I generally don't have the patience for something like this, but this is exceptional: Sen. Maizie Hirono (D-HI) really lets AG William Barr have it:
Full exchange between Senator @maziehirono and Attorney General William Barr: "You did exactly what I thought you'd do, it's why I voted against your confirmation. I expected you would try to protect the president and indeed you did." pic.twitter.com/5ecg4jF2b2
Digby has an interesting post on politicians being accosted in public places by -- well, the public -- and the reactions from, of all people, journalists:
This past weekend, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was yelled at in a Louisville restaurant while sitting with his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. A man approached their table and angrily told they should leave the country. When other patrons spoke up and told him to leave them alone he shouted, "They're coming for Social Security!" (This happens to be true. McConnell told CNBC just last week that the only solution for the massive deficit caused by his massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy is to cut "entitlements.")
There have been several similar incidents. Protesters and constituents have approached Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen in public places, giving them hell over policies and practices.
Of all the people in our public life to get angry about this, the last you'd expect would be members of the media, who are being demonized by the president and these very same politicians. But some of them are quite upset and have taken to social media to scold citizens for addressing their leaders in this way[.] . . .
These are all fine reporters but they are on the wrong track. The same First Amendment that protects them from the authoritarian impulses of a politician like Donald Trump also protects these citizens' free speech and right to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
I find it absolutely astonishing that reporters, the media, would come out defending politicians who support a president who, among other things, has praised a congressman for physically attacking a reporter. And hacks like McConnell, Cruz, and Sanders are themselves part of the rot that's infested our government -- they certainly don't deserve much in the way of deference.
I guess it's true, what they say about the Villagers -- they're not even sure anything exists outside of Washington cocktail parties. I have news for them: democracy is not always well-behaved.
Two posts at Hullabaloo on the ramifications of Thursday's Senate Judiciary hearings on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
First, from Digby, some comments on how privileged white males react to having their status questioned:
I'm not a lawyer but I would imagine that if one has a client who has been accused of sexual assault it would not be an obvious strategy to have him angrily yell and cry in red-faced fury denying that he could ever do something so terrible. Neither would it seem to be a good idea for a man in such a position to arrogantly behave as if it's an affront that someone with his elite credentials should ever even be asked to answer to such charges. One would think that any good lawyer would want her client to present himself as a sober, thoughtful, empathetic person, willingly answering questions and submitting himself to whatever inquiries would clear his name.
She also looks at Lindsey Graham's tantrum. She doesn't even really have to say anything: he did it all himself.
And from Tom Sullivan, a broader perspective on the reaction to things like women acting as though they were actually people:
We stand at the nexus between the world that was and the world that will be, observed Eugene Robinson on MSNBC. The dying one will not let go without a fight.
Make no mistake: The drama in the Senate today was about power. On one side, the power of men who harass or abuse women and get away with it, the power of privileged white men to entrench their power on the Court, the power of men to take away a woman’s control of her own body.
The privileged believe high status is theirs by birthright (or by virtue of highly superior genes, if one believes Donald Trump). The privileged rule according to race and gender. Challenged, they fight back. Viciously and loudly, as Brett Kavanaugh did through tears:
"This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. And millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups."
That's privilege under assault speaking: how dare anyone question his right to have whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.
This is not the first time human society has undergone upheavals. This one, however, is aimed right at the root of the social structure. It's an assault that's implicit in our founding, by inference if not by outright statement: We are all equal.
After seeing all the coverage of the Women's March from various cities -- RawStory has a slide show of marches in cities around the world if you can catch it -- Hah! Let's see if it will embed:
Yes!
Anyway, I hadn't seen any mention of demonstrations in Chicago, and you may remember that Chicago has a long history of demonstrations, so I was a bit concerned that my hometown had pooped out. Well, Google is your friend (as I keep telling my barely computer literate sister). As it turned out:
An estimated quarter-million demonstrators poured into downtown on Saturday, so many that organizers of the Women's March on Chicago told the throngs that the event would only be a rally because there wasn't room to march. But people marched anyway.
