The Dish

Here’s a way to send some moral support to the student insurgents in Iran. Check out their website, sign their guest-book. It’s a start. Jeff Jarvis has been on the case for a long time. Here’s a list of Iranian bloggers he knows and likes. Read them, email them. And don’t, of course, forget Pejman. Or Iraniangirl.

BOLICK’S CONSISTENCY: A superb and persuasive piece in the Washington Post today about the link between the Boy Scouts gay case and the sodomy law now under review at the Supreme Court. Clint Bolick outlines the principled conservative argument – that freedom of association should allow both the Boy Scouts to discriminate against gays and forbid the state of Texas from infringing on the right of gay Texans to freely associate in their own homes as well. That’s always been my position. Pity so many liberals want to use the coercive state to enforce their morality and so many alleged conservatives want to do exactly the same thing. But liberal and conservative prejudice – against free people – is a far more powerful force than principle, isn’t it?

Here’s my proposal. On July 9, as many blogs as possible focus on the struggle for freedom in Iran. It’s the anniversary of the pro-democracy protests that have been going on for years. I’ll devote the week after July 4 to this issue, culminating in July 9. Please send me links, ideas, articles pertaining to the Iranian struggle in the next few weeks. If you’re an Iranian dissident and may perhaps read this somewhere somehow, get in touch, email your thoughts. If you’re an Iranian ex-patriate, let me know what you think we need to link to or include. If you’re a blogger, make your own plans, and let me know so I can link. Many people have theorized about the power of the web to bring about change and the young generation in Iran must know this as well as any group of people. So let’s try and use it – if only to send a symbol of solidarity with those resisting the theo-fascists who have wrecked Iran for three generations.

STILL PLAYING THE GAME: Here’s an interesting nugget that tells you a lot about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her book contains many inflammatory charges about various political and judicial figures. In particular, Chief Justice Rehnquist is portrayed as a political hack rather than a principled justice. Fair enough. It’s a free country. Rehnquist wisely decided not to comment on the smears. But what’s remarkable is that Hillary herself, when contacted by the Washington Post, “declined to be interviewed about the political content of her book.” Huh? There she goes again. Even now, as a Senator in her own right, Hillary still pulls the First Lady schtick to avoid a political fight. Yet the book is highly political. It’s not some anodine memoir of private life. It’s a tough piece of political rhetoric. Yet she won’t allow the press or others to challenge her on the politics of it. She still thinks she’s above it all. Perhaps she always will.

CBS VERSUS NYT: Vicious p.r. offensive from CBS News, in response to a New York Times’ story about CBS’s alleged attempt to market Jessica Lynch’s story for news and entertainment purposes:

Unlike the New York Times’ own ethical problems, there is no question about the accuracy or integrity of CBS News’ reporting. CBS News does not pay for interviews and it maintains a well-established separation from other parts of Viacom. The letters selectively quoted by the Times, when read in their entirety, make that explicitly clear. The letters state: “CBS News maintains editorial independence from the entertainment division,” “we never tie interview requests to entertainment projects,” and “we wanted to make sure that CBS News’ proposal was being considered as a single entity.” Mysteriously, none of those statements found their way into the “newspaper of record.”

Ouch.

“Even the Tony show’s host, married Australian actor Hugh Jackman, has a gay connection. He’ll debut on Broadway this fall in “The Boy From Oz,” a musical based on the life of the late bisexual Australian songwriter and performer Peter Allen. The entire show seemed to announce that the powers that be in the theater community are steering the industry from mass culture to subculture. Broadway is no longer a stage. It’s a sewer.” – Brent Bozell, horrified that Broadway’s homosexuals no longer pretend to be straight in public. Here’s a simple question: is it still kosher in conservative circles to describe an entire group of people as representing a “sewer”?

IS THE NYT BETTER ALREADY? I have to say I agree with Mickey that reading the New York Times since Captain Queeg departed is much more pleasant. Yes, there are still liberal bromides, but they’re presented in the old NYT style of gentle uplift and furrowed brows, rather than Howell’s tone of shrieking paranoia and vendetta-mongering. The Op-Ed page is vastly improved under Shipley; and even MoDo has returned to blather about gender pop-culture. Here in Ptown, I don’t have the option of the Washington Post on dead tree and the Boston Globe is unreadable. So the NYT is all I got. But increasingly, it feels like its old self again.

