The Dish

Today on the Dish we live-blogged the latest violence and unrest in Iran. Tehran Bureau provided a historical primer, the opposition movement apologized for the hostage crisis, Obama spoke out, the regime prepared for protesters, and bedlam ensued. We tracked the resulting YouTubes here, here, here, here, and here. Scott Lucas summed up the sentiment of the day.

Andrew vented his disappointed over Maine here, here, and here. He and E.D. Kaine also fumed over the Church's role. Dale Carpenter stayed positive, Adam Serwer pointed the finger at Obama, Dreher got defensive over "bigot," and Chris Good highlighted the good news out of Maine.

Off-year reax here and here, with added thoughts from Nate Silver, Mudflats, David Corn, and Axelrod.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

I know so many gay priests, all over the country, and indeed, the world who are disgusted with the double life and the lies and the fear – I used to be one of them.  One of my 50-ish priest friends said, "If I won the lottery, I'd leave in a heartbeat – but as it is, I'm too old to start over, and I can't afford it financially."

If I win the lottery, I'm establishing a fund for these guys to get out.

One option used to be to come out. If you were celibate, what did it matter? And you could then prove the hypocrisy in the Vatican. But Benedict knew this and so shifted the church's position (as he does a lot when it's in his interests but defers to the Holy Spirit when it isn't) to one in which homosexual orientation itself is a bar to the priesthood, regardless of conduct. Even if this cannot be fully enforced, it creates a chilling atmosphere in which gay people are slowly purged from the priesthood and the pews. Which is the point. The undesirables are to be cleansed, or forced to recant their very being.

The profound injustice and cruelty of this is hard to overstate. Meanwhile, the priesthood becomes narrower and narrower – since women are barred, heterosexual men cannot marry (unless they're former Anglicans), and gay men are required to enter a suffocating closet that destroys their mental health. The result is what we all see: a priesthood of such low quality it's almost an ordeal to listen to their homilies. And so the exodus continues, as Thomas P. Barnett explains.

Does it really have to get this bad before it gets better?

That seems to me to be the take-out of Axelrod’s chat with Tapper. This struck me as worth noting from the Ax:

I can see that this as a concern that, that Republicans on the right are threatening to purge moderates who have the temerity to say, “Yes, we are going to cooperate with the president or our Democratic colleagues to solve a health care problem, to help solve the economic problems that we have.” And it has a chilling effect. And one hopes that they are not intimidated. You saw the other day Gov. Pawlenty taking off against (Maine Republican) Senator (Olympia) Snowe for having worked with us to try to solve the health care problem. I think that sends a very tough message and you know we’re going to have to work our way through that.

So from a governing standpoint I don’t think this is a great development. From a political standpoint I think it’s disastrous for the Republican party.

Lose-lose in other words.

Adam Serwer says Obama lost last night:

As for the biggest loser last night, I'd say the president, but not because these elections are a "referendum" on his agenda. That happened in 2008…No, Obama is a loser for backing two losing Democratic gubernatorial candidates while staying relatively silent on Maine's referendum. Just as this country will one day look back in shame at discrimination against same-sex couples, so should President Obama feel regret, wondering if things could have been different had he intervened and put the full force of his office behind those fighting for their rights, rather than simply looking out for his party.

But we know by now that he is not a civil rights president. He is like Kennedy in this regard, cautious to a fault, not Johnson, seized with a historical urgency that nonetheless destroyed the Democrats for a generation. And we keep forgetting that Obama openly opposes marriage equality. What he wants, and has always said he wants, is the separate-but-equal civil unions route, which protects his own party from the blowback fighting for real equality inflicts. If he'd said something about Maine, it would have had to have been: vote yes. Better surely for him to say nothing than that. And better for us to stop hoping he'll help. He won't.

Matthew Gagnon provides one:

Even more damaging were Kennebec County (delivering a net of 7,000 votes for Yes) and Penobscot County (11,000), both of which hold a strong number of votes and represent a mix of urban, suburban, and rural voters. This was the real battlefield where No on 1 lost.  These voters – and their cousins in other counties – are not “back country hicks” – even though some areas of those counties are remote. 