"Michigan Avenue is flooded with marchers," event co-chairwoman Ann Scholhamer told the crowd at Jackson and Columbus drives a little before 11 a.m. "Wabash is flooded with marchers. State Street is flooded with marchers. People are still waiting for trains in Oak Park. We called, and you came."
So what was supposed to be a pre-march rally, with a lineup of more than 30 speakers, turned into the main event. City officials would echo organizers' decision a short while later, saying there would no longer be a "pedestrian component" to the march, and that Grant Park had reached capacity.
They marched anyway.
Grant Park, looking toward the Loop:
Photo; Chicago Tribune
The turn out, by the way, was roughly three times what organizers had expected.
In spite of what you're hearing from the "mainstream media" (and how ever did it get that tag?), it wasn't Trump's tweet that stopped the House from neutering the ethics committee:
Democrats and other watchdog groups were also critical of the Monday night vote. A coalition of more than a dozen organizations and activists expressed their frustration in a Tuesday morning letter to House Democratic and Republican leadership. Members also faced a barrage of angry phone calls from constituents.
“I can tell you the calls we’ve gotten in my district office and here in Washington surprised me, meaning the numbers of calls. People are just sick and tired,” Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) said of the simmering outrage over the proposed change. “People are just losing confidence in the lack of ethics and honesty in Washington.”
(Emphasis added.)
And our congresscritters are way surprised at that.
It's interesting that WaPo devoted the first third of the story to Trump's tweet before getting around to the operative factor: calls from angry constituents are not something that Congress tends to ignore.
This is pretty entertaining:
Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) pushed for the weakening of the OCE on Monday. His office said it would have provided “protections against any disclosures to the public or other government entities.”
A government official familiar with the internal operations of the OCE disputed Goodlatte’s assertion that the amendment would “strengthen” the office.
“Representative Goodlatte’s statement that this is an effort to strengthen ethics is a baldfaced lie,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “This will do nothing but weaken the office and weaken ethics in Congress.”
The official said the office was “blindsided” by the amendment, but noted that members of Congress have been trying to eviscerate the office since the day it was created in 2008 following the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. The official said members of Congress were particularly incensed by the office’s investigation into an expense-paid trip that 10 lawmakers took to Azerbaijan in 2013.
Britain has voted to leave the EU, which has pretty much shocked the hell out of everyone. The world is still digesting the results, but what I found very interesting was the campaign of the exit proponents:
The British campaign featured assertions and allegations tossed around with little regard to the facts. Both sides played to emotion, and the most common emotion played upon was fear.
The “Remain” side, citing scores of experts and elite opinion, warned that leaving the bloc, a so-called Brexit, would mean an economic catastrophe, a plunging pound, higher taxes, more austerity and the loss of jobs.
The Leave side warned that remaining would produce uncontrolled immigration, crime and terrorism, with hordes pouring into Britain from Turkey, a country of 77 million Muslims that borders Syria and Iraq and hopes to join the European Union. . . .
In England especially, 85 percent of the population of Britain, many people fell back on national pride, cultural exceptionalism and nostalgia. Many English voters chose to believe the insistence of anti-Europe leaders like Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and potential challenger to Mr. Cameron, that as a great nation, Britain would be more powerful and successful outside the European Union than inside.
(Emphasis added.)
Sound familiar? I just hope to hell it's not a harbinger of November.
I'm still digesting this -- sadly, it's not something I've been paying much attention to, but the results could shatter the EU, which has already started showing some cracks due to its inability to handle things like the Bush Recession of 2008/09 and the refugee crisis. The first indicator, though, is that the pound took a nosedive and the markets in general are not reacting well to the news.
Via Joe.My.God. It's worth reading the comments there -- Joe has a lot of European readers and their insights are worth knowing.
Global markets buckled as Britain’s vote to leave the European Union drove the pound to the lowest in more than 30 years. U.S. stocks joined the selloff with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 400 points, though losses were roughly half what was signaled overnight.
The vote appears likely to prompt multinational banks to shift significant numbers of jobs from Britain to competing financial centers in the European Union, led by Paris, Frankfurt, Dublin and Amsterdam. Many experts assume Brussels will move quickly to restrict trading of euro-denominated assets — a major business for Britain. Prominent banks including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup warned during the campaign that an exit would cause them to transfer some operations elsewhere.
