The Space Merchants

That's the title of a classic science-fiction novel from the 1950s by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. The premise is that the U.S. is quite openly run by corporations -- senators represent AT&T, General Motors, BBD&O and the like. The individual is nothing more than a consumer who makes just enough to spend it all on whatever marketing organizations decide he or she "needs" most. (Need I add that Pohl and Kornbluth were recognized as gifted satirists in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Nikolai Gogol?)

It's about to come true:

One major provision of the McCain-Feingold law banned the broadcast of independent political advertisements about candidates within 30 days of an election if the ads were financed by corporate or union funds. The Supreme Court upheld this provision six years ago, but since then, conservative groups have repeatedly brought new challenges, including a relatively minor challenge that was heard by the court in March.

The argument went badly for campaign finance reform advocates when a government lawyer was asked whether Congress could also pass a law banning the publication of a corporate-funded campaign book just before an election. Yes, said the lawyer, adding that no such law exists. At the prospect of book-banning, Justice Samuel Alito blurted "that's pretty incredible," and other justices openly gaped.

In June, the justices ordered the case re-argued, only this time, they said they wanted the lawyers to focus on whether the Constitution permits any ban on corporate spending in candidate elections. In short, the court said it is considering whether to reverse decades of its own decisions.

Ted Olson is arguing the case for the corporations six years after he defended the law before the Court:

"The most important right we have in a democracy is the right to participate in the electoral process. We've smothered that right with the most incomprehensible, burdensome, unintelligible set of regulations and laws, some of which are criminal laws, surrounding that freedom. That's intolerable," says Ted Olson, who argued in support of the McCain-Feingold law as solicitor general for the Bush administration. On Wednesday, he will be arguing against it.

Olson maintains that corporations are individuals, in a constitutional sense, and should be able to express their views. Money, he says, is speech.

"You can't speak without money," Olson says. "In this day and age, you need resources to reach people. And that's part of the right to speak." He adds: "There's nothing more important under the First Amendment than to talk about elections."

The big question, of course, is whether the First Amendment applies to corporations, which, while legally "persons," are not, in fact, "individuals."

At any rate, given the current composition of the Court, I'm betting on the corporate interests. They already own Congress -- might as well make it official.

Religion and the Earth

Another weird pronouncement from the pope (via Chris Bodenner at Daily Dish):

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where is existence is denied? If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

Frankly, no, it's not, particularly. In fact, historically Christianity has been one of the biggest offenders against the integrity of the environment. As I understand it, until very recently (and still, in many quarters), the idea was that man and nature both fell from grace, and only man can be redeemed. Thus, "stewardship" becomes exploitation. This seems particularly true of some Protestant sects, with their emphasis on mechanistic views of human psychology and their "God rewards the faithful" brand of materialism. It's changing, but it's a matter of controversy within Christianity, especially in evangelical circles.

And of course, being Benedict, he's got to blame someone outside the Church. I would be surprised it's not the gays, except that as I recall, we're responsible for tornadoes and hurricanes, and quite possibly the banking crisis as well, so I guess atheists will have to take responsibility for environmental degradation.

Daniel Florien seems to agree:

Most of the people I’ve met who don’t care about the earth have been Christians. I’m sure my experience is biased, but I also haven’t met an atheist that isn’t concerned about our environment — though I’m sure there are some. Most Christians who don’t care about the environment do so on the basis that God has things under control and he’ll eventually torch the earth anyway. Atheists, on the other hand, believe this is the only home we have and we need to take care of it.

There are Christians who care about the environment, but that’s been a fairly recent bandwagon for them. The evangelical green movement has been gaining momentum, and I’m pleased with that.

I should point out that I'm pleased to see that there is a green movement among evangelicals. I should also point out that, if you'll remember, espousing the view that the evangelical movement should focus more on the environment and poverty and less on gay rights and abortion brought about calls for the resignation of one official of a major association of evangelicals (and Lord love me, I've forgotten the name again). So it's not a done deal yet, by any means.

There were also a couple of interesting responses. This one made me think:

Daniel Florien may not have met any atheists unconcerned with the environment, but I believe that is because of his US-centric viewpoint. In my experience, in Europe, tables are usually turned around, with catholics being far more in favor of preserving the environment than the majority of atheists. The reason for this is that such position has less to do with religious affiliation (or lack thereof) and everything to do with eduction levels. In Europe, the lower classes (education-wise) tend to be atheistic (communists, anarchists, marxists, etc) while in the US is the other way round.

Unfortunately, if one looks at the numbers that show that most Europeans are not very strong believers, this one becomes less easy to swallow. (Just on its face, it seems to be as biased as Florien's statement.) I suspect in the case of Europe, it's a matter of long tradition -- for example, farming practices that avoid chemical fertilizers in favor of recycling organic matter into the soil, which farmers in Europe have been doing for a thousand years.

Frankly, I can only see a variable connection between belief in a deity and care for the earth. It's good to see the pope coming out with this message, although if you read the whole thing, it's still extremely humanocentric -- it's all about taking care of the earth because it's good for humanity, which is certainly a practical consideration, but it has nothing to do with anyone's gods. As I say, Pagans are highly likely to be environmentally conscious, Protestant Christians less so, in my experience. I suspect it has a lot more to do with political affiliation than anything else -- environmentalism is a liberal stance, in this country at least. It's nice that conservatives, some of them, anyway, are finally catching on.

Required Reading

This post at AmericaBlog. I particularly recommend that you read the comments -- there are some very clear-eyed comments on just exactly how Obama has made himself a failure not quite nine months into his term. (And I suspect that is going to turn out to be an accurate description: "his term," because at the rate he's going, the only way he can manage a second term is if the Republicans run a Palin/Inhofe ticket.)

I should probably send this link to my senators and congresswoman.

On the other hand. . .

The day started off badly -- you know it can't be a winner when your coffee pot explodes first thing -- but things are looking up. A cicada decided to molt right outside my back door, so I just spent a few minutes watching its wings unfurl. Strange looking creature -- really primeval -- but the colors are nice.



It's rather late in the season for it to be coming out -- I guess their biological clocks are no better than mine. I can only wish it luck.

The Baby With the Bathwater

I ran across this essay by John Corvino last evening and was going to leave a comment, but I couldn't quite focus my thoughts at that point. Now that I've slept on it, I do have something to say. He's commenting on an OpEd by Robert P. George that I had dissected some while back. (I took George's OpEd apart here. For those interested, I also discussed Jonathan Rowe's response in another post, here.)

While I largely agree with Corvino on this one, this jumped out at me:

First, the good points: George is quite right to insist that the Court’s role is to interpret the Constitution, not to make policy. He’s also right to argue that marriage law has been, and should be, tied closely to the needs of children. And he exhibits a refreshing “don’t panic” attitude, asserting that “democracy is working”—although by democracy, he seems to mean only voter referenda, and not our more complex representative system, with its various checks and balances. On the latter, broader understanding, I’d agree that “democracy is working:” in the last year, five additional states have embraced marriage equality.

There are three huge flaws here -- and I mean HUGE. George is dodging the issue -- or, more accurately, misrepresenting the Court's role in this particular debate. The Court's role is, indeed, to interpret the Constitution, and since this is a matter of fundamental rights and equal treatment under the law, the Court is the appropriate place to go. I'll come back to the second one. The last big flaw in George's argument, which Corvino turns upside down, is the idea that questions of constitutional guarantees should be decided by popular vote. This country has never worked that way, and George should know better. Actually, so should Corvino, as much as he's written and lectured on gay civil rights, and particularly marriage.

The part that leaped out at me was "marriage law . . . should be tied closely to the needs of children."

