Rauch on the MPA

It is truly pathetic to see the Senate waste time and effort on another bid to pass a constitutional amendment that violates states’ rights, triviliazes the Constitution and stigmatizes a minority. The arguments for it keep collapsing. Jon Rauch has another superb and sane column on the subject:

Two questions for anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion Republicans: If states can be allowed to go their own way in defining human life, why not allow them to go their own way in defining marriage? Where constitutional amendments are concerned, why is preventing gay couples from marrying so much more urgent than preventing unborn children from being killed?

It is precisely because marriage is so important, and because it is the subject of such profound moral disagreement, that a one-size-fits-all federal solution is the wrong approach. California and Texas, Massachusetts and Oklahoma take very different views of same-sex marriage. By localizing the most intractable moral issues, federalism prevents national culture wars.

Conservatism, properly understood, is the solution to the question of how we integrate gay couples into society. Republicanism, as it now is, is part of the problem. Its rigid, theologically-based, ideologically driven agenda is the antithesis of a federalist, pragmatic, humane conservatism. Let the states decide. On abortion and marriage.

A Legal Immigrant – Penalized

A reader writes:

My boyfriend and I are a gay binational couple. He’s Thai. I’m an American. Not being able to marry is, well, I don’t have words. July 28th, 2007 is the day his Student Visa runs out and there are really no choices but for him to go back to Thailand. Can you imaigine having an expiration date on your relationship? I live with that everyday.

If he stayed here illegally past this date he would be waiting tables with an MBA and be estranged from his family and/or never able to return. Cruel? Check. Unusual? Check. However with the bill in the Senate, I wish to God he was illegal right now. If he’d ditched school and gone out of status back when he’d be "long-time illegal" now and then seemingly eligible to pay some fines and eventually become a permanent resident given that he’s been here for 4 years. You know how cheap and easy that is compared to paying for an MBA degree that he didn’t even want to start with? He came here to go to language school for a year and then we fell in love and then we were force marched down an educational treadmill so that he could stay in status. Having an MBA is great and all but that isn’t where his heart is. He did it for me, Andrew. This just makes my head explode. From where I’m sitting right now we completely screwed up our lives by doing the right thing and obeying the law.

But wait… that’s not all… even getting married in some symbolic ceremony or entering into a Cali domestic parnership is "Intent to Immigrate" and in the language of my own tax funded oppression… "An alien seeking to obtain a non-immigrant visa has a burden to prove that he does not have an intent to immigrate." Ah, yes.

The law requires we break up a family and lose a legal immigrant with an MBA. Meanwhile, illegal immigrants with nothing like these qualifications get a gradual amnesty. Go figure.

Moore Award Nominee

"Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it – but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq – as Blair did," – George Galloway. You realize why he and Saddam got on so well, don’t you?

The Euston Manifesto

Norm Geras launched it last night in London at a public meeting. He recalls what prompted this gathering of parts of the left to fight Islamo-fascism:

Beinart This brings me to a second end and beginning… It happened in the days immediately following 9/11. Not just simple-minded, but cold, shameful, appalling responses to the crime that had been perpetrated, parading across the pages of the liberal and left press. You know the terms of it: blowback; comeuppance; yes, a crime of course but… But what? But a crime to be contextualized immediately, just in case you might be unaware that it wasn’t the first or the worst crime in human history.

This kind of stuff, I regret to say, was coming principally from a part of the left. And in those few days, 12, 13, 14 September 2001, it became clear to me that this part of the left wasn’t a part one should have anything – or anything more, depending on where you were at the time – to do with if the left was to have a worthwhile future and merit anybody’s support.

Anyone who’s ever belonged to anything, as we all have – a family, a group, a club, a movement – will know that this involves having some quarrels. If you’re part of the left then you have your quarrels; and having been a part of the left all my adult life, I’ve had my share. But some things you quarrel about. About other things you draw a line.

And so parts of the left – including Peter Beinart’s upcoming book – refuse to be bystanders on the war against Islamist terror. If the Democrats are smart, they will follow their lead. We have real enemies out there; and they need to be uncovered, fought and killed before they kill us. And the primary victims of our enemies – ordinary Muslims across the Middle East – need our democratic support now as much as they ever have.

Clean Water or CO2

A reader writes:

Of course a global push for clean drinking water would alleviate far more human suffering than an effort to limit global warming.
We will look back on this period of history as an ugly brown stain in which we have the technology to erase water borne illnesses and we have had the technology for quite some time but still things are getting worse and worse as time goes on.
Regardless the point is, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and suggesting so is nothing more than a cop out.