Perhaps the greatest reason for my ambivalence on gay marriage is that as my psychological and mythological studies have touched on anthropology, culture history and ritual, I have observed that all cultures understand the institution as a pairing of the opposites, uniting two individuals of different sexes.  Across cultures, the bride and groom have always played different roles in the ceremony.  (Arnold van Gennep offers a good introduction to this in the chapter, “Betrothal and Marriage” in his classic, The Rites of Passage.)

That said, I believe that if the state recognizes traditional marriages, it should also recognize same-sex unions, but am just not beholden to the term “marriage” to define them.

Given the vast array of evidence from a multiplicity of disciplines* on sex difference, I remain troubled by using the term “marriage equality” to define the movement for state recognition of same-sex marriage.  It suggests that sex differences are meaningless or, to borrow a term of a discredited theory, are mere “social constructs.”

In his thoughtful consideration of marriage and Judge Walker’s opinion in today’s New York Times, Ross Douthat contends that gay and straight unions are not the same:

But if we just accept this shift [i.e., changing views of marriage), we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.

Emphasis added.

Simply put, two men or two women relate to each other in a different manner than do one man and one woman.  It’s folly to suggest that sexual difference is meaningless, particularly given the vast amount of scientific research on the topic these past forty years.

Like Douthat, we would be wise to recognize that same-sex unions differ from different-sex ones.  And without an “Equal Rights Amendment” in the constitution, states are free to consider that difference in determining how to recognize those unions.  Perhaps, like the legislators of Vermont and New Hampshire, they will choose to call those unions “marriage” which is and should be their prerogative. (more…)

One of the great things about our readers is that they often alert me to pieces I might otherwise have missed.  And in the past twenty-four hours, two readers, Leah and Eric, have respectively linked blog post and a New York Times Op-Ed which, in the wake of Judge Walker’s ruling, make fine contributions to the debate on gay marriage.

First, the blog post, then in a subsequent post I’ll address the editorial. In Schwarzenegger: I Lost the Gay Marriage Case. Now Go Implement the Winners’ Position as Quickly as Possible, Patterico faults Walker for trampling “all over the issue with elephant feet, willy-nilly issuing pronunciamientos regarding the proper role of tradition in deciding the legality of gay marriage, and couching these edicts as ‘factual findings’:

This sort of inquiry is far more suited to decision through the collective wisdom of millions of voters, debating a topic in public — rather than in a courtroom, litigated by two sets of parties who (as Schwarzenegger’s pronouncement highlights) may actually agree with each other. . . .

Judge Walker’s ruling was simply the negation of our vote, on a matter that should properly be decided by the People and not by an unelected judge (and no, it does not help that this particular unelected judge could benefit directly from his own ruling). . . .

A courtroom is not the place to resolve the question of whether society ought to accept gay marriage. A courtroom is not the place to decide whether thousands of years of tradition are to be given any weight in assessing whether a law abrogating that tradition is rational. I keep hearing that the proponents of Proposition 8 simply didn’t make their case in court. They should not have had to.

Emphasis added.

Like me, Patterico voted “No” on Prop 8.  And he’s not the only straight “No” voter I’ve heard from who’s unhappy with the decision.  Whether we like it or not, the issue of gay marriage is a controversial social issue.  State recognition of gay marriage represents a significant social change; it could very well be a good social change if those gay people who elect marriage as a means to define their relationships appreciate the meaning of the institution. (more…)

According to Jim Geraghty, Republican challenger Kristi Noem leads incumbent Democrat Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin by 9 points in the contest for South Dakota’s at-large House seat .

With with the Hil reporting that former funny man Al Franken called the Democrat “a great leader, and I really believe in her,” (as reported by the Rapid City Journal), looks like Herseth-Sandlin is going to have a tough time moving those numbers.  In 2008, in a Democratic year in a Democratic state, spending over $20 million dollars, Franken barely won a race for the U.S. Senate, running 12 points behind Obama.  The number of dead people voting exceeded Franken’s margin of victory.

Don’t think Franken’s support will help in a that where Obama capatured only 45% of the vote and where his popularity has fallen precipitously in the past two years.

Shortly after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down its Goodridge ruling mandating that the Bay State recognize same-sex marriages, I recall reading that just as more Americans came to support interracial marriage after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down it’s Loving decision in 1967, more would soon come to support same-sex marriage.

