The Dish

“I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.” – famously enlightened British editor, Richard Ingrams, in the Observer. He goes on to argue that Jewish contributors to British op-ed pages should be identified as such if they write about Israel.

“No stars. Oh well, it’s a small thing, it doesn’t matter. I am happy, we all are. The general sentiment is: “Yes, of course we know it is not a real government, but it is a start.” The mix is right; they just have to work more on the choice of characters, and they need a massive PR campaign. People just don’t know who they are, especially the women.” – Salam Pax describes a reality ignored by the mainstream media.

Strikes me as the right choice. Sulzberger is to be congratulated for inviting the obvious criticism that he made a mistake two years ago, and yet picking the right man anyway. Arthur – unlike Pablo Picasso – seems open to change and renewal.

ROBERTSON: Fresh from defending the despot in Liberia, the social right’s darling, Pat Robertson, is now praying for health concerns to prompt three Supreme Court Justices to retire. You can’t make this stuff up, really, can you?

Bloggers descend on the British parliament for a blogathon. One deputy already has a blog and he’s btter known for it:

James Crabtree, the organiser of the seminar and head of the Voxpolitics project, says the idea of the evening is not to evangelise the case for weblogs – a form of online diary and comment site with links – but to ask what they can do well, and what they are not useful for. He points out that as recently as 1995 only one MP had a website, and now they are universal, and predicts the same uptake for blogging. “If you look at Tom Watson, six months ago nobody had heard of him. Now, if you type ‘Labour MP’ into Google, you get Tom Watson, not Tony Blair.”

So the tectonic plates of media and political power slowly shift.

KERRY AND GAY MARRIAGE: Maybe I was too harsh. Yes, his position is better than many on the right. But I don’t see why liberals should be given a pass on this issue. They need to explain why they support inequality for gays, without a facile resort to broad platitudes – monogamy, child-rearing, etc. – that collapse upon inspection. In Kerry’s case, as I argued yesterday, his second marriage to a divorcee does not exactly conform to a traditionalist notion of civil marriage in which it is for life and for children. But Kerry is also an example of another piece of heterosexual privilege: the zero estate tax on married couples. As a reader explains:

You missed the biggest Kerry hypocrisy. While Kerry moans about the Republican goal of eliminating the estate tax, he says nothing about the unlimited marital exclusion to the estate tax.- Talk about a loophole!
Over a half billion passed to his present wife from her first husband’s estate, free of estate taxes.-The same unlimited marital exclusion will allow that same accreted fortune to pass to Kerry in the event his wife dies first, again free of estate taxes.

Why should a gay couple be denied this benefit? Or put it another way: why does Kerry believe that he is worthy of inheriting a fortune tax-free, but a gay spouse who has lived with her partner for sixty years isn’t? Shouldn’t someone ask him this question?

NYT TWELVE STEPS: A guide to overcoming an addiction.

You begin to think that this BBC report might be fair – and it certainly provides evidence for optimism. And then you come across paragraphs like these:

But [the government appointees] are dismissed as outsiders by Iraqis, as people that spent the Saddam years outside Iraq whilst others suffered and struggled within. Perhaps most damning is the almost total lack of belief that people seem to have that the council will be able to act independently of its’ [sic] American masters. Maybe it is the hulking presence of US tanks and armoured cars on street corners; maybe it is the vacuum in authority left by the collapse of a totalitarian regime. But there is precious little faith amongst Iraqis that this council represents the beginning of an era of self government. For most Iraqis, the bottle is most definitely half empty.

Notice how these things are simply asserted. How does this guy know what “most Iraqis” think? Why, given the unprecedented range of participants in the new governing council in Iraq, is it so obvious that they will not become autonomous at some point?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Polygamy is not worse than gay marriage, it is better. At least polygamy, for all its ugly defects, is an attempt to secure stable mother-father families for children.” – Maggie Gallagher, coming up with “new” arguments against gay marriage.

How could I have forgotten? Here’s one way to commemmorate one of the worst moments in Western history.

The NYT establishment is apparently angry at the blithe denial displayed by Pablo Picasso on Charlie Rose.

Here’s the original piece. In it, Connor and the FRC oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment for the same reasons the Concerned Women for America do: they believe it’s not restrictive enough. They want an amendment that would more explicitly rob gay couples of any protection whatever under the law – preventing them from hospital visitation, property rights, shared healthcare, and on and on. I think, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that the current FMA would do all of these things – and many legal scholars agree. Others argue that this wouldn’t be the case – but if the language of the amendment can provoke genuine and deep disagreement by serious parties, wouldn’t it be similarly open to a radical spectrum of intrepretation by courts and legislatures? And isn’t such a vague and sweeping amendment precisely what shouldn’t be written into the federal Constitution? You can be sure, for example, that if FMA passed, the far right would work very, very hard to have it interpreted in as broad and restriuctive a way as possible. The FRC is clear in their intent to attack gay couples and gay citizens:

We will oppose the granting of “domestic partner benefits” by both private and public organizations. We will speak out against the creation of “civil unions” in whatever state they are proposed (as we did vigorously in California, helping to kill AB 1338).- And we will struggle with all that we have against civil marriage for same-sex couples anywhere in the United States.

Give them points for honesty. But please don’t call me paranoid. These people would rob gay citizens of very basic rights – for no other reason than they’re gay.

John Kerry, like Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, opposes equality for gay citizens in the most fundamental matter related to emotionaland sexual orientation. But, like the Clintons, he offers no argument. Give the far right their due: they really have tried to come up with an infinite array of reasons to oppose civil equality in this respect. But this is what Kerry said:

Marriage is an institution between men and women for the purpose of having children and procreating.

Now, Kerry is in a second marriage to a woman also in a second marriage, with no apparent connection to the goal of reproduction or child-rearing. Like Pat Buchanan, he lives a marriage that is childless. Fred Hiatt homes in on the point in the Washington Post today. It seems to me that Kerry has just argued that he himself should have no right to marry. (I’ll leave the speciousness of the Clintons’ defense of marital privilege to your judgment, but it would be hard to find a deeper example of hypocrisy than their joint defense of traditional marriage.) But his real reason is deeper. It could easily be construed as a statement like: “I am heterosexual, and heterosexuals deserve special rights that privilege them unrelated to any actual roles or acts that they might perform.” Kerry is asserting – frankly, crudely, unmistakably – heterosexual supremacy. Just because. I find this far more objectionable than those on the religious right who at least have some theological or strained sociological reasons for opposition.

The Kurdish leader got it exactly right:

The liveliest moments of the news conference occurred when some council members disputed questions from the news media. The Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani criticized a BBC correspondent for suggesting that the interim government would have limited powers and therefore little legitimacy among the Iraqis. “The Council has a lot of authority, appointing ministers, diplomats, budgets, security,” Mr. Talabani said. He then accused the BBC of having been biased toward Mr. Hussein’s government during the war.

And they still are pining for a Saddamite revival. I don’t think it’s because they actually consciously support a man who tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people. I think it’s because their hatred of the West trumps their disdain for tyranny. And that’s been the story of the far left in the West for a century now.