Why?

I don't dispute that children are, and have been, one of the central factors of marriage -- after all, raising a family is one of the reasons people get married. It was a key factor in dynastic marriages, whether those were political or business: it was about paternity and property. However, to jump from that to the idea that children are the central factor in marriage is simply not dealing with reality. Leaving aside George's fantastic (and sometimes painfully funny) leaps of logic in ascribing marriage as legitimate for childless couples because male/female sex has the "potential" for procreation (when, in fact, it doesn't always, particularly if the couple are infertile or taking steps to make sure that there is no procreation gonna happen), let's just look at this rationally.

No matter what anyone may say, marriage now is an arrangement between two people that carries with it a certain status in the community. That status is "married couple," and it's not dependent on evidence of fertility. For Corvino to concede that marriage law should be tied closely to the needs of children is giving away the store. Certainly, the needs of children should be one part of it, and an important part, but the core of marriage law should be the rights and responsibilities of the partners in terms of mutual care, decision-making, rights to property, and fiscal responsibility, including support and maintenance. It's instructive that these aspects are so often left to marriage vows, pre-nuptial agreements.-- or divorce courts. (I'd love to see a heterosexual supremacist "marriage supporter" address that, I really would. However, the weather report for Hell sees no snow in the foreseeable future.)

One of the most objectionable bases of George's piece is his flat refusal to recognize that gays are entitled to the same rights as anyone else. In his eyes, it's not a civil rights issue. Of course, in reality, it is. Happily, Corvino punctures that balloon -- sort of.

I remember reading somewhere in the misty past that America is so obsessed with children because we don't really like them very much -- if we did, we wouldn't need so many laws protecting them. This strikes me as more in the same vein, one that's been mined since the days of Anita Bryant. It's getting a little old.

Housekeeping Note

I've finally updated the review listing of yaoi at Epinions in the sidebar. It seems like forever since I've tidied up over there -- mostly because my brain took most of August off.

So now it's up to date as of August 31.

Reviews in Brief: 98 Degrees' Revelation

More boy band. 98 Degrees is another group I ran across on YouTube -- the song this time was "You Should Be Mine." I picked up the CD and got a pretty much mixed bag.

Their up-tempo songs on this one are superb -- lots of energy, crispness, with a decidedly Latin/hiphop flavor. It opens with "Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)," with a rhythm I wish I could identify -- it's a dance song, but I can't quite nail it. It could be a very fancy, free-form cha-cha, but it's a good one. The other real winner on this one is "He'll Never Be . . . (What I Used to Be to You)," a really hot tango-based piece -- high drama all around, and I could see a dance floor getting pretty steamy with a couple who knew what they were doing.

The ballads don't fare quite so well. They border on gorp, although if you're in the right mood and out dancing with the guy (or gal, too, I guess) of your dreams, I can see where they'd go down easy -- they're made for holding someone special very close, which I guess is the point. (Although I have to confess that "My Everything" comes close to being the most syrupy song ever -- but if you can last past the intro, it's not unbearable. Just undistinguished.)

What strikes me about these guys is the strength of their vocal arrrangements. They carry a good sense of texture and counterpoint, and they do some wonderful things. Here's the video with "You Should Be Mine" that first caught my attention to give you an idea of where these guys go vocally. (The characters are Gojyo and Hakkai of Saiyuki fame, who seem to be a favorite pairing among the yaoi/slash set at YouTube. The opening sequence is from Death Note, which looks intriguing. I love the little guy who keeps playing with his mouth.)



In the final analysis, 98 Degrees would be fairly generic boy band pop if it weren't for those little vocal treats that they throw in from time to time. (And true to the annoying traditions of boy-band releases, they don't seem to tell you who anyone is or who's doing what on any given track -- I guess you're supposed to know. Well, I don't, and I don't feel like spending an hour on Google finding out. Brickbats for that one.)

The Sounds of Silence

Interesting comments on a book by Sarah Maitland, The Book of Silence, from Jesse Crispin. It's mostly a diatribe against technological doomsayers, those convinced that our reliance on technology is the work of the devil, but this sparked a thought:

Maitland believes that our culture hates silence. We fear it, despise it, do anything to avoid it. Maitland moved to rural England in order to escape the noise of her city life, and in her book she examines the experience of silence and isolation, both voluntary and involuntary. She rather overstates her case, honestly. Anyone who lives in a city does not fear silence. They crave it, wish for it when the train rumbles by every 15 minutes all night long, or when the neighbor you're afraid of turns on the death metal until your apartment floor vibrates. She points to our constant noise-making as proof of our fear, but I think her examples are just our attempts to make the sounds around us friendlier. An iPod full of our favorite music is greatly preferred over random subway rumble and chatter, and texting or phoning your dearest is preferred over a roomful of strangers' conversation.

As you might imagine, I have a slightly different take. I treasure silence, I really do, and when I'm not forced to interact with people, I'm largely silent myself. But it's a sometime thing. Two points: I do not own a cell phone or an iPod, nor do I travel "plugged in." And I had a heavy dose of John Cage in my formative years (which actually don't seem to have ended yet). I like the sounds of the city, unless I have to focus on something else -- sometimes, when I'm writing, I need silence; other times, I need music, which seems to help my concentration. I hate noise, but "noise" itself is a subjective term. I remember lying in bed one summer night listening to my window fan and the way it intersected both the random street noises outside my window and the cycling of someone else's airconditioner. It made a nice lullaby.

Questions of technology aside -- I don't see it as either evil or good, but pretty much as value neutral -- I like to stay open to what's going on around me. In the city, that includes the noise of human activity (which includes our machines: they are ours, after all, and operating under our supervision, one hopes). In the country, it's the sounds of "natural" life. (Anyone who's ever been in the country for any length of time knows that it's not quiet. It's just that the sounds are of a different type, and governed by different requirements. I've been in the North Carolina mountains in summer, when the calls of frogs are almost deafening, and inescapable. That's hardly "silence.")

And when it comes right down to it, you make your own silence, if you can stand it. I think Maitland is misidentifying the noise factor, and Crispin doesn't spot it: there are people who hate silence, but they also are probably people who don't spend a lot of time thinking to begin with. Just a surmise, but if you roll that one around a bit, it makes sense: if you've never developed your personal resources, you don't really have much to fall back on when the input stops.

What we seem to have here is another instance of people arguing from different points on a continuum.

Silence has much to offer us, Maitland argues. I mean, once you get away from the men and women that silence drove crazy and suicidal. But she reports that periods of isolation and silence can bring a deepening sense of self, a connectedness with the divine and with the world, and a disinhibitedness.

You can also find those things just by thinking a little -- growing older helps, too, as long as you keep your eyes -- and ears -- open.

One note on technology: I do try not to be too dependent on it, although if my computer were to die, I'd really be in a pickle. But that's just it: technology is vulnerable, and the more complex and widespread it is, the more vulnerable it becomes. It's wise, I think, to remember that.

(Via Patrick Appel at The Daily Dish.)

We Are Governed By Idiots

In case you were wondering. This was the first story I saw this morning. Talk about being set up for the day:

The European Union is strongly criticizing a congressional proposal to charge a $10 fee to some visitors to the United States and suggesting it may carry a price for U.S. travelers.

If it passes, the EU says, some U.S. travelers to Europe could face retaliation.

The fee now under consideration in Congress would finance a new U.S. program to promote travel, a burden that the EU believes Americans should bear.

"Only in `Alice in Wonderland' could a penalty be seen as promoting the activity on which it is imposed," the European Commission's Ambassador to Washington, John Bruton, said in a statement Friday.

