Back in February and March when I was re-reading and reading* Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quintet, I recalled the author’s bittersweet Two-Part Invention.  The subtitle helps show my interest in the book:  ”The Story of a Marriage.”

At the time, I thought it was the best book on marriage I had ever read.  Later, when I re-read the Odyssey, I realized Homer’s epic still holds that title.  (And perhaps always will.)

Given that I underline in my books and often write notes in the margins and fly-leaves, I thought that by reviewing this book, I might quickly locate a few insights, a few conclusions she has made about that ancient and honorable institution to help me craft a post on gay marriage similar to that Megan McArdle, as Jane Galt, wrote eight years ago, A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other.

But, L’Engle’s book was about marriage primarily in the sense that she reflects on her life, her relationship with her husband Hugh, farmed in part around his death from cancer in 1986 .  To write movingly about marriage, she deals not in abstractions, but in anecdotes, sharing certain experiences with us as she recalls her feelings and her reflects on her and her beloved’s interactions.   And as I reviewed my notes, I wondered if what has been bothering me so much about the debate on gay marriage is that most people do the opposite of what L’Engle did in this book, that is, they talk mostly in abstractions.

Marriage is about love, say the advocates.  Gay marriage will destroy the institution, say the opponents.  The former hardly discuss how love can sustain a life-long partnership.  The opponents don’t tell us how exactly same-sex unions will undermine the institution.

And their tired cliches sound increasingly empty each time another individual repeats them anew.   What L’Engle teaches us is that to really get at the meaning of marriage, you need do more than recite rehearsed bromides, you need to tell stories.

No wonder that when Homer reunites Odysseus and Penelope after twenty years of separation, he has Athene delay the dawn so that the married couple can both delight in the pleasure of love-making and share each other’s stories. (more…)

Should the Senate immigration bill (or something similar) pass the House and be signed into law by President Obama, Marco Rubio’s political career will likely end with the 2016 elections. Conservatives in the party will be upset and will likely put up a candidate to oppose him the 2016 GOP primary (for the charismatic incumbent’s U.S. Senate seat).

Should Congress fail to pass comprehensive immigration reform, by the time the 2016 elections roll around, most people will have forgotten the past few months of negotiations and debate (on this issue) and will remember Senator Rubio for his conservative record and his Reaganesque manner of speaking.

My sense (and this is just a sense) is that Rubio is banking on the House to hold the line and not pass an immigration bill as sweeping as that he championed in the Senate.  (Watch him in the coming weeks; if he puts pressure on the House to move, then it will show that there is little substance to this sense.)

He championed this issue not so much because he wanted to see the Schumer bill pass, but to break ranks, on a major issue, with the conservatives who have embraced him  He wanted to present an image of a politician willing to work in a bipartisan manner, one who does not march in lockstep with his party.

And the man whom the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media recently (ridiculously) derided for drinking water has now earned respect in their circles.  Oh, they’ll pull out the knives again as soon as the Floridian points out flaws in Obamcare or challegnes the administration on its foreign policy (or lack thereof).

But, for now these purveyors of public opinion see him as a principled reformer willing to buck his party.

And Marco, bear in mind, what happened to the media’s favorite Republican when he secured his party’s presidential nomination back in 2008. (more…)

I find it a somewhat delicious irony that on the day the Supreme Court hands down its gay marriage decisions, a day I had planned on blogging about the debate on gay marriage.  But, I had been planning that before knowing that on the actual day, I would be more focused on writing the first chapter of the second part of my epic.

I have long thought the debate on this important issue, this fundamental social institution, has long been particularly lame.  And from reading my Facebook feed, see that it has become ever more so, with all too many (but fortunately not all) treating the decisions not so much as constitutional interpretation and social policy, but as personal validation — as if they needed some government body to decide the “right” way so they can feel recognized.  But, that feeling of approval will fade.