THE LYNCH STORY: More complicated than we all thought. But no dramatization either.

Andrew Stuttaford has bravely roiled the waters at National Review and seesthe positive side of same-sex marriage. He takes on the Stanley Kurtz notion that gay men are incapable of monogamy and therefore should be barred from marrying (except marrying women, of course, where their ability to be monogamous would be even more sorely tested. Go figure.). Andrew asks whether the sex lives of gay men, given that they have never been given any social support for their relationships, should be directly compared to straight men who live in a culture which has actively endorses monogamous marriage for generations. Good point. Imagine for a moment if heterosexual marriage didn’t exist; if there were no legal commitments for a husband or a wife; no social cost to adultery; no enforceable legal responsibility for children; and so on. What do you think would happen to male heterosexual promiscuity? Of course it would soar. And if some heterosexual men, in that context, decided that they wanted to affirm monogamy, do you think conservatives would tell them to get lost? Or describe their aspirations as somehow socially destructive? Of course not. But some far-righters simply don’t seem to think of gay people as human beings like everyone else, susceptible to social norms and pressures and incentives.

LESBIAN MARRIAGE AS THE NORM: One other point: in Vermont, which is our best case study for something like gay marriage, two-thirds of civil unions are between two women. In other words, lesbian marriage will almost certainly be the most common form of gay marriage. And most lesbians are more monogamous than most heterosexuals. So the institution of same-sex marriage could well increase the monogamous nature of marriage as an institution. Conservative critics never seem to consider the lesbian angle – and I guess you can see why. In the decade-long campaign within the gay community to elevate the issue of marriage, I found lesbians to be more supportive than many gay men. In fact, I think a lot of gay men will decide not to marry; but those who do are likely to take it seriously, and so further tilt the norm in gay culture toward conservative values. Many of the left recognize this, which is why so many opposed gay marriage for so long. But the far right still prefers to see nothing but catastrophe. That’s their fear speaking, I think; not their rationality.

Yep, it was only a matter of time before those EU bureaucrats got themselves in a tizzy about freedom of speech. The Council of Europe has now decreed that

Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or “blogs”), must offer a “right of reply” to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.
With clinical precision, the council’s bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:
• “The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours.”
• Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. “It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it” from the spot of the original mention.

They’ll be measuring our pixels next. (Via Blogs of War.)

HILLARY’S GENIUS: “She has employed a brilliant two-pronged strategy that even Tommy Franks would admire. She has given the Right a target, far ahead of the real battle, that has tested the enemy’s resources and has them wasting all their ammunition. This done without giving up a single iota of political capital from herself. At the same time she sucked up all the remaining oxygen left for any of her Democratic competitors. Brilliant!” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

John Scalzi reflects on how the blogosphere has changed and not changed in a few years:

The composition of the blog population is tremendously more diverse than any other previous iteration of online community, and many if not most of the truly prominent bloggers are professional people who write about what they know, not just what they think about what they think they know. So you have lawyers discussing law, economists discussing the economy, writers discussing writing, so on and so forth. They all also write about whatever else they want – i.e., they’re as happy to spout off beyond their area of expertise as any the rest of us poor schmoes – but the point to make here is that these personalized sites are no longer simply “amateur”; there are enough people in enough fields writing in blogs that you can look to the blog world as a resource to understanding the real world, not merely a place that is reacting to it. And that’s mostly new and mostly useful.

Yes, what thousands of people are now building is an extraordinary new resource for understanding the world. It won’t replace traditional media. But it will be an exhilarating fresh and open supplement.

That was Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s total compensation last year. What was Raines’ severance package? Edward Boyd searches in vain.

Michael Ledeen thinks a revolution in Iran could be brewing:

The regime is in a real jam. The mullahs know the people hate them – even the timorous correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor in Tehran says that 90 percent of Iranians want democratic change, and 70 percent want drastic change – and they also know that their own instruments of repression are insufficient to deal with a massive insurrection. Many leaders of the armed forces have openly said they will side with the people if there is open civil conflict. Members of some of the most powerful institutions in the country have said that they believe more than half of the Revolutionary Guards will support the people in a frontal showdown. Ergo, the mullahs have had to import foreign thugs – described as “Afghan Arabs” in the popular press – to put down demonstrations.

