At Random: Follow-Ups and Updates

DADT

Blogbuddy Scootmaroo at cabanaboyscoot has a couple of good posts on the discharge of Sgt. Bleu Copas, the gay Arabic translator, here and here. Go check them out.

Citizen Deux, in the comments to the first post, made the statement:

Once again, the prejudice against hmosexuals (specifically male) is not driven from any sort of religious side. Rather it is a hold over from societal pressures, much like prohibitions against women in combat...

My response was that that prejudice is, and has been, purely religious in origin. It is also a prejudice that seems particularly evident in those religions with a strong patriarchal cast -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the obvious suspects. There is ample evidence that not only non-Western cultures (see the writings of Gilbert Herdt on New Guinea, for example, or Stephen O. Murray on Africa), but pre-Christian European cultures, not only accepted homosexuality but institutionalized it -- the famous erastes/eromenos relationships of ancient Greece seem to have been echoed in several other European cultures. Roman historian Diodorus Siculus was quite scandalized by the casual homosexuality of the ancient Irish. (I think we can probably look to the Romans, puritanical as they were, for the ultimate stance of the Church on homosexuality.)

The bottom line on all this, of course, is that DADT is based on a religious prohibition.


Lieberman

This could finish him off in the primary. From NYT:

But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

Assuming that Lamont does take the nomination, and that Lieberman follows through on his threat to run as an independent, NYT will most likely endorse Lamont in the election for the same reasons. Lieberman's right on one thing: this is a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party -- whether it will remain an independent party or become a token and ineffective "opposition" in a one-party government.

I hope my senators are paying attention.


Podhoretz

Two posts from tristero at Hullabaloo, on the kind of leader Podhoretz wants, and the following post, addressed to the Liebermans of the Democratic party (the link to that one is broken). Check them out.


LOTR, Wingnut Version

This is hysterical. I swear, these guys are Onion wannabes.


Andersen

I did look through the opinion in Andersen. It is, as I suspected, fairly tortured -- just as an example, the court, rather than taking a plain reading of the privileges and immunities clause, undertakes a minute and legalistic (in the worst sense) historical review and basically decides that issue on the basis of the fact that the purpose of the clause was to prevent wealthy and influential entrepreneurs from gaining undue influence through favorable legislation. The court reads this to mean that the tyranny of the majority, under the Washington constitution, is justified because the clause prohibits privilege for "the few." The whole opinion (and this is equally apparent in Carpenter's comments) is an example of the majority of the court doing backflips to maintain an indefensible status quo. Carpenter is equally culpable here, as he points out the backflips, notes that they are backflips, and then decides that the court was justified in turning backflips. (Here is the promised link to Carpenter's comments.) The conclusions, no matter how carefully reasoned (and it's another case of accepting unjustified assumptions as the basis for the argument), are specious, as well as being morally repellent. (This is the kind of thing that only a lawyer could come up with.)

The Washington court, aside from the moral (and intellectual) poverty of its decision, is following in the steps of more and more courts adjudicating not only social issues but issues of basic civil liberties: deferring to legislatures on questions that are, and should be, within the court's competence and mandate to decide. (We saw this a couple of years ago in the Third Circuit's refusal to hear the Florida adoption case on the basis that it was the legislature's prerogative to change the law, which meant it didn't actually have to invoke the Constitution.) This is a very scary result of the rightwing attacks on the courts over the past decade or so: the courts now are afraid to judge cases, caught, as they are, between the demands of constitutional guarantees and the poisonous backlash of the extreme right wing.

Man, we are losing our country, big time.