That said, I have seen two statements on Facebook which do get at the meeting of the decision, from people on opposite sides of the political aisle.  And I’m sure that in due course, I will discover some thoughtful blog posts and editorials.  But, for now, while I have much to say about marriage, my mind is on my book.  At the end of May, I finished the first draft of the first part of the book (over 150,000 words) and spent the better part of this month revising it, having intended today to print out the whole thing and take it to a printer (so I can share it with friends).  (As I begin serious work on the second part.)

So, let me offer the meaningful Facebook post for your consideration.  My friend Harmeet Dhillon (my predecessor as president of the U-VA Federalist Society) offered this on the standing issue which served to overturn Prop 8:

As a political law practitioner, the broader implication of today’s Prop 8 ruling is 1) a narrow interpretation of standing and 2) apparently there is no recourse by the citizens if their elected constitutional officers (here, the Attorney General) simply refuses to enforce a law passed by the majority of voters. The former is likely an artifice of the Court trying to dodge a merits decision on a very controversial issue, but the latter severely undercuts the power of the citizen-sponsored proposition in California, regardless of subject matter or what political persuasion is affected. A sobering reminder that your vote on propositions sort of matters sometimes, while your vote on who is the Attorney General matters a whole lot. And not enough of you vote!

Our left-of-center reader Rob Tisinai gets that state recognition of marriage is about more than just “rights”: (more…)

Interesting:

The public won’t officially see or hear President Obama’s climate change speech before he delivers it this afternoon at Georgetown University, but liberal supporters already have it — and are even commenting on it hours in advance.

Did W ever release a speech to conservative supporters before delivering it?  Just askin’.

Wouldn’t have thought a post-partisan kind of guy would do a thing like this.

As Gabriel Malor notes at Ace:

The President, still in search of a topic change, will today give a speech about global warming. He’s going to sidestep Congress and crack down on power plants via the EPA.

Seems like the guy is trying to rally his liberal base.  Wonder why that is.

And this on AOL’s (AKA Huffington Post) homepage:

Take a gander at this screen capture.  Interesting juxtaposition between ad and article, no?

Question for the day: does his perpetual campaigning help compromise the Democrat’ “Reputation for Integrity”?

And please tell me how did Mr. Obama acquired such a reputation? Through his actions? (What specific actions helped him earn it?)

. . . it would not only be news, but proof of her unfitness to hold elective office or make public comment on issues of consequence.

But, Ms. Landrieu is a Democrat, so it’s just a slip of the tongue.

Senator Mary Landrieu: South Dakota Borders on Canada, You Know

Sound familiar?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to two cities where unrest has occurred and again condemned his detractors as “a handful of looters” and vandals.

In the southern city of Adana, where pro- and anti-government protesters clashed Saturday night, Erdogan greeted supporters from the top of a bus before lashing out at his opponents in the highly polarized country

If he wanted to defuse the situation, he might do well to acknowledge the protestor’s grievances rather than insult them.

Another nation’s leader said that Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, “is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed “’friendships and the bonds of trust.’”

Over at Ace, CDR M asks the important questions about the Obama administration’s surveillance program:

If the War on Terror is over and the administration views terrorism through a pre 9/11 prism, why is the administration assembling and wielding the most powerful and intrusive systems of surveillance ever conceived?

UPDATE (early Monday morning 06/10/13):  Looks like my random thoughts were really quite random.  It appears the White House didn’t leak the information.

Please note the inclusion of this post in the Random Thoughts category.

Yesterday afternoon, taking a break from editing the now-completed first half of my novel, I learned about the reports of the federal government gathering data from various phone services, notably Verizon, and thought it yet another of the administration’s many scandals, but later caught Andrew C. McCarthy’s piece on National Review’s  Corner saying this was being blown out of proportion.

Later, caught a few minutes of “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” where Karl Rove was giving the president the “benefit of the doubt” on this issue. Just before bed, via Instapundit, learned that University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo who “served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department of President George W. Bush” offered a view similar to McCarthy’s claiming that this “data collecting isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.”

