I may have something to say about this later:

A federal judge put gay marriages on hold for at least another six days in California, disappointing dozens of gay couples who lined up outside City Hall hoping to tie the knot Thursday.

Judge Vaughn Walker gave opponents of same-sex weddings until Aug. 18 at 5 p.m. to get a ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on whether gay marriage should resume. Gay marriages could happen at that point or be put off indefinitely depending on how the court rules.

A quick review of the article makes this seem like a just compromise, given the circumstances.

While most polls have shown 28-year Washington veteran Barbara Boxer leading Carly Fiorina, a SurveyUSA survey has the businesswoman ahead of the outgoing Senator:

California Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina has increased her lead over Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer to five percentage points according to a new CBS 5 KPIX-TV poll released Thursday, which also shows gubernatorial candidates Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman in a dead heat.

Hey, Ma’am, how do you like them numbers?  Strikingly, Fiorina has increased “her lead in the Central Valley, from seven points one month ago to 21 points in this latest poll.”  Given how the federal government and the state’s political establishment have neglected this once-booming agricultural in order to purse their supposedly “green” policies, expect turnout here to soar.

(Can someone tell me why it is that policies dubbed “green” have led to the “de-greening” of the Central Valley?  Call it the Brown* effect.)

(Via Instapundit.)

*Yes, Ma’am, references to career Democratic politicians are intentional.

Dems searching for way to blame Bush without looking like whiners

Jonathan Rauch, perhaps the most articulate (and civil) advocate of state recognition of same-sex marriage, calls Judge Walker’s recent opinion a “radical one, but not, ironically, as it pertains to homosexuality or to marriage. No, Walker’s radicalism lies elsewhere: In his use of the Constitution to batter the principles of its two greatest exponents – Madison and Abraham Lincoln“:

Now, I agree with Walker that gay marriage is unlikely to cause any significant social harm and will do much good. But the judge insists that the testimony of a handful of expert witnesses in his courtroom rules out the possibility of harm so definitively as to make any attempt at caution or gradualism irrational. The evidence, he holds, is “beyond debate.” In an unpredictable world, that kind of sweeping certainty would leave any Burkean gulping.

Now, to be sure, I quibble with Jonathan’s points about how carefully Walker marshaled his evidence.  I think the judge did do a good job laying out the strongest arguments for state recognition of gay marriage, but in adopting a condescending, almost sneering tone toward the Proponents of Prop 8, he undercut his strong case for the social change by reducing defenders of the traditional defition of marriage to sniveling bigots.

Jonathan gets at the judge’s arrogance when he contends his conclusion is “beyond debate.”  So much so that he brushes aside the compromise that California voters have effected, rejecting state recognition of gay marriage, yet not opposing the state’s decade-old domestic partnership program:

But his decision treats civil unions as if they were trivial or worthless. By refusing to give them any weight and declaring them not just inadequate as a matter of policy but prohibited as a matter of law, Walker uses the Constitution to put compromise out of bounds.

It’s not so much that Walker used the Constitution, but instead contended that in the various emanations from the penumbrae of the Constitution there lurked a “fundamental right” to define marriage differently than it had been treated at the time the Framers drafted the Constitution (and several subsequent Congresses amended it (with three-fourths of the states ratifying)).

(H/t Peter Wehner at Commentary Contentions.)

Well, if the angry left and the zany right are attacking you all at once, you must be doing something right.

As I learned from our incoming traffic and from conservative bloggers, some gay lefties got their panties all in a bundle all about Ann Coulter’s coming appearance at Homocon 2010.  Well, turns out at least one of their counterparts on the right is up in arms.

According to GOProud, “Peter LaBarbera of Americans for the Truth about Homosexuality issued a press release urging Ann Coulter to reconsider headlining GOProud’s Homocon 2010 in New York City.”

Christopher Barron, Chairman of GOProud’s Board responded by encouraging “LaBarbera to head out to his local bookstore, buy an Ann Coulter book and actually read it.  For a guy who claims to be a ‘fan,” he seems completely clueless about what Ann has actually written and said about gay people and gay conservatives.”

This LaBarbera fellow has probably attended more gay confabs in a single year than I’ve attended in my life.  He does seem peculiarly obsessed with gay sex.  Look, if it really bothers him where Ann Coulter speaks, maybe he should just stop reading her columns.  And if it bothers him what gay people do and say, why does he spend so much time participating in gay gatherings and writing about us?

