The Dish

“Liberalism triumphed yesterday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government. Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises “judicial restraint” and deference to — it sometimes seems — almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary’s indispensable role in limiting government.” – George F. Will, today. Like Will, I favor a judiciary that keeps itself in check. But I do not favor – and I don’t believe conservatives should favor – a supine judiciary when it comes to individual liberty and equality. The courts are there for a reason. And sometimes when they strike down majority or legislative decisions, they are absolutely right to do so.

I’m not permitted to mention her actual age (it’s a landmark day), but I owe so much to her. She was never able to go to college because her family needed her to work for a living; but she made it part of her life’s work to make sure I got a better chance. She made sacrifices that I only later appreciated, gave me the confidence to reach for the stars, and nurtured the faith that still nourishes my soul. She’s my heroine in so many ways. So happy birthday, mum.

Here’s an email that gladdened me:

I’m a gay farmer/rancher born and bred in Saskatchewan, Canada (or, as I prefer to call it, Paradise). I have been in a committed relationship with my partner for almost 8 years now. We live in an extremely rural part of an extremely rural province. From the time we moved in we were made to feel completely welcome and respected as any other family in the community. People here really don’t care what you do in bed with who. What does matter is being a productive, involved member of the community and a good neighbour.

Our neighbours continually pester us with questions about when we’re going to “make honest men of each other.” Just as with straight couples, it’s with mixed emotions that my partner and I move closer to tying the knot. After all, forever is a very long time! But when you love someone completely none of that scary bullshit really matters. As long as we have each other to share life’s good and bad and grow old together my life is complete. We are very lucky men to have found each other.

I only wish my many gay friends in the U.S. were able to have their relationships honoured and respected in the same way. A country that doesn’t allow its citizens to freely choose who they will spend the rest of their lives with can’t truly be called a free country.

Somehow I don’t believe this man is a threat to anyone or anything. But he understands the meaning of freedom.

The proof is here.

Jon Rauch, astute as ever, notices some interesting shifts in Republican rhetoric in the Senate debate over the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown. Yes, the days of small-government Republicanism are now largely a matter of history, I’m afraid.

The state of Tennessee is now investigating the unlicensed Christianist camps where children are sent to be “rescued” from their emotional and sexual orientation.

“It is really refreshing to read your objection to the HIV scare tactics. They have always made me uneasy. I am a heterosexual non-drug using woman, and HIV has never struck close to me, but the scary ‘you have sex you might die’ refrain is inhumane, to my ears. Maybe because I am a person who would have been better off with more sex in my life, not less.
It has occurred to me that for much of the history of the human race the mortality rate for childbirth was such that having sex, for a woman, was about as dangerous as what today would be considered ‘unsafe’ sex. Maybe a lot more dangerous. The entire human race is built upon the willingness of women to take greater risks than we now consider acceptable. But that was sex between a man and a woman.”

Some defenses of Karl Rove’s rolling out of the “stab-in-the-back” ploy to cover for possible future failure in Iraq have made an important semantic point. They say that the people I cited – Christopher Hitchens, Tom Friedman, Paul Berman, Joe Lieberman, The New Republic, and so on – are not “liberals”. They’re centrists or mavericks or oddballs like yours truly. What Rove was doing, they say, is citing hard-left types like Michael Moore and Moveon.org and Kucinich and the like. He doesn’t mean all mainstream liberals. But this is too clever by half. The rubric Rove used was the “conservative-liberal” rubric, in which the entire polity is bifurcated into one type or the other. All non-liberals are, in Rove’s rubric, conservatives; and all non-conservatives are liberals. This is in keeping with the very familiar electoral tactic of describing even moderate or centrist Democrats as “liberals” with as broad a brush as possible. Rove, in other words, cannot have it both ways. He cannot both use the word liberal to describe everyone who is not a Republican and then, in other contexts, say he means it only for the hard left. Rove is a smart guy. He picked his words carefully. A simple addition of the word “some” would have rendered his comments completely inoffensive. But he left that qualifier out. For a reason. I see no difference between his generalizations and Howard Dean’s unhinged rants about Republicans. Except that Rove is running an administration that is running a vital war. With that kind of power should come a tiny bit more responsibility.

A U.N. source has claimed that the Bush administration has acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,” the Committee member told AFP. “They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark.”
UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities. The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006.
Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee. The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings. “They haven’t avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture,” the Committee member said. “They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished.”

Again, the notion that the administration did nothing to encourage or allow such practices. Then why did the CIA demand memos providing legal cover for their violation of US law? And why did the president create a loop-hole for “military necessity”? I have no way of independently confirming this U.N. source, so the news story has to be treated with some skepticism. But the evidence for serious violations of basic moral codes and U.S. law is mounting.