Do wonder if someone in the White House deliberately leaked the information to the Washington Post (which broke the story) knowing it would be blown out of proportion and so creating a large audience for administration flacks when they set the record straight.  And when people learn that this story, sucking (at present) the air out of other administration scandals, has been blown out of proportion (if indeed it has), they might be more likely to discount those other scandals.

Just a thought.  And now concluding where I began, you know why I include this in the “Random Thoughts” category.

UPDATE:  Glenn reports that Ann Althouse offers similar thoughts to those expressed above:

ANN ALTHOUSE ON WHY THE DATA-MINING SCANDAL LEAKED: “I suspect it was someone who wanted to distract us from the IRS scandal (and other scandals) so that the scandal of the moment would be one that’s about Bush.” (more…)

In today’s Morning Jolt today (available by subscription), Jim Geraghty reflects on “the latest offering from the Family Channel”, a drama called “The Fosters” featuring an interracial lesbian couple raising a “brood of adopted, biological and foster children.”

“After watching the pilot, where the parents come across so saintly,” Geraghty suspects . . .

. . . that the writers will be terrified about portraying them with any flaws, either because they’ll be afraid they’re portraying gay parents negatively, or because they fear their audience will be even momentarily repelled by characters that the entire show’s purpose is to get you to love and accept.

In other words, if Hollywood is afraid to portray a gay character as human, with strengths and failings, moments of character and moments of weakness, and so on . . . are they really being all that groundbreaking or brave or honest in their creation?

Reading that concluding question, I recalled an essay that both Bruce and some eaders shared with me, Bret Easton Ellis’s overlong, but insightful rant, “In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves,” where the novelist also wondered about Hollywood’s depiction of gays:

The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.

. . . .

Where’s the gay dude who makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It?  . . . . But being “real” and “human” (i.e. flawed) is not necessarily what The Gay Gatekeepers want straight culture to see.

Interesting how the views of a conservative pundit and a non-conservative gay iconoclast parallel each other. (more…)

Glenn Reynolds reports:

Last night on Powerline, caught this video of Angelenos protesting against the possibility of the Koch brothers’ purchasing the Los Angeles Times:

And it got me wondering (and not for the first time) about the origins of the anti-Koch hysteria. Wonder if a Mr. D. Axelrod might have been behind this. I mean the guy did think it significant that a former Massachusetts governor once transported the family dog on the roof of his car.

RELATED: Protesters explain: Kochs must not buy LA Times because … tolerance

On Tuesday, Jeff posted a video with clips of the current President of the United States Barack Obama using almost identical language to that of Richard Nixon to describe how each learned about scandals taking place under his watch, with both politicians claiming they had learned about them from news reports.

Today, while tidying my desk, I came across a note I had scribbled over four months ago:

Dem[ocrat]s want to define GOP by Nixon now/fear party being defined by Reagan — hence the silly line that Gipper couldn’t win in today’s GOP.

They’ve even got Bob Dole repeating that Democratic talking point (without providing any evidence to back it up).

If the Democrats continue to stonewall on the various scandals percolating around this administration, the media will have a tougher and tougher time making the age-old Nixon comparisons stick to the GOP.

NB:  I had scribbled the note on January 9, 2013, the one hundredth anniversary of Nixon’s birth.

UPDATE: Meant to include this screen capture from the Obama-friendly AOL: (more…)

Happy Memorial Day, er, weekend! And a big Thank You to GP commenter heliotrope for the following, which he posted as part of a longer comment, some ten days ago. I must warn that it’s not exactly cheery; but neither is the state of America these days.

In an environment of enabling corruption, these words are tested:

“Experience has shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
― Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

“A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”
― Edmund Burke

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.”
― Aristophanes, Plutus

“Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

Obama, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder have made “not knowing” an art form. They learn of bad things by an occasional glance at the TV where the news is reporting it. That is the modus operandi of corruption. Unlike Ghandi, their minds are open to walking through by all manner of dirty feet, so long as there is no record kept or chain of evidence linking to them.

