The Dish

The base is not holding back:

"I think it’s tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father," Robert Knight, [director of the Culture and Media Institute of the Media Research Center] said. "Fatherhood is important and always will be, so if Mary and her partner indicate that that is a trivial matter, they’re shortchanging this child from the start."

"Mary and Heather can believe what they want," Knight added, "but what they’re seeking is to force others to bless their non-marital relationship as marriage" and to "create a culture that is based on sexual anarchy instead of marriage and family values."

Please. I’m sure there will be plenty of strong male role models in the child’s life, starting with his or her grandfather. If the argument is made that all kids should have biological mothers and fathers, adoptions would cease. If the argument is made that kids should always have a father and mother in the household, then single mothers would have their kids removed from them in order to give them to adoptive couples. Neither argument applies because we have a modicum of respect for mothers, and their right to bring up their own child as they see fit, as long as it is with care and love.

I might add that these statements, once you see them directed at an actual couple with an actual unborn child, are deeply, deeply hurtful. They violate what should be a joyous moment in any family’s life. But perhaps they can therefore serve a greater purpose: to reveal quite how hurtful and callous the religious right can be.

Congrats to Mary and Heather. Don’t let these people get you down.

Here’s an analysis (PDF) from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a far left group. The data, however, are clear and the report admirably lays out the empirical evidence, based on exit polls of self-identified gay, lesbian and bisexual voters. Demographically, and in terms of geography, income and background, gays should split pretty much like the rest of the country. But the GOP’s attack on gay dignity has alienated many – and made gay voters the third most reliable Democratic voting bloc (Jews and blacks are more loyal). Two slightly surprising factoids: One in five gay voters has a child under 18 living in his or her home (Mary Cheney is not an anomaly). Gays are slightly more likely to vote Independent than straights. Here’s the money quote from the authors:

While it is easiest to notice how many LGB voters are liberals and how few are conservatives, we should note that LGB voters are about as likely to say that they are moderates as is the rest of the electorate. LGB voters also are slightly more likely than all other voters to say they are Independents. This combination means that the electoral capture of the LGB vote by the Democratic Party is not complete.

At the moment, the data indicate revulsion by LGB voters to the hostility toward gay people that has been manifested by some of the most visible members of the Republican Party’s leadership. The data also indicate that, in terms of family heritage and other demographic variables, we should expect LGB Americans to be just about as Republican as anyone else.

So the Democrats cannot take this group for granted. Many of us share basic small-c conservative ideas – limited government, individual freedom, strong defense – but have been forced out of the tent by the Christianists. If the GOP wanted gay votes, they could gain a lot by dropping the hostility. Equally, if the Democrats treat gays solely as ballot-fodder, and do not deliver any pro-gay policies, they may not be able to rely on Karl Rove to rally their base next time.

A reader writes:

A lot of pundits are comparing our crossroads in Iraq with LBJ and Vietnam. However, I think that when looking at whether GWB is capable of dramatically altering the plan, a more interesting parallel is de Gaulle and Algeria. The General had declared "Algeria is France", yet only a few years later he oversaw a bitter and divisive withdrawl.

Unfortunately, I just don’t think this President is capable of admitting such a mistake and changing course dramatically. I hope you’re right and maybe Gates can somehow be heard by key Administration members (Bush, Cheney, Hadley). No matter what we do, it will be painful and messy.

And there’s the torture parallel, of course. If you haven’t seen the movie, "The Battle of Algiers," you really should.

Here’s TownHall blogger Kevin McCullough’s response to the Mary Cheney news. Money quote:

Knowing from scientific data that children excel best when given the full and natural parental structure of one mother and one father, is it moral to bring a child into such a scenario – purposefully, simply to stroke one’s own desire to have a child – sort of like a new handbag, or pair of shoes?