[First Minister] Nicola Sturgeon said it was "democratically unacceptable" that Scotland faced the prospect of being taken out of the EU against its will.
She said the Scottish government would begin preparing legislation to enable another independence vote.
The UK's deicision to leave the EU means Sinn Féin will press for a border vote in the North.
Both Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain in the EU, but the leave campaign was able to convince Wales and England to leave the union.
“We have a situation where the north is going to be dragged out on the tails of a vote in England… Sinn Fein will now press our demand, our long-standing demand, for a border poll,” Sinn Fein’s national chairman Declan Kearney said after the UK as a whole had vote to leave the EU.
Northern Ireland could now be faced with the prospect of customs barriers for trade with the Republic.
After residents of the UK voted today to leave the European Union, the movement for an independent Texas may be gaining serious momentum, with thousands online calling for a “Texit.”
The largest group agitating for secession is the Texas Nationalist Movement, which has been promoting its own version of Brexit, called Texit, over the past several weeks. The group has taken inspiration from the pro-exit campaign in Britain, noting that the two movements share many of the same principles.
Same principles? You mean like racism, Islamophobia, isolationism, nativism, all that good stuff?
Please, do it. It would do the federal treasury a world of good, and we wouldn't have to deal with Ted Cruz or Louie Gohmert any more.
The presidential election is in November, 2016. It's August, 2015. 85% of news coverage is election related, mostly about the Republican contenders trying to make themselves out to be bigger asses than Donald Trump. (Although you have to admire The Hairpiece for taking over the discourse the way he did. Poor Ted Cruz, left out in the cold like that.)
"To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington, McConnell decided to break it. And it worked." That's from Matt Yglesias in a post he published yesterday evening before the scope of the GOP victory became fully clear. This is succinct and it is correct.
Indeed, in key respects it worked in 2010. By many measures Republicans should have won the Senate in 2010 and 2012. But each year they were hobbled by a raft of crazy and indisciplined senate candidates who squandered what should have been easy or at least odds-on wins. This year, the terrain was heavily weighted in their favor. And they kept their candidates on the straight and narrow.
But if this was the plan (and it was) and if it worked (which it did) we should ask, why?
Marshall has some interesting insights on this, and builds a good historical context, but there's one point I think he misses: the Republican party, at least as now constituted, is not interested in governing. It is interested in ruling. (And this article only points that up: the gist is that the GOP should wait until it controls Congress and the White House to do anything. Then it can rule without hindrance.) From everything I've read -- and especially from those "mainstream media" figures whose non-partisanship is rather tattered mask -- it seems that the GOP's favored mode is oligarchy. Sadly, too many Democrats have fallen into that trap -- the Blue Dogs and DINOs -- and have paid the price:
One trend that was interesting last night is that clear, strong progressives like Jeff Merkley (OR), Tom Udall (NM), Brian Schatz (HI) and Al Franken (MN)-- who had massive right-wing money thrown at them-- won, while conservative Democrats like Mark Warner, Mary Landrieu, Mark Udall, and Kay Hagan stumbled and the most conservative Democrat of all, Mark Pryor, lost badly. In the House, conservative Democrats-- Blue Dogs and New Dems-- lost everywhere, even in Democratic districts. Almost all of Israel's Red-to-Blue recruits lost, as did many of his Frontline incumbents.
The lesson here is that the Democratic party has a winning message. They should use it.
According to some. Very good post, if depressing, at Mahablog this morning, based on this article by Joseph Heath at Salon.
The take-away:
The status quo depends on nothing getting fixed, actually. So the status quo will see to it nothing gets fixed. Krugman’s column today says, “Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.” And the system is rigged so they can’t find out.
I very reluctantly have come around to thinking that the system is so broken it cannot be returned to anything resembling functionality. The most likely outcome is that the U.S. will continue to decline economically and politically over the next several years until quality of life is so eroded for enough people that something big and nasty and possibly violent will happen to change everything. We may actually have to become a failed state first, though.