It gets even more surreal:

Early, this year, however, the United States began requiring people traveling to the United States under the visa waiver program to register online at least 72 hours before travel and renew their registration every two years. If the new proposal is passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, it would require all visitors to pay the fee when they register.

The money would pay for a travel promotion campaign run as a public-private partnership. Among its aims would be educating foreign visitors on U.S. entry procedures, including the online registration for visa free travel.

I'm speechless.

Military Perversions

I was ambivalent about this story, reported by Pam's House Blend, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and others (including ABC, CBS, Mother Jones, Gawker and who knows where else?), but I think that Digby came close to the core issue:

What's with all the homoerotic hazing rituals?

If this is the way men bond in these all male environments, I guess I understand why so many of them are against lifting Don't Ask Don't Tell in the military. Once you remove the taboo a whole lot of them will have to deal with their own urges without the cover of coercion and humiliation. I can see why they'd be afraid, but really, these men should just admit that they like this sort of thing and leave those who don't alone. They'd feel a lot better and so would the men who are forced to participate in order to be accepted into the pack.

Once again we see projection at work. Many of these men obviously have gay feelings and act upon them in this predatory, coercive manner. So they assume that out gay men are doing the same thing. Of course they're not because they can be with people who consent and wouldn't need or want to force anyone, as do most sexually healthy people.

Before I get into the meat, one point: projection almost certainly is at play here, as it is in this story at Box Turtle Bulletin, also reported by Towleroad.

Digby's point is well taken: if they didn't have to worry about the social stigma attached to same-sex attraction, this sort of thing probably wouldn't be happening, although given the exaggerated and highly unrealistic version of "masculinity" prevalent in the military and quasi-military environment, the possible alternatives are scary -- and there would be alternatives. As Digby also points out, this is to some extent an initiation rite, and that's going to happen. It's a fundamental means of establishing a place in the group.

But I think that Digby is not quite on point about DADT here. DADT is just a symptom of a much deeper problem regarding homosexuality and its perception in America, itself an outgrowth of a partriarchal system that is even more pronounced in America than it is in Europe. It also seems to go hand-in-hand with a world view that persists in describing the universe as a place of diametrically opposed absolutes, which we're beginning to understand is a highly unrealistic way of looking at it.

Add in the exaggerated and pernicious idea of "masculinity" that seems endemic to military and quasi-military orgranizations, and you've got a real mess. Aaron Belkin of the Palm Center has a must-read post on this at HuffPo:

First, in no way do these incidents represent "bad apples" or isolated cases. One of my doctoral students just completed her dissertation on military training, a project for which she actually went through boot camp as a part of her research. I begged her not to go to boot camp to do her research because i believed she could get assaulted. Sure enough, every single woman in her training was sexually harassed, including one woman who was raped. The reason behind the pattern is that in order to train our troops for combat, we train them to brutalize one another.

Second, these cases are not hazing, they are torture. By referring to torture as "hazing," or "homosocial behavior" we make the violence seem like it is okay, just boys being boys. Hog-tying someone to a chair and then shoving him into a dog kennel full of feces, as was done to the gay sailor, is not boys being boys. In fact, the victims of such treatment often develop PTSD. One of the sailors implicated in the Bahrain scandal died from suicide, while another told me that he developed suicidal ideation as a result.

Third, the pattern of violence is not an accident, but reflects official policy, including the "don't ask, don't tell" law which makes it almost impossible for gay victims to report abuse. And even though the military does have policies in place to deter violence against women, these policies often produce contradictory results. For example, I am aware of a rape case that was not reported because the base commander had announced a "zero-tolerance" policy for assault, which the troops took to mean (accurately according to people I interviewed) that he did not want to hear about incidents.

Belkin's post (which I found after I had written most of this) hits some of my points, but there's an underlying problem. If you look at the work of Alfred Kinsey, which I take as valuable because it is based on actual behavior, it seems that most men are, or have been at some point in their lives, open to sex with other men. I shouldn't need to point this out: is there a man alive in this country who didn't suffer through a schoolboy crush on a classmate, teacher, or older boy? We like to call it a "phase" and are secure in the (unfounded) assumption that boys will grow out of it -- but I begin to suspect more and more that boys "grow out of it" mostly because of the social disapproval inherent in not growing out of it. What they grow out of is expressing it, which in most cases seems to go hand in hand with a certain amount of self-deception. This is where that view of the universe as composed of dichotomies comes in: a man is either gay or straight, in most people's minds. I don't see any evidence that this is intrinsic. In fact, I see more and more evidence that it's not, starting with something as simple as the fact that we are forced to recognize the existence of bisexuals. (I've dated a couple, actually, and known others; they all had varying approaches to dealing with their needs, but they were all quite functional human beings.)

The bottom line is that you wind up with men who want to interact with other men in ways that are not permitted, and like any frustrated need, it can, and often does, turn poisonous. The response of society, as exemplified in the military as noted in the second story cited and in Belkin's post, is to ignore it all.

I would hope that this is something that's going to fall by the wayside, although without a fundamental shift in our way of looking at the world, it's going to be sketchy. I take heart from the apparent existence of a real "post-gay" mentality among younger people. Some younger people. In some places. Repeal of DADT is only a small start.

(Yes, there are pictures of the carryings on in Kabul -- any of the sites linked to above will provide them, or links to them, although Digby seems to have a bad link. This story at HuffPo has video. (Which itself is instructive -- look at Joe Scarborough's reaction to the story -- he spends most of the video trying to justify it. What an ass -- he really doesn't get it. But that's only indicative of the "conservative" reaction to things like this -- "boys will be boys." The lesson he draws from this? Don't get caught.)

From Codpiece to Ball-less Wonder

I said at one point that we voted for a leader and got a Chicago politician. I take it back -- Obama wouldn't last two minutes in Chicago politics. From John Aravosis at AmericaBlog, a heads-up on this story from NYT:

By signaling that they would seek to revise existing versions of legislation moving through the House and Senate, administration officials and Democratic leaders in Congress - many of whom had said earlier in the summer that they saw no need to scale back their ambitions - made clear that their political calculations had changed. With Congressional Republicans standing almost unanimously in opposition to the Democratic approach, the target now for Mr. Obama is primarily a handful of moderate Democrats and the one Republican who seems open to a deal, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine.

“It’s so important to get a deal,” a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about strategy. “He will do almost anything it takes to get one.”

Aravosis:

Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but this doesn't read like determination, it reads like desperation - an admission that Obama will agree to almost anything in order to get "some" deal, any deal. Why admit that fact publicly - as disturbing as it would be privately - and why does this not give the Republicans that much more incentive to go for broke, and either bring the deal down entirely (since Obama is so desperate for it), or so pervert health care reform that it becomes virtually unrecognizable (think: giving away 40% of the stimulus bill as worthless tax cuts in order to buy 3 votes).

I'll go him one better: when you're right, you fight for it. The public option has broad public support, but that no longer means anything, certainly not in the Senate, and apparently not in the White House, either. Update: This just noted from AmericaBlog:

Despite the hammering the issue has taken from Republicans and too many Democrats over the summer, the public option still polls strong according to the latest Research 2000 poll for DailyKos. When asked "Do you favor or oppose creating a government-administered health insurance option that anyone can purchase to compete with private insurance plans?" 58% responded yes. 34% responded no and eight percent were undecided. From Markos:

The public option remains popular, by a nearly 3-2 margin. Seems like people like the idea of competition in the insurance market, that would help lower premiums and keep currently unaccountable insurance companies honest.

What's more, the public option is favored by over a quarter of self-identified Republicans, which is more "bipartisanship" than you'll ever see in DC.