The polls don’t bear that assumption out, but they do, as I noticed last week show a dramatic uptick in support for same-sex civil unions.  About the time Goodridge was handed down, a slight plurality of Americans opposed same-sex civil unions.  Today, an overwhelming majority do — and that majority has been increasing (at least according to Pewe) at least since the Masachusetts decision.

Could it be that as the issue of same-sex marriage reached the national consciousness with the Massachusetts decision, people started thinking about the issue of same-sex relationships?  And once they started thinking about it, a number of people, once skeptical that same-sex relationships merited recognition, began to change their mind.  But, still they just didn’t wanted to call them marriages — which they wanted to reserve for different-sex couples.

This would explain the growing support for civil unions while support for same-sex marriage has effectively plateaued.

That decision thus changed the views of roughly one in eight Americans (a pretty substantial swing on a social issue in such a short time) on same-sex relationships.  Not what some activists who favor the judicial approach anticipated, but real progress nonetheless.

That’s my working hypothesis for now.  Much more on this in the coming week (hopefully).

* (more…)

One of the truly great screen presences of the post-war era has passed.  Patricia Neal died of lung cancer “lung cancer at 11 a.m. Sunday at her Martha’s Vineyard home, surrounded by her family“.  For someone who held her own against Gary Cooper in her second screen performance, which many of our reader’s will be delighted to know was the 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, her list of film roles was remarkably small, but when she had a good script and worked with a good director, she soared.

In her third picture, she acted opposite the Gipper in the enjoyable, but, well, not readily memorable, .  And she was brilliant in Hud, proving that not only could she hold the screen with a leading man of one generation (i.e., Cooper), but also with one of the next, Paul Newman in Hud. She both rivaled Newman for control of the screen and took home an Oscar for her performance — though perhaps not the night of the ceremony as she wasn’t present to receive her award.  She outshone Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan‘s A Face in the Crowd, perhaps her strongest performance, and all but carried The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Those movies will always define for me, though she was magnificent in Robert Altman‘s in 1999.

Glenn Reynolds linked a piece from the Knoxville News offering more details about this great woman’s difficult life.  This great lady was born in the Marble City.

She may leave us with a small body of work, but it included many magnificent performances.

UPDATE:  Just learned that her film debut was opposite Ronald Reagan — in John Loves Mary.

I always found her somewhat gravelly, yet sweet voice, her most distinguishing characteristic — it really got your attention.

FROM the Fountainhead:

It is my second appearance!  This one is chock full of fireworks, trust me!  I was beat up on good… and gave back just as hard!!

The Political Panel is in the last third of the program. (click on the top one of the list)

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Same Sex Sunday begins with an interview of Congressmen Jim McDermott (D-WA). We discuss the holdup of the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA) in the House, Citizens United, how to end the war in Afghanistan and much more.

Phil Reese and I also interview David Fleischer about his new study that, “changed everything we know about Proposition 8.”

The American Federation for Equal Rights is funding Perry vs Schwarzenegger for the Plaintiffs. Spokesperson Yusef Robb shares an exclusive update about the case after last week’s historic federal court ruling overturning Proposition 8.

And finally, the Same Sex Sunday round table returns when Courage Campaign‘s Rick Jacobs, journalist and LGBT POV blogger Karen Ocamb, California grassroots activist Sara Beth Brooks, Metro Weekly Senior Political Writer Chris Geidner, and GayPatriot.net blogger Bruce Carroll, debate and analyze the historic week.

You can subscribe to SameSexSunday on iTunes or join our Facebook page.

Enjoy the show!

It is always interesting when writers I regularly read and admire disagree with others I read and admire.  And today a blogger I regularly read and admire, Glenn Reynolds, links two such writers taking issue with the latest column from the woman I have dubbed the Athena of punditry.  It’s almost as if we’re seeing a battle on Olympus, a war of wits.

Both William Jacobson and Michael Ledeen are none too happy with Peggy Noonan’s America Is At Risk Of Boiling Over.

Jacobson thinks Peggy is wrong to dub our political leaders detached “from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past.”  Instead, he believes that the élite strategy “in which success is punished is part of the plan. It’s a feature not a bug.”