Any student of history has seen this coming for a while. Think back to Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the "military-industrial complex." Guess who's running the government. And our "independent press" is playing along -- the major news outlets are corporations, too.
There is a ray of sunshine, though -- a small one, and it's hard to know how effective it's going to be. From a post by Spocko at Hullabaloo, built around Google severing ties with ALEC:
ALEC and Rush appeal to people's most selfish impulses. They use greed, fear and ignorance to get what they want. They want us to believe that everyone thinks like they do, when in fact it is a self-selected minority that holds these beliefs. They say if you only believe them, you will be among society's winners.
But when we go to the interested third parties and educate them, many of those real winners are disgusted with what they hear. Combining that education with appeals to both personal and stated corporate values systems and you have a solid package to help them decide to walk away.
If you want to convince people within the corporate form to walk away from a right wing media personality or a right wing legislation bill mill, learn who they are, what they say their company is about and ALL the things that they care about.
There are more and more companies that are finding out that being socially conscious is good business. Whether that's enough to offset those who don't give a damn is the big question.
Gee -- the Republicans in the Senate are blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United:
Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings dating back to 1976 that invalidated restrictions on money in politics.
The party line vote was 54 in favor, 42 against, falling short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster and proceed to a final vote.
I'm actually surprised that there were no Democrats joining the Republicans on this one, but they probably figured they were safe. Oh, and Ted "Obama Will Censor SNL" Cruz didn't bother to show up for the vote.
And the Through the Looking Glass Award goes to Mitch McConnell:
"I have to say it’s a little disconcerting to see the Democrat-led Senate focusing on things like reducing free speech protections for the American people," he said before the vote. "This is what they chose to make their top legislative priority this week. Taking an eraser to the First Amendment."
There you have it: in the Republican lexicon, corporations are "the American people." What does that make the rest of us?
I've been following, sort of, the Eurovision contest in Copenhagen, and the final votes were announced last night. Austria's entry, gender-fuck artist Conchita Wurst, won hands down. Here's the broadcast of the final vote:
It's longish, but it's pretty exciting.
And here's the winning performance:
And, another salute to the right-wing nasties, Michael Sam has been drafted by the St. Louis Rams. Post with videos at Joe.My.God.
“I don’t think that the government should be involved in health care or health insurance,” says Greg Collett, a 41-year-old software developer in Caldwell, Idaho, who would rather pay the fine for now -- $95 the first year -- than signup.
“I calculated it out and it is cheaper for me for the next four years to pay the fine rather than get coverage,” Collett said. “At some point where it would make financial sense to pay for insurance rather than pay fines, I will make the decision from a financial standpoint.”
And what if he gets sick?
But his children are covered:
Collett, who is married and has 10 children, says the kids are covered by Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance plan for people with low income and children who are not covered.
But it’s “absolutely not okay,” that they are, Collett says quickly. “There are a lot of people out there that’ll cry foul."
Collett, whose children are home-schooled, likens taking Medicaid to sending children to public school. He also does not approve of government-funded public schools. “The government is taking your money. They are spending it on things they shouldn’t be,” he says. “Trying to get whatever you can back -- I have nothing against that. You have to at some point try and get your tax dollars back.”
It's absolutely not OK, but he's doing it anyway. This is what we're up against in this country. Read the article -- there's more.
Switzerland will hold a vote on whether to introduce a basic income for all adults, in a further sign of growing public activism over pay inequality since the financial crisis.
A grassroots committee is calling for all adults in Switzerland to receive an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,800) per month from the state, with the aim of providing a financial safety net for the population.
Switzerland has also imposed strict limits on executive pay.
I'm reminded of the fact that Germany weathered the meltdown in 2008-2009 much better than most other countries, largely because it has a very strong social safety net, including adequate unemployment insurance -- money that went right back into the economy. Of course, I also remember that Germany was campaigning for other countries to cut their spending -- on things like social safety nets.
But on the whole, Europe, at least the parts of it with their collective heads screwed on straight (I'm not counting Britain, which behaved very stupidly with its "austerity" budgets), when faced with things like gross income disparity, faltering consumer demand, and the like, does something about it.
How's that for getting some of your tax dollars back?