Y'know, it's not all that long ago that the Republicans were telling the Democrats to suck on it while ramming through whatever would benefit their major donors. Now the White House is telling the Democrats the same thing -- while helping the Republicans ram through whatever will benefit their major donors.

It's not just a White House problem. The Senate gives every indication of having become completely nonfunctional, thanks in no small part to the "leadership" of Harry Reid and his reluctance -- or inability -- to whip the Blue Dogs into line. (That name is almost appropriate, but only almost: think in terms of what's wagging what.)

Which leads me to this gem from Sen. Chris Dodd:



Indeed. (And thanks to reader PietB for finding the lost link.)

We wouldn't have a crisis of leadership in this country if we had any leaders.

Halfway Through Siegfried

That's how far I got with Wagner's Ring the other day at work, which is OK -- I'm not that crazy for Goetterdaemerung anyway.

And that shows you how long my workday is.

I've also been working on two posts for today and lost them both, so I'm hanging it up for now. Maybe tomorrow or Saturday. (With thanks to PietB for a timely save.)

Odd Morning

Ran across a post at AmericaBlog that looked like a good nut for a post of my own, on Sen. Chris Dodd saying that Obama has to show some leadership, complete with video and link. System froze up for some reason, and when I got the post back, no link, no video. Weird.

Anyway, he's right -- Obama has to show some leadership or lose the whole ball of wax.

On a real life note, I packed the CD player with a bunch of stuff I haven't listened to recently -- all art music from the last thirty or forty years, and wound up bringing some of it to work with me. Feldman's The Viola in My Life (a no-brainer: I really, really like that piece) and Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, which I've listened to before but never really listened to, you know? It's really engaging. Not particularly subtle, but there's probably stuff I'm missing on this player, which is not the best. Adequate for the office, but only that.

That one may be up for a Review in Brief sometimes soon. Another candidate is another BL anime, After School in the Teachers' Lounge. Very odd, highly abstract, very interesting. If I can find the complete thing, I'll do it.

The State of the Nation

This is what Earthlink considers "Top News." From AP, no less.(You know -- the ones who will sue you if you actually use one of their stories.)

And this is what the Honolulu City Council thinks it should be spending time on.

Adjusting

New work schedule, and I'm not sure yet how it's going to work out. And I woke up in the middle of the night with a cramp in the muscle in my lower leg -- the one just below the calf muscles and under the Achilles tendon. It hurt like hell, and when I got up this morning my leg was so sore that I could barely stand. It took fifteen minutes of warm-ups and a walk before it loosened up enough to be comfortable.




Besides, the news is the same as it has been -- the Republicans are against everything, and the Democrats don't know how to deal with it.

As far as the health care reform debate, I like this one:



Thanks to Balloon Juice.

What kind of asshole thinks it's OK to take an assault rifle to a presidential visit? And what kind of idiot defends him? (She's one of our favorite idiots.)

And who is this Steven Anderson character? Gods, that man is creepy. (There is something totally unhinged about Anderson calling Signorile a liar for saying he never molested a child, because Anderson knows that all gay men are child molesters. And people listen to him?)

And just because people like Steven Anderson hate the idea, let me point out that same-sex marriages start today in Vermont.

Reviews in Brief: Backstreet Boys' Unbreakable

I happened to remark one day as our Advertising Director was walking past, "What is it with me and boy bands lately?" He just looked at me and said "You don't expect me to answer that, do you?" (I had been listening to 98 Degrees' Revelation and realized that I also had two Backstreet Boys albums with me that day.)

I stumbled across Backstreet Boys on YouTube (which has become a great source for me to catch up on popular music of the past ten years or so). The song was "Incomplete," and it was used as a soundtrack for a yaoi AMV (of course). I couldn't find that album (Never Gone), but I happened across Unbreakable when by some odd chance I had money in my pocket.

It's a good, strong collection. There are a few knockouts. The song that first caught my attention on this one was "Any Other Way," a solid pop rocker. That's followed by "One In A Million," which could lead to some dirty dancing, for sure -- it's got that kind of beat. My true love from this group, though, is "Unmistakable" -- pure romance: think of holding your guy in your arms and just floating around the dance floor. It's that kind of song.

Back to the first question: What is it with boy bands? Well, in this case, these guys are good. Forget all the crap about "not playing their own instruments" and all the other jackshit arguments that rock 'n' roll "purists" come up with. That's nothing more than in-group backbiting, as far as I'm concerned, and a sure sign of a) not understanding music very well, b) having your taste canalized by adherence to your peer group, and c) (which I think follows from (b)) a shaky ego.

These guys are singers and dancers and they do both very well. And they're very smart about picking their material, at least on this collection. (I don't know if they write any of their own music. I don't really care. Barbra Streisand doesn't, either.) There's everything here -- humor, melancholy, a sort of wry, after-the-fact acceptance, and a hint of acid. And the musicianship is exemplary. Like I keep sayin', these guys are good. It's a rich, textured sound that makes full use of their voices. It's probably their best album, but don't quote me on that -- I don't know the rest of their output.

The AMV that got me started has been taken down, but here's another with that song and one of my favorite manga/anime characters:



And just for fun, here's one of my latest favorites, which also happens to be by Backstreet Boys (with more of may favorite manga/anime characters):



The only videos I have from this album are slide shows and not all that interesting.

Every Once in a While

I hit one that's just too perfect:

The Next Health-Care Debate: Update

This is not really as tangential as it seems, since the core of the "debate" over circumcision is about HIV transmission. I questioned Hannah Rosin's post because of her overly broad application of results from a study in Africa: I'm not alone in doubting that it's applicable to conditions in the U.S. In that light, Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin has come up with (gasp!) some actual information.

Dr. Amy Lansky of the CDC presented research at the Aug. 24 plenary in which the CDC estimated in the U.S. there were 692.2 new HIV cases in 2007 per 100,000 men who have sex with men (MSM).

In other words, the rate of new infections in the population of gay and bisexual men in 2007 was 0.69%. Or in 2007 one out of every 144 gay/bi men seroconverted.

That still is very high. And it is consistent with our calculations that about 12% of gay/bi men (or about 6% of all gay/bi people) are infected with HIV. (So play safe kids… or better yet, find someone to have and hold from this day forward.)

But, in those terms, perhaps it isn’t quite as scary as the somewhat meaningless announcement that “MSM are 50 times more likely to have AIDS than women and non-gay or bisexual men.” I think most of us already know that sexually active gay men, especially those unpartnered, are at a much higher risk of HIV than Grandpa Joe and Grandma Sally.

He has pretty much the same reaction I do to this sort of thing:

And I wonder at the wisdom of making announcements of such comparisons. Provided without context, this quote can seem counter-intuitive. A gay man with both gay and straight friends might think that such ratios do not reflect their observations. And using language that feels out of sync with the realities of the experiences of gay men will not encourage better behavior; rather it will cause the target audience to dismiss the information.

Read his whole post -- it's a much-needed grounding in reality.

Oh, FTLOP!

I don't really have much respect for Andrew Sullivan as a thinker, but I thought he was better than this.

"People love honesty, but they hate the truth. To frankly acknowledge and address the ineluctable reality of healthcare rationing is not merely to touch the proverbial third rail of American politics; it is to lie across the tracks in front of the onrushing train. Come, let us speak of unpleasant things. How is health care to be rationed? Who gets the short end of the stick?" - Eric Chevlen, First Things, via Megan.

The quote is from this article, in which a doctor who is a consultant for a private insurance company comes to the conclusion that, lo and behold! we should rely on private insurance companies because a government run program will result in rationing. Whoda thunkit? Happily, the commenters call him on it. (His argument starts with a flawed assumption -- that rationing is inevitable because there can't be enough health care to go around. Based, it seems, on the practices of private insurers, who have a vested interest in rationing health care -- it's called "profits." The article limps along from there.)

