Sadr City

It’s another sign that things may actually be improving in Iraq. Readers know my evolution on this question over the years – and it has been rooted in an attempt not to let ideology or wishful thinking or my own pride get in the way of seeing reality. So it behooves me to note real progress there, progress that we should all hope is sustained, whatever sides we have been on and whoever we may support in this election. Pete Wehner notes:

The Sadr City military offensive is impressive, especially when executed on top of the success we’ve recently seen in Basra. (After a shaky start, for the first time the Iraqi government has pacified and restored government control there). The Sadr City offensive is doubly impressive when you consider that no American ground forces accompanied the Iraqi troops into there. While we shared intelligence, helped the Iraqi’s in planning the operation and provided overhead reconnaissance, it was “totally Iraqi planned, led and executed,” the U.S. military told the Washington Post.

The militias may well return; the October elections will be very instructive – and may impact the US election the next month. I wonder to what extent the knowledge that the US, under Obama or McCain, will be withdrawing troops in the near future has affected the urgency behind Maliki. But these are encouraging signs and should be better acknowledged and understood.

China Blocking Burma

George Packer calls out China:

…since I’m not a member of the U.N. Secretariat, the U.S. Department of State, or the executive board of Save the Children, I don’t have to be polite to either the Chinese or the Burmese government. So let history record: at the U.N., China is blocking any chance of a Security Council resolution authorizing the world to do for suffering Burmese what their government won’t do or allow to be done for them, even if it means an uninvited intervention.

Matt, I assume, will see this as scapegoating China and more half-hearted advocation for invasion. But there is some truth in what Matt Steinglass wrote earlier this week:

If the response were playing out according to the rough script that obtained in the ’90s for international interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and East Timor, then Western governments would be holding summit meetings right now to put together a coordinated diplomatic approach to pressuring Burma to open hurricane-affected regions to foreign aid agencies, with a threat of military intervention as a last resort. It would be left unclear exactly what foreign militaries planned to do in the last resort, just as it was left unclear in Kosovo and East Timor. The aim would be to push the Burmese government to accept more access for foreign aid agencies in a compromise deal to avoid military conflict. As the unacceptability of the crisis became established in the international public’s mind, diplomatic pressure would be applied on countries reluctant to approve humanitarian interventions, such as China. Ultimately, just as Russia acceded to intervention in Kosovo, China might signal to the Burmese government that it could no longer shield it from international demands. At that point hopefully a face-saving compromise could be found that permitted more access for international aid agencies than would have been obtained without the vague threat of eventual military action.

Wittes’ Point

Ben Wittes says that the California court declared Barack Obama a bigot. Well, he admits he’s not actually saying that, because the court didn’t. But he bridles at the notion that domestic partnerships are an invidiously "separate but equal" institution. He argues that to impute prejudice to those who support domestic partnerships as the equivalent of civil marriage is unfair. I see where he’s coming from. I certainly don’t want to alienate or insult those who want substantive state (but not federal) equality for gay couples in a separate and nearly-equal box.

But the question Ben does not answer is this: on what grounds should we call a same-sex marriage a civil union and not a civil marriage? What does it mean to have a different name? The California court went to some length to answer this question and could not come up with an answer that could square with the strong assumption of civil equality in California’s constitution. It’s not merely descriptive: we could call the two institutions "gay marriage" and "straight marriage" if we wanted to. But one is called a "domestic partnership" and one is called a "marriage". Why?

Tradition, obviously. But tradition is always threatened by any change. It was threatened by divorce, by miscegenation, by women’s equality, by the pill, by every change in civil marriage over the past centuries. Why is allowing a tiny minority to be part of this such a uniquely rupturing change that it requires another name altogether?

It really does come down to this. Are gay relationships as good as straight ones? Do they deserve the same dignity and respect and support? If you believe they do, there is no logical reason to deny the term civil marriage.

I can understand, for example, a fundamentalist simply arguing that gay relationships should be stigmatized on religious and moral grounds. If gays have to have some legal rights in a free society, they could and do say, at least we should declare as a society that they are inferior to heterosexual relationships. The different name and fewer rights do that, and that is the primary goal of the anti-marriage-equality forces. But if you have no substantive objections to equal treatment, if you have conceded the entire substance, and have no moral or religious objections to a civil act of legal equality, then the stigma of withholding the name is in some ways more intense. That last step has nothing logical or substantive supporting it – and so it becomes purely symbolic stigmatization. Its only rationale can be marginalization.

Can you imagine, for example, the lawyers in the Loving vs Virginia case fighting all the way to the Supreme Court and then saying: "Okay, we know you have issues with this. We don’t want the courts to impose inter-racial marriage on the country by fiat when huge majorities find such marriages repulsive and immoral. So we’ll call inter-racial marriages "domestic partnerships" instead."

Of course you can’t imagine that. And that speaks volumes. Equality is equality is equality. And a marriage license is a marriage license is a marriage license. Calling it something else for a few is a way of saying it is something else for the few, and something lesser for the few. There is no way around this, and in many ways, I am grateful that the California court put it so bluntly.

Could Barr Hurt Obama?

A reader thinks so:

Michael Goldfarb is right when he says that Barr might take away votes from Obama (to an extent).  I am a big Ron Paul fan but defected and voted for Obama in the Georgia primary after Paul bombed in New Hampshire (where all his fans said he was supposed to win).  I will NEVER EVER vote for McCain or the Republicans, at least for a few more elections.  I would rather protest against the party and their wayward ways by voting for Obama, but many of my meetup friends are pretty adamant about writing in Ron Paul or anything other than Obama b/c most of them are radical libertarian-types who will never compromise, but will instead vote libertarian or Constitution party.  I still vacillate in my heart between Barr & Obama (each have areas I love and want to see enacted).  It’s very difficult to decide and I change my support from week to week.

The conflicts that any libertarian-conservative feels in backing Obama in part to punish what the Bush Republicans have done at home and abroad are real enough.

It is indeed depressing to know that Obama backed the farm bill, will raise my taxes even more, has no intention of tackling entitlement spending, etc. And Barr may become an attractive proposition for Obamacons for these reasons. McCain’s fiscal policy is, alas, no more likely to reduce the debt and will almost certainly increase it more than Obama over four years. He is also beholden to many of the forces on the far right that dismay so many of us small-government, individual freedom types. But I’m not an ideologue, and maybe an Obama presidency would galvanize reform on the right in ways impossible under McCain.

We have months to weigh these issues. For me, however, the defeat of Giulaini’s neofascist tendencies, Romney’s callow theoconservatism and Huckabee’s Christianist schtick has been a huge gain. And the defeat of the Clintons an even bigger one. I’m not complaining about the conflicts ahead. They are wonderful conflicts to be weighing given what we were contemplating six months ago.

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

Thanks for the post about fistula. I am one of the apparently rare U.S. women who has had one.  Fortunately my child was fine, and – being in the U.S. – I was able to have the surgery to get it repaired (which was no picnic to go through while recovering from childbirth and nursing a newborn, but I was grateful for anything that would undo that gawdawful fistula).

I panicked having it for a few days (the condition is both physically and emotionally painful).

I cannot imagine having to live with it for a lifetime.  I had NO idea it was so common, or that so many women had to live with it, or that they usually lost their babies.  How incredibly lucky I have been, and surely the best way to show my gratitude is to help others get out of that pain and humiliation.

I just wanted you to know that because of you, this organization now has a loyal donor.  I don’t know how many people will act on that link; probably not many.  But one person will, for sure.  THANK YOU for letting people know about this.

Donate here.