I'm in Florida for the week, visiting family. It's a little unreal -- I'm not sure I believe the palm trees. (Which means that I've gotten way too used to my routines.)
And scanning through the news, it's all depressingly the same, which is actually the main reason that I haven't been posting much lately. I do want to point out one thing, from Pam's House Blend, though, about the effectiveness of grassroots campaigns (and yes, sadly, astroturf campaigns, as we can see from the disastrous Congress that was in stalled after the 2010 election). Key point: "Why letters to the editor? It’s simple. Advertising costs a fortune, but LTEs are free."
I think letters to the editor are also more real to most people -- ads and commercials always have a sense of fantasy to them (deliberately, I'm sure) that might influence people, but aren't reality, and we all know it. Letters to the editor are reality.
I managed to miss this one, but I wish I'd paid more attention to the time. Here's pictures of the Chicago rally in support of Wisconsin workers, from Democratic Underground.
The turnout's not so surprising -- Chicago's always been a strong union town.
Arrogance is its own brand of stupidity. See this post from Matt Osborne at C&L. Aaron Barr is the CEO of HBGary Federal, one of the outfits retained, in a fully plausibly deniable manner, by Bank of America to trash those who were, it thought, about to unmask possibly criminal activities by its upper echelons. It didn't quite work out that way:
HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year.
When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published.
It gets worse -- a study in incompetence. This is the cherry on top:
Alas, two HBGary Federal employees—CEO Aaron Barr and COO Ted Vera—used passwords that were very simple; each was just six lower case letters and two numbers. Such simple combinations are likely to be found in any respectable rainbow table, and so it was that their passwords were trivially compromised.
This is a firm that specializes in Internet security.
Barr also completely misread the nature of Anonymous. Do follow the links -- there's some very interesting information there.
It would seem that the oligarchs' idea that they are above mere right and wrong has unintended consequences.
I'm sick of it. It's been the top story online for the past seventy-jillion years, and I'm over it.
I'm going to vote, and I'm going to vote a straight Democratic ticket because the Republicans are all crazy and pernicious. It's a habit I'd like to be able to break, but not until the Republican party is no longer the party of crazy perniciousness.
I have yet to find the time to get back to the Dreher/Linker debate (and any number of others have weighed in at this point, so the catch-up is rather massive) -- it may wind up being a link dump with brief comments. However, David Link has come up with an interesting post dissecting one of Dreher's commentaries that I recommend.
I do, however, take issue with one of Link's assumptions:
As a gay man who’s worked on this issue for a quarter century now, I am fascinated to watch the debate move fully into the heterosexual world, since they are the 97% of voters who will be charged, in our democracy, with deciding the legal rules that will apply to lesbians and gay men.
Considering the tension between court rulings and right-wing propaganda on the issue of judicial review, I find this statement chilling, as well as essentially thoughtless: the legal rules are already established: the state must provide a rational and compelling reason to withhold a fundamental right from a segment of the populace. The question is whether majorities of the populace, influenced by deceptive and mendacious campaigns by those who don't really believe in our system of government to begin with, are going to be permitted to override those rules. For an interesting series of commentaries on judicial review as it pertains to the Iowa decision, see these posts by Scott Lemieux and Paul Campos, here, here, and here. I like this point in particular:
Almost everybody's conception of democracy (including, I assume, Paul's) entails some protection of individual rights from majorities, but once we assume this claims that judicial review is presumptively undemocratic become almost impossible to sustain, at least in this form. What we should consider the normative ends of democracy is beyond the scope of a single blog post, but certainly it seems to me that if you arrive at a place where arbitrary exclusions of fundamental benefits require less justification than removing such exclusions you're doing something wrong.
I doesn't look like I'll be doing a regular Friday Gay Blogging column this weekend. Expect more individual posts like this one. (The "Race and Marriage" post may happen eventually -- I'm too much under the gun right now to focus on it, and by the time I get to it, it's likely to be old news, except that I don't think it's an issue that is ever going to be old news, although one can hope. Maybe.)