The links are screwed up, so I can't get to Megan McArdle's comments (I assume that's the "Megan" that Sullivan is referring to. It seems like her kind of thing.) Hah! Found it! It's rather thin, and she starts from the same assumption. To be fair, I haven't been following McArdle on health care reform -- I don't think much of her to begin with, and my sense from what I've read of comments on her comments is that she's reliably advancing "libertarian" arguments -- and you all know what I think of that.

Fort Worth "Raid": Update

There's been some action by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission in the aftermath of the raid on the Rainbow Lounge on the anniversary of Stonewall: the two agents involved have been fired and their supervisor, who was taking early retirement, will be terminated next week.

And here's an editorial that focuses attention on the police department's reaction.

But Halstead still must deliver the results of an ongoing internal affairs investigation into whether any of the officers used excessive force, conducted themselves unprofessionally, neglected their duty or were not properly supervised in the Rainbow Lounge raid.

They took seven people out of the bar that morning, two of them forcefully. They let one go and charged the others with public intoxication. Chad Gibson also was charged with assault by contact. He was sent to the hospital after injuring his head in a fall outside the bar, Halstead’s report says.

Two months later, Halstead says there still are conflicting accounts about the officers’ actions. He adds that a final report on the investigation may be ready for the council by October.

That’s a stretch. It could lead one to believe that the city is intentionally delaying the report for fear of a lawsuit. Or maybe Fort Worth police just have trouble investigating their own. Either would be another black eye.

Halstead must meet his own deadline and deliver the report of the internal investigation by October. Sooner would be better.

For those who insist that we have to wait for public opinion to support us, take this as an object lesson: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I would bet that without the immediate and negative reaction of the gay blogosphere and the Fort Worth gay community, which focused national attention on this incident, we'd be faced with another cover-up. Any takers?

The Next Health-Care Debate

Circumcision? Lord love a duck.

From Hannah Rosin at Daily Dish:

But the procedure is only "controversial" because people have emotional, psychological and religious reactions to it. Scientifically speaking, it's not remotely controversial. The anti-circumcision sites always refer to the American Academy of Pediatrics' 1999 policy statement on circumcision, which declined to recommend the procedure. But that statement was issued before the most compelling studies emerged about the role circumcision plays in reducing the risk for transmission of HIV and other STD's. This is a good overview from medical writer Arthur Allen.

Three trials in which Kenyan and Ugandan men were randomly selected to receive circumcision were halted when it became clear that circumcision helped prevent transmission of HIV. Men who got it were about half as likely to get infected. “A 50% reduction is about the same as some vaccines,” says [Edgar Schoen, MD, who was chief of pediatrics at Kaiser-Permanente Healthcare.]

Yes, conditions in Africa are different. The trials showed results mostly in heterosexual transmission. But the evidence is still pretty strong, and even stronger for STD's. The problem with all this "controversy" is that Medicaid now doesn't pay for the procedure, which costs all of $300 in most hospitals. Rates of circumcision for the poor, particularly African Americans and Latinos, have plummeted in the last ten years.

Here's a statement of the policy -- and please note that there is a comment at the top that the poicy was reaffirmed in 2005. And here's the article that Rosin lifted her quote from. Frankly, it's long on assertion and personal opinion, short on data, and completely lacking in direct citations.

I don't doubt that the studies exist or that they conclude what the reports say they conclude, but I'm not swayed. There's something missing here: what impact does circumcision have on disease transmission for those who habitually use condoms or practice other forms of safe sex? Yeah, I thought so.

Update:

Before you run out to get your hood whacked off, read this, of particular interest to at least some readers here:

Circumcision, which has helped prevent AIDS among heterosexual men in Africa, doesn’t help protect gay men from the virus, according to the largest U.S. study to look at the question.

The research, presented at a conference Tuesday, is expected to influence the government’s first guidance on circumcision.

Circumcision “is not considered beneficial” in stopping the spread of HIV through gay sex, said Dr. Peter Kilmarx, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There's also the fact that about 80% of American men are already circumcised. (By the way, this study also specifies that transmission rates for circumcised and uncircumcised men who engage in anal sex are about the same. I suspect that the sex of the person on the receiving end is not going to make much difference.)

Can you say "agenda"? On the parts of both Rosin and Allen, it would seem. (I won't make reference to the implicit heterosexism in both writers' comments -- but then, I probably don't have to.)

I don't know that I need to concern myself with the feminist take on circumcision, but I will say that for American feminists -- or American anything -- to take the results of a study of African men who do not use condoms and demand that American men all trot off obediently to get cut strikes me as a little specious, not to mention downright dangerous: circumcision doesn't eliminate the risk of infection with STDs, including HIV, it only moderates it in those who do not use condoms for penetrative sex. Sure, every little bit helps, but you will note that neither writer mentions practicing safe sex, and regrettably, that is still not something that can be taken for granted, particularly among younger men. (And I'm not just talking about young gay men -- teenage pregnancy rates have risen in the past few years, and the girls aren't doing it with turkey basters, you can bet on that. Concomitantly, of course, there has been an increase in the incidence of STDs among teenage girls.) (It reminds me in a way of that horrible woman who went on a campaign to ban pornography because it demeaned women. Well, sometimes, maybe. And of course, she had no response when asked about gay pornography. But she still wanted to ban it all. Same attitude.)

So here we have the Daily Dish lending itself to another half-baked opinion without much backing from complete research, or even much in the way of careful thought. My objection, I guess, is that for most responsible men, the message here is irrelevant. And those for whom the message might be relevant are not being provided with useful information. That pisses me off.

And in case you were wondering, none of your business -- if you're someone who needs to know, you'll have direct evidence. My own attitude is a cock is a cock, and each has its good points and its less than good points. It's the man attached to the cock who's the most important part of the whole thing.

(I thought about including a picture or two, but this is not that kind of blog.)

In Memoriam: Sen. Ted Kennedy

I think he was the last real liberal.

At the 1980 Democratic Convention:



NYT called him a "Senate stalwart". He was much more than that.

And there's not much else that I can say.

Pep Talk

From Dday at Hullaballoo, this post on the campaign in Maine, with a good summary of how the "professional gays" lost the campaign in California.

For so many people, the passage of Prop. 8 last November represented a civil rights failure. But it was just as much a political failure. A campaign that could have been about neighbor-to-neighbor contact and recognizing what brings us together rather than sets us apart was instead waged at 30,000 feet. The TV ads for the No campaign never showed one gay couple, and they never spent any resources on door-to-door canvassing. The consultants who ran that campaign (into the ground) claimed that visibility mattered more than personal persuasion (they actually told volunteers to get on a street corner and hold signs instead of interacting directly with people), and the entire race was waged in a defensive crouch, as the Yes campaign would post one lie after another to which the No campaign would belatedly respond.

I'd say it was mostly a political failure, and an organizational failure. As far as I'm concerned (and I don't think I'm alone), if demolished whatever shreds of credibility the "professional" gay advocacy organizations had. Their inability to move the Obama administration has only finalized it.

While most of the attention has been on the attempt to repeal Washington state's enhanced DP legislation, there is a crucal fight in Maine. Fortunately, it looks like the Mainers are doing things right. Here's their first commercial:



Dear gods! There are actual gay people in this one! With their kids! Let's see if it works.

If you've been following Pam's House Blend lately, you know that Louise has been tracking this one very closely, ever since the bill went to the governor.