In evaluating Noonan’s piece, Ledeen relates a bit of his own intellectual journey, objecting to her contention that the gap “between the country’s thought leaders, as they’re called—the political and media class, the universities—and those living what for lack of a better word we’ll call normal lives on the ground in America” begin in the 1980s:

She’s got the substance right, but not the dates. The gulf between the intellectuals and politicians on the one hand, and “normal Americans” on the other, probably goes back to the first settlements in the New World. It most certainly did not originate in the 1980s, and to prove that all you have to do is pick up a book written back in the early 1960s by a distinguished Columbia University historian, Richard Hofstadter, called “Anti-intellectualism in American life.”  When I first read that book (an elegant lament about Americans’ traditional lack of esteem for intellectuals), I agreed with Hofstadter that this was a very bad thing. It was only later in life that I realized what a good thing it was, and how fortunate we were to have withheld high status from professors and politicians.

To be fair to Peggy, she wrote that she only “started noticing” the gap in the 1980s. (more…)

In posting the video below, Ace asks, “Who decides in America? The people, as the books claim? Or the elite, as common practice seems to have it?”

Caddell gets at the hubris of the Obama Democrats, an arrogance manifest since the first days of the Administration when the president answered Republican objections about the size of the “stimulus,” with a self-righteous, “I won,” as if his victory were entirely personal, overriding the pledges he made in the campaign in order to win the election.

The Democratic pollster points out some pretty stunning poll numbers which show just out of touch the Administration is with the American people. Only 39% of Americans think that Obama’s policies “saved the country from the brink.” Just saying “I won” is not enough to sell your policies to the American people.

“Obama” Victor Davis Hanson writes, “thought his popularity and charm could win the public over to his unpopular agenda; now he worries that his own growing unpopularity and lack of charm may make any agenda unpalatable.” And the mainstream media seem complicit in the Administration attempts to downplay or ignore evidence that the American people don’t like its policies. As Fred Thompson put it:

The ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts all mentioned President Obama’s birthday, but none mentioned Missouri’s vote against Obamacare.

Which is sorta like complimenting a guy’s shoes while neglecting to mention that he forgot to wear pants.

And yet, despite the media’s best efforts, the American people, in increasing numbers, recognize how Obama’s initiatives are at odds with their interests. In this clip (@2:40), Caddell points out that 68% of Americans believe the government is operating without the “consent of the governed.” As a result, he believes the situation in America is “pre-revolutionary.” Sounds like a notion I heard somewhat recently. Now, where was that? Ah, yes, right here!

UPDATE:  In a similar vein, Peter Wehner offers:

It turns out these liberals really are elitist, and they really do look down their noses at a citizenry they consider benighted, childish, and bigoted. And they honestly believe that in times of difficulty, ordinary Americans cling to their Bibles, their guns, their antipathy toward immigrants and those who aren’t like them — and Glenn Beck.

This analysis is not only wrong; it’s politically stupid. The public doesn’t much like being viewed in such condescending and paternalistic terms. But better they know about it than not.

Via Ed Driscoll via Instapundit.

A reader alerted me to a Washington Post story about a response Sharron Angle gave to a questionnaire from a social conservative organization. The Nevada Republican U.S. Senate nominee answered “Yes” to this question:

In reference to question 35A, Intel Corporation supports “equal rights for gays” and offers benefits to “partners” of homosexual employees. Would you refuse funds from this corporate PAC?

First, I’m just wondering if the MSM reporters are rooting around in the candidate questionnaires of Democratic candidates looking for extreme answers. Second, this is a pretty stunning answer. Now, I doubt the candidate herself filled out the form, probably delegated it to some campaign flunky.  (Note how Democrats use this excuse all the time when Republicans discover potentially damaging answers on their questionnaires.)

That said, she did sign off on it.  But does she mean it?   Given how many corporations offer benefits to same-sex partners of their employees, it’s probably safe to say that several may have already donated to her campaign.  Has her campaign been refusing checks from such corporations?

Her campaign should clarify that the response was just an error made by an overzealous staffer.  If it doesn’t, this response could hurt her with a lot of Americans in the middle who are neither pro-gay nor anti-gay, but who wonder at a candidate who objects overmuch to a private corporation, without influence from government, determining, on its own, the best way to treat its gay employees.

In her campaign, Ms. Angle has done a good job rallying the Tea Party folk who believe the government is doing too much and who trust the private sector to make the right choices.  Her answer to this question suggests she scorns private corporations who make certain decisions in setting corporate policy.

She would help her campaign if she would say as much and change the answer to the question.  If not she risks ceding the election to a politician, increasingly unpopular in his own state and is out of touch with his constituents on nearly every issue.