Andrew Sullivan offers (without comment) this opinion from Dale Carpenter. Carpenter seems to me to be off base here, possibly from not really looking at things closely. This, for example:
Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with pickets directed at specific places of worship like the Mormon church in Los Angeles. It's too easy for such protests to degenerate into the kinds of ugly religious intolerance this country has long endured. Mormons, in particular, have historically suffered rank prejudice and even violence. Epithets and taunts directed at individuals are especially abhorrent. Individual Mormons (and blacks and others) bravely and publicly opposed Prop 8. Even those who supported Prop 8 are not all anti-gay bigots, though I saw plenty of anti-gay bigotry when I was in California last week. As I've repeatedly argued, there are genuine concerns about making a change like this to an important social institution. Those concerns are misplaced and overwrought, but they are not necessarily bigoted.
Here's my advice to righteously furious gay-marriage supporters: Stop the focus on the Mormon Church. Stop it now. We just lost a ballot fight in which we were falsely but effectively portrayed as attacking religion. So now some of us attack a religion? People were warned that churches would lose their tax-exempt status, which was untrue. So now we have (frivolous) calls for the Mormon Church to lose its tax-exempt status? It's rather selective indignation, anyway, since lots of demographic groups gave us Prop 8 in different ways — some with money and others with votes. I understand the frustration, but this particular expression of it is wrong and counter-productive.
OK -- so Carpenter doesn't think we should direct protests at the people who falsely maligned us in order to further their political ends. I'm chalking that up to his personal discomfort. What I don't see is that we were portrayed as attacking religion, except maybe by implication -- he doesn't point to any specific instances, except the "churches losing their tax-exempt status" mantra, which has been going on for years in every conceivable context. There's some sketchy reasoning going on here that doesn't quite hang together. Are we attacking religion, as Carpenter claims? Well, the right will say so, no matter what we do, but according to him they've already said it, so what's the difference? I think anyone whose mind isn't made up on this -- whicih is the people we're trying to reach -- will see this as appropriate retaliation against a group that unfairly (and possibly illegally) targeted our civil rights, and on that score, the more information that comes to light, the less sympathy I think anyone will have for them. This is not a spur-of-the moment, horrified reaction -- this is part of a long-standing, ongoing campaign on the part of the Mormon Church to deny gay citizens their rightful place in the fabric of this country. The LDS Church's involvement is part of a deliberate attempt to write religious doctrine into the law.
I'm going to pull this video up again, because Dan Savage said it right:
No matter what Carpenter says, and I have no reason to think he's accurate about the possible repercussions here, you can't come out and instruct -- not "urge" as Carpenter said, but "instruct" -- your followers to work against a minority and then hide behind your church to get out of taking responsibility for it.
Carpenter's "alternative" is, sadly, almost too predictable:
If a more intense physical expression of anger and frustration is needed, why not have sit-ins at marriage-license bureaus in California? It could be modeled on the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the 1960s. The demonstrations would be targeted at government buildings — rather than at churches. And after all, it's government policy we're legitimately protesting, not religious doctrine. Let people get arrested as they sing "We Shall Overcome." The protesters themselves — gay and straight, single and married, black and white, Mormon and Catholic, Republicans and Democrats, moms and dads raising kids — would suffer and accept the legal consequences of their acts. Rather than instilling fear and resentment in others, rather than dividing people on religious and racial lines, they would literally be putting their own bodies on the line for the good of their relationships, their families, their friends, and for a just cause whose time has come. We've had enough of lawyers, courts, focus groups, and media handlers. Let peaceful protesters by the thousands be dragged away just because they want to marry. It would be good old-fashioned civil disobedience, an American protest tradition.
What he's recommending is that we let the religious forces that demolished our right to marriage get off scot free and victimize ourselvs some more. (There's also the fact that the protests that he recommends are already in process -- see my previous post on today's activities.) This is well within the parameters of the standard conservative response to the whole civil rights struggle: be patient, don't rock the boat, don't cause controversy, and let the ones who are out to get you have their way, because eventually some old white straight guy will reward you for being virtuous.
When he gets around to it.
(In Carpenter's defense, some of the information I'm pulling into this commentary came to light after he posted his comments, although I can't say that it would have changed his mind about anything: his position has been pretty consistent.)