So the vice-president’s future grandchild is now the equivalent of a pair of shoes? Send me more examples of base reax, will you? In many ways, the GOP’s base response to the reality of gays seems to me similar to their attitude to the reality of Iraq. They have an ideology; it just doesn’t fit persuasively with reality. The more reality bites, the more fiercely they stick to their ideology. This is why the Christianist psyche really is the anti-conservative psyche. It is a rigid political ideology, enhanced with the certitude of religious fundamentalism, and deployed with Schmittian ruthlessness. In the end, it must fail. It will fail. And it is failing. All that remains to be discovered is the extent of the human damage it has wrought.

We need a new term to describe the way in which pundits’ past pontifications can now come back to haunt them. God knows I’m not immune. But this reader sticks it to Markos Moulitsas:

So, Kos has awarded the Democrats’ 2008 presidential nomination to Barack Obama more than a year before the Iowa caucus? What a fantastic service he provides. To fully appreciate his powers of prognostication, perhaps we should rewind the clock to Dec. 18, 2003:

It is clear that our nominee will be either Dean or Clark. No one else has a shot. Therefore, I will not criticize or point to criticism of either of those two candidates. Each one of those guys has his plusses and his cons, and each one of them can beat Bush. That’s all that matters.

D’oh! The only worse predictor I can think of is Mickey Kaus – a man who foretold that 9/11 would be off the front pages by Thanksgiving in 2001 and that John Kerry would have to withdraw his candidacy before New Hampshire. But, hey, I passionately believed in Saddam’s stockpiles of WMDs.

My colleague, Mike Allen, has the goods.

Ideas for Iraq, courtesy of Glenn Reynolds. Money quote from Kevin Drum:

The only problem with our Iraq strategy is that we haven’t declared war on enough people.

I thought it was the insufficient will and cowardice of the American people. Or did I read the wrong talking points?

Apparently, some Brits are attending the current Holocaust "conference’ in Wannsee Tehran.

From Leon Wieseltier:

Does all this pessimism warrant withdrawal? I will confess that I wish it did. Since I was a supporter of the war, I have its consequences also on my own conscience. I do not believe that American troops should die for some heartless Kissingerian notion of American credibility in the world, or the like. (Anyway, it is the war itself that is doing the most damage to American credibility. After terrorism, the most immediate problem for American foreign policy in the age of Bush is anti-Americanism.) Even if we withdraw from Iraq, we will be a spectacularly powerful country whose enemies should still beware. And moral reasoning about such matters should be efficient: in the lag between the conclusion that we should withdraw, if that is what we conclude, and our withdrawal, Americans will pointlessly perish.

For all these reasons, I am not inclined to dismiss all the antiwar voices in Congress and elsewhere as a depraved isolationism or another Peter, Paul, and Mary concert. This war has not been a glittering success, and its costs have been considerable. And I have never felt comfortable with the America in whose name this administration has conducted this war: in times of danger one tries to overlook differences about other issues and other challenges, but I do not agree that only a state preemptive of civil rights, treaty obligations, and international alliances – that only the preemptive state – can adequately defend itself.

Leon does not believe we should therefore up and leave. The rest is here.

(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

Mary Cheney is pregnant and will have a child with her wife of almost twenty years, Heather Poe. Except they live in Virginia which, with the enthusiastic backing of the Republicans, has declared itself homorein, and so no legal protections for Cheney’s and Poe’s marriage or custody of their child will be available. There is surely coming a point at which the sheer dissonance between what the GOP base believes and the way even the most conservative vice-president in modern times deals with the reality of his own family must surely prompt some kind of Republican adjustment.

You cannot be a party that sees gay love, marriage and parenthood as the work of Satan and have a vice-presidential family that is busy building a lesbian family as an integral part of it. For my part, congratulations to the two moms and best wishes for a healthy, safe pregnancy and birth. And congrats to the lucky grandparents on both sides. Commiserations to James Dobson, Hugh Hewitt, George Allen, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Mitt Romney, and, of course, George W. Bush, who backed a federal constitutional amendment to strip the daughter of his vice-president of dignity, family and civil rights.