. . . that would be news.

And editorialists at all the major dailies as well as reporters on all three broadcast networks would go into high dudgeon about Republican intolerance.  CNN would run special reports, highlighting Christians who regularly voted Democatic and lamenting how their feelings had been hurt by the Republican Leader’s statement.

As you may know by know, Sen. Maj. Ldr. Harry Reid (D-Mt. Crumpit) was caught saying something similar, “telling an audience of mostly Hispanic voters: ‘I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?’”

As Michelle puts it, this “attack on Hispanic conservatives for straying off the liberal reservation” shows the “Left’s contempt for minority conservatives”.

Just don’t expect CNN to do any special reports exploring this contempt.  I mean, a search for “Sharron Angle extreme” on Google news got more than twice as many hits as “Reid Republican ‘hispanic heritage’”.

Guess the MSM would rather whack Republicans for their whacky statements.

In losing her bid for the Republican nomination for Gary Hartpence’s U.S. Senate Senate, Jane Norton ran nearly 14,000 votes ahead of Michael Bennet who won the Democratic contest.  In fact, about 70,000 more people voted in the GOP primary than did in that of the president’s party — in a state he carried by a margin slightly higher than his margin nationwide.  And this in a contest where the two leading Democrats, current President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, had endorsed the competing candidates.

One of our readers noted something interesting about the winner of the Republican primary, a man who ran 26,000 votes ahead of the candidate endorsed by Obama and 54,000 votes ahead of the candidate backed by Bill Clinton (not to mention 12,000 ahead of the candidate backed by John McCain):

I read online that Ken Buck was endorsed by the Tea Party, so I went to his campaign website. I do find myself curious about Republican (& Democrat) candidates and how they exactly they position themselves when it comes to gay marriage/ civil unions & other LGBT related issues.

On his website, he does describe himself as strongly pro-life, but he makes no mention at all about gay marriage.

I also did a quick search and found out, when he was District attorney in 2009, he prosecuted the murder case of Angie Zapata (a trangender woman murdered in 2008 in Colorado) as a “hate crime” under the Matthew Shepard hate crimes act, and he won the case.

Emphasis added.  No mention at all about gay marriage?  What?  Huh?  I thought all these anti-establishment Tea Party candidate were finding common cause with social conservatives eager to demonize gay people.

That’s right, Buck also successfully prosecuted of a man who murdered a transgender woman and wants to ensure that the cretin who committed the crime stays locked up for life:

Weld District Attorney Ken Buck said that adding up to 60 years to Andrade’s life sentence was meant to ensure Andrade never got out of jail in a political climate where the death penalty could soon be over turned, bringing life in prison next on the chopping block.

Through the comments to the article, we learn of one means to prevent such murders: (more…)

With the notable exception of such folk like Jonathan Rauch and David Blankenhorn, most advocates and opponents of gay marriage would rather level accusations against their opponents on this issue than actually engage their arguments (see, e.g., Judge Walker’s opinion in Perry v. Schwarzenegger)

The advocates tell us that the opponents are meanies who just plain hate gay people while the opponents (like some bozos running for Senate in Arizona), in the highest of dudgeon, warn that state recognition of gay marriage will lead to parade of horribles, including interspecies marriage. And while the opponents of same-sex marriage warn that state recognition of same-sex marriage will damage the institution, they do little to undo long-enacted laws that has already harmed marriage far more than gay marriage ever could.

Last month, I wrote about the last state to hold out on passing one of those laws:

New York [is] set to become the “last state” to “adopt no-fault divorce”.  Now, I’m sure some social conservatives are opposing such legislation.  Those who don’t while continuing to oppose state recognition of same-sex marriage, are just plain not sincere about their support for the institution and the ideals which undergird it.

Well, ya’ gotta give credit where it’s due.  One such social conservative, Mike McManus, President of Marriage Savers, penned a column “urging Gov. Paterson to veto” the bill.”  Kudos to Mr. McManus.

Now, let’s hope Evan Wolfson, Executive Director of “Freedom to Marry”, and other leading advocates of gay marriage show they’re serious about the institution they wish to open to gay people by joining McManus in pushing Governor Paterson to veto this anti-marriage legislation.