A Republican For Marriage

The Republican mayor of San Diego just reversed himself on marriage equality and agreed to sign a a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California’s gay marriage ban (also opposed by the state legislature). Moving video moment here. He’d previously vowed to veto it. He has a lesbian daughter, it turns out, and like many other parents of gay children, simply didn’t believe it was a positive step to keep her segregated from her own family and community and stigmatized as inferior. Here’s his full statement.

With me this afternoon is my wife, Rana. I am here this afternoon to announce that I will sign the resolution that the City Council passed yesterday directing the City Attorney to file a brief in support of gay marriage.

My plan, as has been reported publicly, was to veto that resolution, so I feel like I owe all San Diegans an explanation for this change of heart. During the campaign two years ago, I announced that I did not support gay marriage and instead supported civil unions and domestic partnerships. I have personally wrestled with that position ever since.  My opinion on this issue has evolved significantly — as I think have the opinions of millions of Americans from all walks of life.

In order to be consistent with the position I took during the mayoral election, I intended to veto the Council resolution. As late as yesterday afternoon, that was my position.

The arrival of the resolution — to sign or veto — in my office late last night forced me to reflect and search my soul for the right thing to do. I have decided to lead with my heart — to do what I think is right — and to take a stand on behalf of equality and social justice. The right thing for me to do is to sign this resolution.

For three decades, I have worked to bring enlightenment, justice and equality to all parts of our community.

As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage — than anyone else — simply because of their sexual orientation.

A decision to veto this resolution would have been inconsistent with the values I have embraced over the past 30 years. I do believe that times have changed. And with changing time, and new life experiences, come different opinions. I think that’s natural, and certainly it is true in my case.

Two years ago, I believed that civil unions were a fair alternative. Those beliefs, in my case, have since changed. The concept of a "separate but equal" institution is not something that I can support.

I acknowledge that not all members of our community will agree or perhaps even understand my decision today. All I can offer them is that I am trying to do what I believe is right.

I have close family members and friends who are members of the gay and lesbian community. These folks include my daughter Lisa and her partner, as well as members of my personal staff.

I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones — for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life’s wondrous adventures.

And I want their relationships to be protected equally under the law. In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana.

The Non-Epiphany Epiphany

Thomas Sowell gets off the bus. A reader comments:

I generally like Thomas Sowell and find a great deal of well and simply stated wisdom in his columns. He has now joined the ranks of the Peggy Noonan types, who have quietly but decisively changed their tune without really acknowledging their complicity in the recent pro-war fervor. The linked column below, had it been written in February 2003 would confirm his conservative bona fides, but in September 2007?!? Where are the mea culpas? Where is the sense that he was wrong?  The detached, inclusive way the column is written ("we" this, "we" that: don’t the "we" include people he would have labelled wackos or even traitors only months ago?), betrays an ongoing blindness that "we" are to blame and have indeed lost a great deal of credibility by not espousing these views not in 2007 but almost five years ago. 

Very few conservatives should write this kind of column today: George Will, yes; Pat Buchanan, obviously; Jeffrey Hart, certainly; Andrew Sullivan, yes because we have been able to follow his painful journey from fellow-Kool-aid imbiber to bruised, disillusioned and wiser Burkean; but Sowell, who has been part of the echo chamber on Iraq since the beginning without any sign of a slow journey to (self-)awareness. Hard to swallow.

I’ve given up hoping for intellectual accountability from most on the right. Taking responsibility for one’s past views and actions is not apparently in the current conservative book of virtues.

The Limits Of Anbar

Michael Totten emails:

I wish I disagreed with what you wrote on your blog, but I don’t.

The "Awakening" model is spreading elsewhere in the country, which is good, but something else will need to happen in Baghdad, especially, for the reasons you outline.

Also, the Mahdi Army will be tougher to beat than Al Qaeda because they are less extreme and less likely to be rejected by the society as a whole. So while the Anbar model is exportable to an extent – it is being exported to Diyala Province, Salah a Din Province, and even to some places in the South – winning everywhere in Iraq (if it’s even possible, and I really don’t know if it is) will require something more. The success in Anbar Province is real, but it would be a mistake to assume that solution can be applied to the entire country. It probably can’t. I wouldn’t say reconciliation between Sunnia and Shias is impossible, but if it is possible it won’t be because of what happened in Anbar.

A voice of sanity from the ground. Hit his tip jar. Tom Ricks echoes Michael’s judgment here.

Dobson On Thompson

The GOP’s chief mullah issues a fatwa:

"Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won’t talk at all about what he believes, and can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail? He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"

Quote for the Day

"I still hear it often said, including by liberal-minded people, that all serious experts agree that we need to stay in Iraq, or even that the consensus on this score is so overwhelming that it’s inevitable that we’ll stay. Neither is true. Quite a lot of who’ve thought deeply about this problem have concluded that the best thing to do is simply to cut our losses and leave, focusing our remaining Iraq-related energies on doing what we can for refugees and to improve the broader regional diplomatic situation," – Matt Yglesias, reading Steve Simon’s CFR booklet on the surge.

Star Wars – Panned

Here’s a movie-week blast from the archives of the Atlantic: the first take on George Lucas and his Star Wars franchise. Money quote:

[Lucas] does not tell a story. This is the basic failing of the film. It lacks true narrative drive and force. It is a void, into which any mystic idea can be projected; entertainment, brilliantly confected, which is quite hollow. Its only idea is individualism – that a man must take responsibility for others, even at great personal cost and peril. Its idea is, in classic form, "A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do."

You can vote for Star Wars here, if you like. Its entry in the contest is: ""I have a bad feeling about this."

The Passion Of Converts

The born-again are often more insistent on religious purity than those who have been born only once and still have faith. The same is true with Islam, it seems, except the consequences of that fanaticism can be far, far worse than enduring piety at full-blast. In Germany conversions to Islam have gone from around 300 a year in the late 1990s to 4,000 in 2006, the WaPo reports. Some have become religious murderers. One blogger wants to know more:

Here are some big questions that are left unanswered and would probably take more than three reporters a couple of weeks to figure out: Why do these people convert? Why the increasing numbers? And what are they converting from? Christianity? Agnosticism? Atheism?

Why would any of these converts turn radical? For the purposes of a story like this, it doesn’t matter if 95 out of 100 converts stop at the madrassas. All we’re talking about in this story is a handful of converts who have since been arrested for being involved in terrorism. This rough spiritual timeline from the so-called experts is nice, but we need more.