And the usual suspects are lining up to attempt a repeal, although if the Mormons are involved, they are keeping it a deep, dark secret. (And according to reports, the Bishop of Portland is getting strong resistance from his flock. Good.)

From time to time, I'll take another look at this one.

Roots

Read this post by Jim Burroway. It's wonderful.

I didn't grow up in Appalachia, although I have strong connections there -- my mother's side of the family is all over the place in McDowell and Buncombe counties in North Carolina. We used to visit my grandmother for fairly lengthy stays when I was small -- sometimes almost the entire summer. And this was an old farmhouse in the hills, with no electricity, a fireplace and wood stove for heat, and running water in a cistern in the front yard, piped in from a spring up the hill. My joke used to be that of course my grandmother had running water -- if she needed water, one of us ran out the yard and got it.

And it could take me up to a month to lose the hillbilly accent when I got back home to the Midwest.

Whatever Happened to David Gergen?

Not much, apparently -- he still gets on talk shows sounding like he actually knows what's going on. Here he is on Anderson Cooper's 360, telling it like it is (in some weird alternate reality):

I think one of the other aspects of this is very fundamental to who we are as a people. There are a lot of sociologists and historians will tell you we as American people are just different. We're an outliers measured in many ways. Our value system is different. We don't think like Canadians. We don't accept government the way it is. We're not deferential to authority the way Canadians are or in Western Europe.

And so, I think the Clintons misread that some, and I think President Obama has misread that some. When you come and try to sell something big, big government to the American people, they tend to be very, very weary of it. It's been true throughout our history. . . .

I think there's no way that the American people will ever accept single-payer system, a government-run health care system for all. I just don't -- you know, I don't think we're like the British or the Canadians in that sense.

That does not mean you can't have universal coverage. It does mean you can have a very robust system in which poor people have a chance for protection and will have a chance for decent life. It does mean that -- in the American system, we tend to do that more through the private sector than through the public -- than through the public sector.

It's an amazing tour-de-force on Gergen's part -- every scare argument, every disproved exaggeration, rendered in very temperate language as though he actually knows what he's talking about. (Something that I don't ever recall him being guilty of in the past.)

On at least one point there he's demonstrably wrong: Americans are much more deferential to authority than either Canadians or Europeans. I remember a story the novelist Jerzy Kozinski told, of trying to get on a plane in Italy. He donned a suit that looked like a uniform, although it bore no insignia, and went to the airport and very matter-of-factly butted in at the head of the ticket line. The ones who didn't object were the Americans. As I recall -- this was in a TV interview with, I believe, Dick Cavett -- he was amazed and tried the same trick several other times, with the same result.

The American people will accept anything, if you give them some real information and some time to think about it. Look at gay marriage -- not even a concept twenty years ago.

The whole program looks to have been pretty depressing, from an information standpoint.

Read Digby's priceless commentary on this. It's totally High Snark.

Reviews in Brief: Tarako Kotobui's Love Pistols

This one came to me via a friend/colleague who was cleaning out her bookshelves. I'd run across it on Amazon and put it on my list to pursue someday, but at the price she asked, I jumped right on it.

Imagine, if you will, a universe in which humanity, the regular sort descended from an ape-like ancestor, shares the world with another sort of person, descended, it would seem, from everything but the apes. This is the universe in which Norio Tsuburaya finds himself -- after crashing his brand new motorbike into the garden wall on his sixteenth birthday, in what seems to have been a near-death experience but only resulted in a broken foot. Suddenly, not only is he seeing people as animals, but they are coming on to him like crazy. His senpai, Kumakashi, first clues him into the existence of Zoomanity, as it is called. Kumakashi is a large, hulking sort of guy, captain of the judo team and a member of the gardening club. He is the first to confess his love to Norio -- but what Norio sees is a bear. Things are getting decidedly out of hand when Norio, limping along on his crutches, suddenly smells something totally captivating -- just before he falls down the stairs and onto Kunimasa Madarame, a senior and the one man that Kumakashi told him especially to avoid. Kunimasa's reaction is somewhat strange -- he starts sniffing Norio, then picks him up and carries him off. And so begins the main story line.

There are other stories scattered through the five volumes of this series, involving Kunimasa's brother, Yonekuni, who professes to hate men; Kumakashi, who is contracted to mate with a North American bruin; a flashback to another of Kunimasa's brothers and his parents; and more. And as the series progresses, it gets weirder and more outrageous.

One of the saving graces of this one is that Norio and most of the other uke tend to fall into the category of "ornery uke." For example, it seems that Norio is a very rare type, known as a Missing Link, so not only is he in high demand, there's also the fact that, as one of Kunimasa's brothers tells him, "no one can beat a pissed off Missing Link" -- and Norio spends a lot of time being pissed off. The conflicts with Kunimasa, who is completely lacking in interpersonal skills, rely on Norio's stubbornness to counter Kunimasa's demanding nature. Characterizations as a whole are somewhat extreme, but perfectly believable and generate most of the momentum of the various stories.

There's also the fact that Zoomanity has discovered a way for men to bear children and for same-sex couples to generate their own offspring, which leads to some very interesting family relationships -- consider that "Mom" to one sibling may be "Pop" to another. Kotobuki has thought this out pretty carefully, so we are treated to excerpts from chidren's primers on Zooomanity, the main groups, the rankings, and so forth, as well as a family tree of the Madarame, which has to be seen to be believed.

And drawing is a pleasure to see. Kotobouki favors elongated, blocky body types, somewhat like Ellie Mamahara's style, with exaggerated hands and feet,although her renderings are more fluid. Narrative flow is fairly straightforward and very clear, which is fortunate: the stories themselves are hard enough to follow.

There are five volumes out; there was to have been at least one more, but apparently Kotobuki abandoned the series -- volume 5 was published in Japan in 2006 and there's been no sign of a sequel. Nevertheless, it's worth checking into -- it is without doubt among the most imaginative yaoi series I've run across. It's from BLU.

Note: If you're searching the Web for this one, you may run across references to "Sex Pistols," which was the original title. That was changed to avoid conflict with the band of the same name.

OK, I Promised You a Marriage Post

Both of these items had their fifteen minutes this past week, but I wanted to take another look at them.

First, the Justice Department filed a new brief in Smelt which takes a radically different tone than their previous offering. John Aravosis has an alert, with the text. Aravosis quotes this portion without, I think, noting the key point:

Plaintiffs' equal protection and due process claims raise several issues, all of which were addressed in the United States' motion to dismiss. As established in the government's opening memorandum, federal courts have unanimously upheld the constitutionality of DOMA.5 Plaintiffs' only response to the government's arguments in favor of dismissal is to assert, without elaboration, that "same gender marriage is a . . . fundamental right" such that DOMA is subject to "heightened scrutiny," and to imply that DOMA constitutes "gender discrimination" (Doc. 40 at 4, 5). The United States refuted these assertions in its opening memorandum. (Emphasis added)

If that indeed is the argument being made, it's the wrong argument. The core issue, as I see it, is that marriage is a fundamental right, and that under Constitutional guarantees of equal treatment under the law Congress must show a rational reason for withholding that right from any group. Congress has not done so.

However, this brief does something that the previous filing did not. From Chris Geidner at Law Dork:

Those who assert that the Obama Administration did not even need to file a brief will be dissatisfied with the brief because it essentially incorporates the earlier arguments into this reply brief and continues to defend DOMA as a legal matter. But, for those many people who believe that the government, in a situation such as this, does have a responsibility to defend the law, this brief makes clear the distinction between opposing a policy and defending a law.