I myself am from Penobscot country (Hampden, specifically – which incidentally went for Yes 53%-47% for those of you keeping score), and a great deal of these people represent the typical “suburban swing voter”.  In other words, many of them work white collar jobs, live in mostly nice neighborhoods within striking distance of a city, and are pliable for whichever side makes the better case.  We are not talking about culturally conservative “Deliverance” type areas here – this is the home of Maine’s soccer moms.

The failure of No on 1 to make any inroads in these types of voters is what ultimately doomed them. The people who live in townships and in the shadows of mountains may have been decidedly against gay marriage, but they don’t represent anywhere near enough votes to offset what happened in Portland and other No on 1 cities.  This fight was lost among the middle class voters of “middle Maine”, and it was lost badly.

I really don't see how a narrowly divided vote can be seen as losing badly – especially when this issue wasn't even discussed a decade ago. We're urging a real change here, and it is not easy to counter the very well targeted fears and panic about gay people and children.

(Hat tip: Smith)

What we see on YouTube may not be what the Iranians are seeing on TV. In fact, we know it isn't. The Atlantic's Graeme Wood was on the ground at the Quds day rally a month ago. His impression:

For this observer, anyway, the Quds Day rally established exactly what the Islamic Republic wanted it to show, which is that despite the reports of unrest and discontent, there are still vast numbers of Iranians who love their government and hate Israel, and who are as sheltered from their anti-clerical countrymen as their government wants them to be. The opposition, of course, rallied elsewhere, farther north (more on that later). And optimists will point out, with some justification, that totalitarian governments have never had much trouble staging parades, even in their last days. But if the protesters' goal was to force their displeasure into the view of all Iranians, they failed. If I hadn't received the Tweets, I wouldn't have known there was any counter-protest at all.

From Chris Good's reporting on the win for medical marijuana:

A big concern for medical marijuana advocates has been that it's hard to convince voters and state legislators to pass laws that they know the federal government will contradict. If medical marijuana users get arrested by the FBI and DEA, what's the point in legalizing medical pot at the state level? After the effort of putting a bill through the legislature or getting a measure put on the ballot, passage would seem like a pyrrhic victory.

So, with that in mind, Marijuana Policy Project Executive Director Rob Kampia, whose group drafted the Maine proposal that's now law, suggested the Obama administration's new policy had something to do with the vote: "Coming a decade after passage of Maine's original marijuana law, this is a huge sign that voters are comfortable with these laws, and also a sign that the recent change of policy from the Obama administration is having a major impact," he said.

Jacob Sullum has more details on the new law. Pot-shops in Maine is a big step forward to destigmatization.

Silver's take on yesterday's results and the tea party movement:

There's not really any evidence that the…movement is yet anything more than an isolated and regional one. It will almost certainly have some implications in the South — and if I were a Democratic Congressman there, I'd be very nervous. But only 18 of the 52 Blue Dogs in fact come from the South, and if I were a conservative Democrat in California, or South Dakota, or Michigan, I'd be feeling rather relieved.

The spin from the White House is similar.

Dreher:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state. Even California, the national bellwether state on liberalizing social trends. Even Maine, in the most liberal region of the country

…unless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots — and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice — maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here. And that maybe, just maybe, serious attention should be paid, instead of paying attention long enough to insult people who disagree with you as evil people who deserved to be excoriated and harassed.

Coates replies:

I probably wouldn't use the word "bigot." I don't think, for instance, that half this country thinks hate crimes against gays is a good thing. But I have no problem believing that half the country–maybe more–is deeply prejudiced against gays. This generally fits into my view of all -isms. I think prejudice is part of who we are as humans, and thus as Americans. Following from that, I think prejudice is one of the many forces that influence how we vote. Hence the notion that half this country is deeply prejudiced against gays really doesn't shock me.