Over at Commentary Contentions, Peter Wehner references House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “pathetic and pitiful” response “to the dismal new unemployment numbers”.   Always on the attack, Ms. Nancy would rather blame Republicans than accept the responsibility for her own party’s failures:

Today’s report shows our teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses are still feeling the worst of the Bush recession — while Republican leaders demean them as ‘special interests’ and try to block legislation that will grow our economy,

Bush recession?  Huh?  That good man has been out of office for 18 months, with Ms. Pelosi’s party has having since held all the levers of power in our nation’s capitol.

So, if she’s going to blame the current recession on the immediate past Administration, it’s only fair to also blame the immediate past Congress, given that the legislature has the power to enact laws to help deal with our economic woes — and has the power of the purse.  So, let’s see, the 111th is the current Congress, so the previous Congress must have been the 110th.  Let’s see who was Speaker then.

Googling 110th Congress.  Why a Ms. Nancy Pelosi was speaker of that Congress!  Omigosh, the very same Nancy who’s blaming all our nation’s problems on that evil Republican Bush.  That Congress first met on January 3, 2007, nearly a full year before the recession began (in December 2007).

So, there you have it, by Ms. Nancy’s logic, she gets her name on the current recession.  If W is responsible for the current recession, then she is too.  My friends, we’re in the 33rd month of the Bush-Pelosi recession.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Kurt offers:

Or the Bush-Pelosi-Reid recession as we might say here in Nevada. I think we ought to start comparing the so-called Bush deficits (which run from fiscal 2001 through fiscal 2007) with the Reid and Pelosi deficits (which begin in fiscal 2008). The enormity of the Reid and Pelosi deficits dwarfs the previous years.

He’s got a point.  From now on, when Democrats call it the Bush recession, we’ll remind them that their party had controlled Congress for nearly a full year when the economy started going south.

Linking some posts in the blogosphere (including Bruce’s) on Ann Coulter’s coming gathering with Homocons, Dan Riehl observes, “If the only happy homosexual is a progressive homosexual, how come they’re the ones bitching all the time? So much for the whole tolerance meme.”

I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.  And probably for a longer time than Dan has.

Why do they get their panties all in a bundle when they merely learn of the existence of gay people who offer opinions at odds with the orthodoxy?  Why do all too many (but fortunately not all!) self-anointed “progressive” gays respond to the right-wing counterparts not with inquiry and arguments but instead with insults and animosity?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Sure sounds like it: “One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans.”

Alas, but no, that line has little to do with the content of the post.  He lambasts Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin for his detailed plan to cut spending and taxes — and thus deal with two of Americans’ biggest concerns, the ever-growing national debt and the lately-stagnant employment rate.

So, Krugman goes after a man with a plan while having being dewy-eyed for a man with a few slogans.  Paul Krugman was one among many in the media establishment who showed himself quite susceptible to the manifest charms and empty rhetoric of a certain Senator from Illinois. And now he has the cheek to call a serious and thoughtful Republican Congressman a charlatan?

Hey, Paul (Krugman), it wasn’t conservatives who bought a bill of goods from a man who promised to heal the nation and fix the economy and ended up taking rhetorical stances which divided us even further while enacting economic policies which kept us in the economic doldrums.

Bruce just sent me a link to this video of two fetching young Tea Party patriots.

Seems that even at their young age, they’ve experienced the same sorts of prejudice we have. And while they’ve been warmly welcomed at Tea Parties by their freedom-loving conservative peers, they’ve been “socially ostracized” by their equality-loving gay peers.

Gotta love this political ad–if just for the closing lines:

Via: Battle ’10.

In one of the better back-and-forths we have had in a comment thread to our various posts, my Williams classmate Phil Holmes considers Katie Couric’s bias, then makes an interesting point:

. . . if Biden and Palin were both to be interviewed on Fox News, I think you’d see the same difference in treatment (i.e., Fox would gun for Biden much more than they would gun for Palin)

Now, I don’t know how familiar Phil is with FoxNews as it features a variety of anchors, reporters and commentators — who have a great variety of opinions; they are not interchangeable one with the other.  Bill O’Reilly has posed tought questions to Republicans and Democrats alike as have Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Brit Hume.

Sean Hannity, however, is a different story.  During the 2008 campaign, I watched his interview with John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin and saw him toss softball after softball at the accomplished then-Alaska Governor.  He showed her almost exactly the same deference Couric showed to Barack Obama’s running mate, the gaffe-prone then-Delaware Senator.

The difference?  Sean Hannity does not put himself forward as an impartial purveyor of news.  Katie Couric does.

Hannity even wrote a book making clear his agenda: Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda.

