Category: The Dish

A longish piece of stop-motion graffiti:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Sonny Bunch)

And yet oddly brilliant:

One thing Obama and McCain have in common is that they each have a Vice-President problem. In both cases the choice is fraught with peril. Do you go for someone who strengthens your base or extends your appeal? Do you try for balance or amplification? How do you avoid saddling yourself with one ingrate and a dozen disgruntled spurnees?

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A blog dedicated to pictures of things that look like ducks.

A heads up to those of you in New York who support the rights of bi-national gay couples to immigrate as bi-national straight couples do. Immigration Equality – the group that does the lion’s share of work in advocating for equal treatment for gay spouses and HIV-positive immigrants – is honoring me, Staceyann Chin and Skadden law firm for work on these issues. Everyone is welcome – for a minimum donation of $250. It’s next Wednesday in Chelsea. You can buy a ticket or just donate here. They’re a great group and it’s a great cause. See you there.

That was my first reaction to Bush’s Knesset speech. First Read concurs.

A good point:

A blog post is all about getting new ideas and news out there in a timely or spontaneous fashion to kick-start conversations. The writing should be as clear and stylish as possible under the the quick turnaround timeframe that goes hand in hand with posting five days a week. And of course facts should be accurate. But beyond a perfunctory breaking news report, an an article is something that one could think of as growing out of a blog post — a piece of work that involves more long, hard thinking, in-depth and/or wide-ranging interviews and perspectives, and a refined style.

Some readers have noted a contrast in tone and style between posts on this blog and my columns or essays. You bet. It’s a question of different platforms, idioms and ways of writing. I have found that blogging and long-form writing, while distinct, can nonetheless catalyze one another. Many columns have emerged from a week of blogging. And some essays come out of months of blogging. Long-form pieces are deliberately more mellow, considered and less inflammatory than blog posts. But I’m not schizophrenic – just adjusting to the newly varied ways in which a writer can express himself.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

McCain was once in favor of Obama’s position.

Actually, that’s wrong!  Both Clinton and Obama have said we should not negotiate with Hamas until they recognize Israel’s right to exist.  McCain actually supported a position more extreme than Obama.  By accepting the incorrect Republican talking point about Obama on Hamas, you actually do Obama a disservice.

I stand corrected. I was thinking of Obama’s willingness to talk to Tehran’s leadership. But I’m with McCain then. I do believe that Hamas has some legitimacy as the winner of a democratic election and at some point we will need to talk to them.

In re-reading and pondering the decision, I keep coming back to this:

In contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.

People can talk about activist liberal judges all they want. But the simple truth is that what has changed these past twenty years is not the nature of judges, but our collective understanding of what sexual orientation is. Behind all this is a deep, deep shift in our consciousness from thinking of gay people as defective straight people who perform certain sexual acts to their being the moral equivalent of heterosexuals, capable of forming relationships and building families as well as anyone. This is at the core of the generational divide: not that young people are more "liberal" or "progressive" than their parents. On an issue like abortion, they’re not. It is simply that the next generation has grown up with a different definition of who gay people are. They see gay people as interchangeable with straight people. They don’t think we’re inferior to them. Because they know us.

Once you alter that basic understanding, then re-fitting the law to account for it may, at first blush, look liberal or activist, but in fact, it’s just removing what now appears a massive anachronism and anomaly. Yes: this means that the court is dong something the first Californians would have regarded as outrageous. But that goes for so many other issues as well, especially race and gender, where our core definitions have shifted with time and knowledge.

Is this shift an ideological one? I don’t believe so. It’s an empirical one, based on increased knowledge of who gay people are. Once you absorb this knowledge, this evidence, this truth, legislative schemes which arbitrarily separate gay people from straight people – and put gay relationships in a separate and unequal box – seem grossly unfair, and certainly a violation of the equality promised in various state constitutions. I think that’s what has really happened in the two decades I’ve been arguing about this. We have altered our view of homosexuality. And the alteration is not one of degree but of kind. And so the law must adapt. Maybe it has happened too quickly for easy cultural digestion. But it is inevitable if we are not now to replace knowledge with fear, and inclusion with, yes, prejudice.

(Shameless plug: My first book, Virtually Normal, the first extended case for equal marriage rights, can be bought here. My recently updated anthology on all the various aspects of the marriage equality debate can be bought here. My 2000 TNR essay on why civil unions are not enough can be read here.)

Heh:

"Let’s leave aside the transparent political crassness of this–actually, let’s not."