Maybe that feeling will prevail. But it is not a reason to keep 2 percent of the population in a second class position, when including them would cause no harm to the majority at all.