Loved how the Fiorina campaign reported Mrs. Boxer’s tour of the state she represents in Washington:

Despite this, Barbara Boxer continues to parade around the state trumpeting the ‘success’ of the stimulus and champion more doomed spending and big-government bailouts for which taxpayers will have to foot the bill. It’s clear that, after more than three decades in politics, Barbara Boxer has lost touch with the real world and how it works. She isn’t interested in what truly drives job growth and economic strength – only what drives the government growth and special interest greed that powers her career and her friends in Washington.

Emphasis added.

I see a small, well-dressed woman walking down an nearly-empty street, followed by a fancy flout with a loud-speakieer blaring that the storefronts really aren’t empty and that those “For Lease” and “Available” signs we see all over Los Angeles, well, just don’t mean a thing.

Hey, Ma’am, I got a question for you:  if the “stimulus” really is creating jobs in California, how come unemployment here is near record highs — and has gone up not down since you voted for the several hundred billion dollar boondoggle?

In a most excellent column today in the Denver Post, David Harsanyi offers a pleasant image of America where government removed itself from the business of marriage:

Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman — or no one at all — and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives.

As with those of us who imagine that blissfual day when the state ends its “war on drugs”, it ain’t gonna happen.

He also addresses Judge Walker’s silly notion that ”‘moral disapproval alone’ was behind this plot to define marriage as a union between a one man and one woman.”

That jurist reaches his conclusion not based on facts, but based on his narrow-minded impression of the opponents of same-sex marriage.*  If the judge were right, the Gallup surveys on those who find homosexuality “morally wrong” would align perfectly with those who oppose gay marriage.  But, in May, Gallup found that 43% of Americans found gay or lesbian relations “morally wrong” while finding that 53% opposed gay marriage. (more…)

Well, one thing you can say for Christina Romer, the president’s soon-to-be former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers: she ain’t Lloyd Bridges:

She picked the right day to quit her job. Despite the Administration’s doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to special interests and state governments, the unemployment rate hasn’t budged holding flat at 9.5%:

A hot summer that’s gripped much of the U.S. has been accompanied by a stone-cold job market. That trend held fast last month as the economy added just 71,000 private sector jobs, after excluding the loss of temporary U.S. Census and other government jobs, the U.S. Labor Department announced Friday. Overall, the economy shed 131,000 jobs in July.

The dark blue line is what she said what the unemployment rate would be if the stimulus were passed.  The shaded red area is this difference between Administration projection and economic reality.

Chart via GatewayPundit.

UPDATE: Tim Cavanaugh on her work before and after Obama:

As an economist, Romer did an excellent job [pdf] of establishing that New Deal stimulus failed to end or seriously mitigate the Great Depression. As an Obama team player (and poignantly, a sunny supporter of the then-senator’s campaign), she made a 180-degree turn toward pro-stimulus hocus pocus.

Via Instapundit.

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, GOProud, the only national organization representing gay conservatives and their allies, announced that conservative author Ann Coulter is headlining their first annual Homocon – a party to celebrate gay conservatives.

“The gay left has done their best to take all the fun out of politics, with their endless list of boycotts and protests. Homocon is going to be our annual effort to counter the ‘no fun police’ on the left,” said Christopher Barron, Chairman of the Board of GOProud. “I can’t think of any conservative more fun to headline our inaugural party then the self-professed ‘right-wing Judy Garland’ – Ann Coulter.”

Ann Coulter is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers —Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America (January 2009); If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans (October, 2007); Godless: The Church of Liberalism (June 2006); How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)(October, 2004); Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (June 2003); Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (June 2002); and High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (August 1998).

Homocon 2010 will take place in New York City on the evening of Saturday September 25th. VIP Sponsorships are available for $2500 and general admission tickets go on sale August 20th. To purchase tickets or for more information: www.goproud.org.

“I can promise you, Homocon 2010 will be a hell of a lot more fun than chaining yourself to the White House fence,” concluded Barron.

More details are coming soon! Please contact Jimmy LaSalvia at jlasalvia@goproud.org for information about sponsorship opportunities.

General reception tickets ($250) go on sale August 20th. Visit www.goproud.org for more information.

©2010 GOProud | 426 C Street NE | Washington DC | 20002 | (202) 543-1003 | www.goproud.org

Something struck me yesterday when I came across the latest Gallup poll on gay marriage.  See if the same thing strikes you:

You might see it if you contrast that poll with the latest Pew poll on support for same-sex civil unions:

You see it now? (more…)