Not an encouraging sign for the theocrats, is it?

With each front-page story in the New York Times and every report from the BBC predicting the q-word for American troops in Iraq, my optimism ticks up. This isn’t to say that we don’t have a hell of a task in Iraq and that some of it won’t be tough on soldiers. But in the broader view, there are a handful of encouraging signs in the Middle East, all of which suggest that the Bush gamble on remaking the region is again defying skeptics. Egypt is now seriously engaged in pressuring Islamist terrorists to deal with the Palestinian Authority. The intervention of Arab countries in this dispute is central to any hope of even minimal success. My bet is that many of these Arab leaders have grown to respect Bush and even fear him. Iraq was a critical testing ground for this trust; and the president proved his mettle. Meanwhile, the news from Iran is inspiring. Student and dissident protests have led to serious violence; and have now entered a sixth consecutive night. As the Washington Post explains:

The complaints of ordinary Iranians … center on an authoritarian religious government that has failed to respond to demands for greater personal freedoms and at least the hope for a better economic future. More than 70 percent of Iran’s 67 million people are under the age of 30 and too young to recall the 1979 Islamic revolution that deposed the U.S.-installed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought the clerics to power. Tehran residents saw evidence over the weekend that protests could bring at least marginal results in an economy closely controlled by the central government: The price of a pound of chicken, for example, dropped from the equivalent of $1 to 60 cents. Newspapers that largely ignored the protests did carry news that a hike in railway ticket prices would be rolled back.

This is how tyrannies fall. Once the regime is exposed as defensive, insecure and reliant on paramilitary thugs to maintain order, its legitimacy, already crumbling, can begin to slide into nothing. Again, could the success in Iraq have had something to do with this? Of course it has.

THE YOUNG IRANIANS: This story from the New York Times also warmed my heart. The battle against theocracy – largely won in the West for the last couple of centuries – is still in its infancy in Iran, but the themes are the same:

“It takes a lot of courage just to walk with a woman down the main street of Isfahan,” said Payam, a 21-year-old with the shoulder-length hair that many male students grow as a form of protest. “We don’t want a government that prescribes to us all the time what is good and what is bad,” he added. Activist students are struck by the fact that the revolution puts great emphasis on education, then seeks to veil their minds. “We should be able to criticize the government, the religion,” said Hamed, a 21-year-old engineering major. “If we want to be able to understand it, we should be able to criticize it.”

Exactly. I wonder if there’s a way the blogosphere can help. Maybe some kind of “Freedom in Iran Day,” where we all pledge to write about the struggle, link to Persian and Iranian websites and blogs, and generally send out a webby gesture of solidarity. This revolution may not be televised. But it sure will be blogged.

THE EURO MENACE: My latest piece on Giscard D’Estaing’s shenanigans is now posted.

Why doesn’t Alan Simpson include in his critique of the religious right their obsessive hostility to any recognition of gay citizens? He’s right about the politics of abortion; and he is on the record saying the same things about gay equality. And yet he still balks. But in some ways, the gay issue is the primary one that the far right will insist on using to gin up their base and make life difficult for president Bush. They will treat the long-overdue reversal of blatantly discriminatory sodomy laws as some kind of assault on the family. And they will surely try to respond to any civil recognition of gay relationships with a truly poisonous bid to amend the federal constitution to keep marriage from including all citizens, gay and straight. Their threat to a sane conservatism is as profound as their indifference to fomenting deep social division. At some point, the president must realize this. Let’s hope it’s not before it’s too late.

COMMIE SPIES IN BRITAIN: Yes, the Stasi infiltrated the British trade union movement. Big surprise.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Fascinating statistic gleaned from Steven Den Beste’s blog: French imports to the U.S. seem to have plummeted. At Front Page, meanwhile, they just ran a fascinating symposium on whether France is moribund. It was also, apparently, a somewhat depressing Paris Air Show. Heh.