From the brief itself to Obama’s statement and in light of the other changes being advanced by the Administration, I continue to believe that the original DOJ Smelt filing was made without the full appreciation (or knowledge) by higher-ups. I do think that the uproar following its filing has changed the approach of the Administration, and, for that, the debate was worthwhile. This filing and statement show a keen awareness of and sensitivity to that impact, while maintaining a clear principle to defend a law that repeatedly has been found to be constitutional.

Dale Carpenter also notes the shift in attitude:

What a difference two months can make. While the DOJ hasn't retracted its earlier arguments, its new brief is much more friendly to gay families in tone and in substance. It also emphasizes the plaintiffs' lack of standing and suggests that a ruling on the merits would be unnecessarily broad. The original motion could have been this narrow and done the job.

Consider this almost apologetic, but also uncontroversial, passage:

With respect to the merits, this Administration does not support DOMA as a matter of policy, believes that it is discriminatory, and supports its repeal. Consistent with the rule of law, however, the Department of Justice has long followed the practice of defending federal statutes as long as reasonable arguments can be made in support of their constitutionality, even if the Department disagrees with a particular statute as a policy matter, as it does here.

There was nothing like this anti-DOMA language in the June brief. There was no mention of the administration's anti-DOMA policy views. The DOJ labels DOMA a form of discrimination, although it doesn't say what kind. Back in June, the DOJ went out of its way to argue that DOMA does not discriminate on the basis of sex or sexual orientation. In fact, the new brief makes no new argument for DOMA, and only vaguely says it supports the value of "federalism."

This brief seems, on the whole, to do almost a 180 in that it hands proponents of same-sex marriage some key arguments, although, as both Geidner and Carpenter note, the government still takes the stance that DOMA is constitutional -- based on previous court findings which in turn, I think, were based on flawed arguments such as I noted above. However, there is one passage that scores a bulls-eye:

Unlike the intervenors here, the government does not contend that there are legitimate government interests in "creating a legal structure that promotes the raising of children by both of their biological parents" or that the government's interest in "responsible procreation" justifies Congress's decision to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

Carpenter also notes that the brief uses Justice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence vs. Texas to undercut arguments against SSM. I hope Scalia has a fit right there in the chamber. Carpenter's conclusion, I think, gets most of it right:

While gay-rights groups complain that the DOJ is continuing to defend the constitutionality of DOMA (see here and here), and are understandably disturbed by the still-unabandoned arguments the DOJ made back in June, they should be delighted by the turn taken in this reply brief. It will serve the cause of SSM in state and especially federal courts for years to come.

What seems to me to be more important is that this filing very effectively undercuts the previous motion pretty much across the board, even though it still insists that DOMA is constitutional.

The next stage in this is the suit being argued by Ted Olson and David Boies. Very interesting profile of Olson in NYT last week, that brings out how feeble the procreation/child-rearing argument is:

In the gay community, though, conspiracy theories initially abounded that Mr. Olson had taken the case to sabotage it. While many have since come around, fears remain that a loss in the closely divided Supreme Court could deal a setback to the movement.

He dismisses Mr. Cooper’s contention that the California ban is justified by that state’s interest in encouraging relationships that promote procreation and the raising of children by biological parents. If sexual orientation is not a choice - and Mr. Olson argues that it is not - then the ban is not going to encourage his clients to enter into heterosexual, child-producing marriages, he insists. Moreover, he says, California has waived the right to make that argument by recognizing domestic partnerships that bestow most benefits of marriage.

So there's a double-whammy on that one. That argument is toast -- and that my provide the grounds for revisiting the decisions in New York and Washington state, which relied heavily on that argument.

The Times also has some interesting commentary on the suit.

And Gabriel Arana at Box Turtle Bulletin points out one interesting wrinkle in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger (the real name of the Olson/Boies challenge to Prop 8:

Today, all parties to the suit filed another round of “case management statements,” proposals that outline what the trial will cover, what legal questions will be addressed, and which sort of evidence will be gathered and presented. What is interesting about these statements is that the case is shaping up to be much broader than the state challenge to Prop. 8, which hinged on the technical distinction between an “amendment” and a “revision.”

Crucially, the plaintiffs plan to go after the Yes on 8 Campaign to show that they were motivated by anti-gay animus. This will involve having the Yes on 8 people testify and hand over documents relevant to the campaign.

If some gay rights groups were frustrated by the legal language and fine lines involved in the state challenge, this is looking like it will be the big fight they wanted.

That will be a key argument: Prop 8 motivated by animus. That's what lost the Romer case for the State of Colorado. Now that Obama's DoJ has torpedoed the procreation/child-rearing argument, and undercut others, that should be a strong one.

OK -- it's a situation still in flux -- there are other cases going ahead as well, including the Massachusetts challenge to DOMA -- but I think things are looking up. Of course, there are elements on the SC that will hear arguments and then base their opinions on what they have already decided (are you listening, Justice Scalia?), so it's still iffy.

Catching Up

This story has been around, at least as a mention, all over the place. Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune asked three leading opponents of same-sex marriage for some predictions on the negative results of legalized same-sex marriage. A simple proposition, since we now have six states in which same-sex marriage is legal, as opposed to 44 in which it is not likely to be anytime soon, which gives us a nice experimental set-up, so Chapman's request was that the three -- Maggie Gallagher, Stanley Kurtz, and David Blankenhorn -- predict those results based on measurable social indicators: divorce rates, out-of-wedlock births, marriage rates, and the like. No one seemed to want to respond -- Gallagher declined, Kurtz did not respond to messages, and only David Blankenhorn had anything to say:

The only person willing to talk was David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. His 2007 book, "The Future of Marriage," made a serious and temperate effort to grapple with the case for same-sex marriage. Blankenhorn opposed it out of fear it would drain marriage of its central role by making it "exclusively a private relationship" that is "essentially unconnected to larger social needs and public meanings."

Blankenhorn is on really thin ice here: by definition, marriage is a social and cultural institution, and his "prediction" is demonstrably ridiculous. The whole point of being married is to establish a couple within the social framework -- it's impossible for it to be a "private relationship." That's called "shacking up," or, to be a bit more formal, "cohabitation." (You may remember that I've dissected Blankenhorn before and found his reasoning wanting, at best. To call his arguments "serious and temperate" is much too generous: his arguments are barely passable, but his assumptions are unjusitifed. I suspect that Chapman is buying Blankenhorn's claim that he's a "liberal Democrat" without realizing that his organization receives its funding from right-wing social extremists.)

On the other hand, proponents were not nearly so reticent. The key response:

M. V. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of the new book, "When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage," was happy to answer my question. "I don't think we'll see those kinds of negative social consequences," she said. "In Europe, there's no evidence that patterns have changed for marriage, divorce or non-marital births because of same-sex marriage or registered partnerships."

That's pretty much what I would predict.

Apparently, according to Conor Clarke, Gallagher did come up with some "specific" predictions -- at National Review:

1. In gay-marriage states, a large minority people committed to traditional notions of marriage will feel afraid to speak up for their views, lest they be punished in some way.

2. Public schools will teach about gay marriage.

3. Parents in public schools who object to gay marriage being taught to their children will be told with increasing public firmness that they don't belong in public schools and their views will not be accomodated in any way.

4. Religous institutions will face new legal threats (especially soft litigation threats) that will cause some to close, or modify their missions, to avoid clashing with the government's official views of marriage (which will include the view that opponents are akin to racists for failing to see same-sex couples as married).

5. Support for the idea "the ideal for a child is a married mother and father" will decline.

I'd love to see Gallagher make a fool of herself in front of a Congressional committee the way Elaine Donnelley did -- but then, she manages just fine all on her own. Her "predictions" are ludicrous -- more airy-fairy scare mantras, all neatly listed. As Clarke points out, "None of them -- with the exception of #4 (where I think Gallagher is just plain wrong) and this vague, unconvincing business of being "punished" in #1 -- are bad things!"