Those who have read my posts and considered my basic political philosophy can probably figure out my views on whether or not the Boy Scouts should admit openly gay youths — and scoutmasters.

As a private organization, they have the right to determine the qualifications for membership and leadership.  The state should stay out of it.  That said, I believe they should allow gay people to participate.

Now, to be sure, given the scandals in the Catholic Church (where most of the victims have been teenage boys), I can understand why they might be wary of having gay (male) scoutmasters.  But, there are ways to screen their leaders to make sure they don’t bring on men who would abuse boys. Most (but alas not all) gay men would never even consider taking advantage of teenagers, particularly those in their charge.

That said, I just don’t get why they would bar lesbians from being scoutmasters.  Lesbians tend not to be interested in boys and would not definitely molest them.  Thus, I was struck earlier today when HotAir linked this New York Times story, featuring a picture of a mother ousted as a “scout leader because she is a lesbian.”

The leadership of the Boy Scouts should make the decision on allowing openly gay members and scoutmasters.  And I would like to see them change their policy.

NB:   (more…)

“WHILE BLOOMBERG’S BEEN FOCUSING ON GUNS AND BIG GULPS“, Glenn Reynolds quips today on Instapundit, “New York City seeing spike in anti-gay crime, officials say.”

And Mr. Bloomberg has grandstanded repeatedly on limiting the ability of all citizens, including gay men and lesbians, to defend themselves against attack.

Perhaps if New York made it easier for law-abiding citizens to get concealed carry permits, bashers would be warier of confronting gay people knowing they could be armed.

NICK ADDS: As I’ve often said, the best way to fight “hate crimes” is for people to arm themselves. And as my buddies over at Reason.com have noted, for some in Seattle, “[i]t’s clearly inconceivable that anybody could actually hold in his or her mind, simultaneously, a regard for the right of people to love who they want and respect for the right of self-defense”

Jeff adds: Nick, good one! Following your link, I surfed on through Oleg Volk’s website to www.a-human-right.com, which has some of the best pro-gun posters I’ve seen, starting here.

Here’s a sample of their wares, with more below the fold:

(more…)

Last night, I had a pleasant dinner, spontaneously arranged, with one of my closest friends in LA.  He and I had met about six years via an online dating service.  We didn’t feel much romantic chemistry, but did enjoy each other’s company and became friends.

as we occasionally do, we shared our stories about online dating, he kvetching about a man who didn’t call when he promised, but who subsequently kept pestering him with texts, I sharing stories about a number of decent dates I had with guys whose profiles presented a pretty accurate portrait of their personality, profession and passions.

And then we fell to talking about guys who misrepresented themselves on line, with both of us recalling dates with men who just didn’t look like their pictures.  I related a tale about a guy I met depicted as thin in his online pictures, but who in person, suffered from a severe shall we say, a severe absence of thin.  (After our coffee date, I went back home and checked his profile and ascertained that that was clearly the guy depicted online, but the pictures were at least ten years old.)

And we wondered last night, my friend and I, we wondered what these men thought when they posted these pictures, that their scintillating personalities would make up for the difference in appearance?  Didn’t it occur to them that men who responded to the ad would be attracted to that picture and expect to meet someone who looked like the guy in the picture? Or did they believe that the picture merely served to draw the potential date to the profile and that the qualities delineated therein constituted the real nature of said date’s interest?

Or did they believe their own propaganda, that they actually looked today like they did ten years ago, despite the fact that ten years ago, they exercised regularly whereas today they’re making plans to exercise next week? (more…)

“Liberal activists,” Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post, “unable to win the argument against Rush Limbaugh, try to silence him instead.” (H/t HotAir headlines.)

Wonder if that is what the IRS was trying to do with the Tea Party.

What if instead of going around the country giving speeches on gun control, President Obama met privately with Senators and Members of Congress to solicit their views on reasonable firearms regulations — and to lobby them personally on expanding federal background checks.

Or would that strategy have defeated his real purpose in pushing the issue?

Your thoughts?