I'm in a mood, so I'll parse Gallagher's "parade of horribles" (as Clarke terms them):

1. When your views are out of step with those of your community, you meet with punishment -- it's called social disapproval. That's what Gallagher wants for proponents of same-sex marriage -- and gays as a group -- but she can't seem to deal with the tables being turned.

2. Public schools are supposed to teach about the world as it is.

3. People who object to their children being taught about the real world can opt for parochial schools or home schooling. It happens all the time. Or do we allow parents to opt their children out of any class that teaches something they're opposed to? Or begin every lesson with the statement "Some people don't agree with this"? Wouldn't that be great in a math class?

4. BS

5. Since that idea has no basis in fact, I don't see why it should be supported anyway.

And Stanley Kurtz apparently is still not responding to messages. (Kurtz, you will remember, did a whole series of articles claiming dire results for families and the social fabric itself if same-sex marriage were legalized, drawing on statistics from Scandinavia and France. In none of those places was same-sex marriage legal at the time. That should give you a good sense of the depth and integrity of his arguments.)

What's especially significant about this story is that it's a column by Steve Chapman, who's a pretty good observer, in the Chicago Tribune, which is not what you'd call a liberal mouthpiece.

And this has been another episode of WTF?

AWOL

Yeah, I know -- I've been terrifically busy and terrifically unfocused. I'm working on a fairly substantial post on marriage right now, but I haven't been able to digest all the material.

Maybe by Saturday.

The High Point of the Debate

Barney Frank, confronted by a nutcase who's trying to make out like health care reform is a Nazi plot:



Frank responded, "When you ask me that question, I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage and ask you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He added, "It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.... Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

Via Steve Benen at Political Animal.

As unhappy as I've been with Frank on gay issues lately, you have to admit the man has it.

Daily Dish: The View From Your Sickbed

Andrew Sullivan and his crew at Daily Dish have been running a periodic series of stories from readers about the horrors of private insurance (along with some much-needed explanations of how insurance companies actually work). Now they've posted a round-up with links to all the posts.

Good ammunition for your "no Obamacare" acquaintances.

2010 or 2012?

This post by Timothy Kincaid lays out the pros and cons of putting referenda on the ballot in California next year or in 2012. The major groups, of course, are counseling "wait." They've been counseling "wait" for over a decade now, and what has it gotten us? A president who wants to wait on gay civil rights.

Kincaid, I think, get to the core of it:

While twelvers are wondering about funding and strategy, tenners are focused on momentum, energy, honesty, and courage. Tenners want to win in 10, but find it even more important to not concede defeat. While they think victory is possible next year, they are committed to fighting this battle until it is won, even if that means going to the polls every two years.

They are exactly right. You can point back to the Black Civil Rights movement (and you'll note, they didn't wait) or to our good friends the anti-gay fundies -- they don't wait either. They keep coming back and back until they win, as they did in Arizona and as they have done across the country. If they lose an election, they go to court. If they lose in court, they go back to the electorate. The key word here is "relentless."

The national gay leadership has worked on a strategy that I think is fundamentally wrong: wait until we have the support. Maybe it's a carryover from the "it's our fault" mentality that infects so much of PC left thinking. Maybe it's just not looking at what's happening around you. We know that the leaders of the Prop 8 fight in California blew it. They lost a sure thing. We want to let them keep control? I don't think so. We can't wait until we have the support -- we have to build the support.

We keep hearing about "momentum" in this fight, about how we have to capture the momentum and not let the momentum die. That's almost right: we have to make the momentum. It's not easy. It takes time, and hard work, and a willingness to be rejected again and again, it takes voices in the media and on the blogosphere repeating the obvious until our messages starts to get through to people.

It's hard. But it's really very simple.

The Symptom, or the Cause? (Updated)

Today's irony: this video of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Berchtesgaden) blaming the government for the unrest displayed over the health care "debate."



This came via AmericaBlog, and while Coburn makes the point that "it's not a Democrat or Republican problem," (let's be "bipartisan" about it, mmkay?) I think Sudbay has it right:

I don't get this argument from Coburn or those inciting violence. "The people" elected this government. Our side won. If Coburn's side isn't happy, they need to elect their own people. That's how it's done in the United States. The very fact that Coburn didn't immediately denounce the threats of violence is way beyond the pale.

Coburn is among the enablers. Frankly, this clip is so loaded with irony that I don't think I even need to point it out.

For a little context, listen to Rachel Maddow:



In that light, Coburn's little homily on how "it's the government's fault" shows up as pure bullshit. But then, we knew that.

Add in this story from NYT:

The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

Read the whole article for a good take on just how this whole thing is operating. (And I might add that if even NYT is calling bullshit, you know it's hip deep.)

Batocchio at Hullaballoo has some incisive observations. It's brutal:

To the conservative, right-wing base, Obama is both a socialist and a fascist, and simultaneously a weak appeaser to foreign rulers but a ruthless dictator domestically. Bush's monarchial power grabs were just fine with them, and anyone who spoke out then was a traitor, but now that Obama's president, America's being ripped asunder. Internment camps were once a swell idea, but not now. Elections have consequences, but for the right-wing, only Republican politicians have legitimacy. There's a range of sincerity to the craziness, of course – Betsy McCaughey's a vile hack, Sarah Palin's more of a demagogue, while many in the rank and file believe every evil tale they're told (and invent new ones). Regardless, they're bad news, and the conservatives trying as usual to blame their own craziness on liberals and Democrats are particulary loathsome. Journalists pretending that "both sides" are somehow equally hostile, irrational and dishonest is sadly not surprising, but it is highly irresponsible. The 'Deny Me Health Care or Give Me Death' movement is fascinating from a psychological standpoint, and may make for good headlines, but oddly enough, the republic doesn't work very well when the stupidest, meanest, greediest and most dishonest citizens get to set the agenda.

Brutal, but on target, as far as I can see.

Coburn did have one thing right: it's not about health care. It's about sinking Obama, and it always has been. The Republican stance is obvious: we win, or we burn the house down. This just happens to be the issue that worked for them.

Update

Maha does an elegant job of demolishing some of the anti-health care arguments, and actually uses (gasp!) facts, which have been in disastrously short supply in this campaign.

I want to comment a little more on Newt’s op ed in the Los Angeles Times today, because he says some things that I have seen popping up in a lot of right-wing commentary.

One key proposal is to mandate an “essential benefit package” for every private insurance policy sold in the United States. Currently, individuals and employers usually make these coverage decisions. This legislation creates a new federal Health Benefits Advisory Committee that would decide instead. For example, if you are a single male with no children, the legislation still requires you to have maternity benefits and well-baby and well-child care coverage. You don’t want or don’t need that coverage? Sorry, you have to pay for it anyway.

Putting aside the fact that single men father children all the time, and in a perfect world those single men would be just as responsible for maternity and well-baby bills as married ones —

Insurance works by risk pooling — everybody throws money into a pot so that there’s money for people who are hit with unexpected expenses. In order for this to work, in any given year most of the people in the pool throw more money into the pot than take it out. Generally, the bigger the pool, the better it works. Insurance companies invest the premium money, and they make most of their profits from investments.

Newt's "argument" is disingenuous at best. (Read it on an empty stomach -- you'll be doing yourself a favor.) It's nothing but a pack of lies from the beginning. Maha does a good take-down.

(Giggle alert: This one really got me:

You cannot spend an additional $1 trillion of taxpayer money and reduce the role of government.

Umm -- actually, you can -- it's called "the bailout of the banking industry.")