How Sacred Is Marriage?

It took twelve centuries for the Catholic church to make it a sacrament. For much of its history, the church was happy to let the state own the issue: 

Those who do not want to let gay partners have the sacredness of sacramental marriage are relying on a Scholastic fiction of the thirteenth century to play with people’s lives, as the church has done ever since the time of Aquinas. The myth of the sacrament should not let people deprive gays of the right to natural marriage, whether blessed by Yahweh or not. They surely do not need—since no one does—the blessing of Saint Thomas.

Undead Politicians

;

Seth Masket does a Q&A on the entry of vampires into the horserace. A snippet:

[Q:] How do you think immortality would influence a vampire’s political platform or view on issues?

[A:] This would have to have a huge effect, since immortality makes irrelevant so many of the major policy issues we deal with, from health care to Social Security to war. Even if a vampire were sympathetic to mortals' concerns over these issues, it would be hard for him to convince many people that he shares their interests.

Does Car-Sharing Cut Carbon?

Very little:

Read On »

The Bain Card, Ctd

A reader writes:

A note on the recent Obama campaign ad. As I see it, the real problem is not that Bain ultimately shut down GST. Absent those lucky duckies on the wingnut welfare circuit, no one’s guaranteed permanent employment.  The problem is that, in doing so, they reneged on a series of financial promises made to GST’s then-employees and retirees: their pensions and health care benefits.  These pensions and benefits were part of the employees’ compensation - earned over many years on the job.  Romney, in order to maximize Bain’s short-term profit on the deal, broke those promises.  That is a fundamental breach of the social contract between employer and worker.  Moreover, it is simply a loathsome way to do business.   

Read On »

Face Of The Day

A rescued Magellanic Penguin from South America looks into the camera from its enclosure at the new June Keys Penguin Habitat at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, on May 16, 2012, during a press preview one day ahead of the opening of a new exhibit highlighting the environmental threats faced by these animals. Penguins have existed on our planet for more than 50 million years but current environmental issues such as climate change and overfishing threaten their survival. By Frederic J. Brown/AFP/GettyImages.

The Syrian Spark, Ctd

Exum plays down Mead's concerns that the Syrian conflict could ignite a broader regional war:

For civil war to resume in Lebanon, factional leaders would have to calculate that wider clashes would carry benefits that outweigh the costs of a broader conflict, but there is no evidence that even one of Lebanon’s major sectarian leaders believes this. In fact, none of Lebanon’s sectarian leaders have an interest in this kind of fighting growing into something larger. ...

Read On »

"The Gay Marriage Of Food"

Sushi, according to Jonathan Haidt:

For centuries Americans thought it was disgusting to eat raw fish. But once some people started doing it more visibly, and people habituated to it, the disgust factor decreased and sushi became OK. 

Quote For The Day III

"That an imbecile, a sub-human like [Giuseppe Cardinal] Pizzardo should be in charge of the department for universities and seminaries is scandalous and extremely serious. . . . This wretched freak, this sub-mediocrity with no culture, no horizon, no humanity. . . . This Pizzardo, who has red pajamas and underpants. . . who haggles over the purchase of a newspaper . . . What a frightful comedy!" - Father Yves Congar, keeping it real, in his personal diary of the Second Vatican Council.

Meaning As Medicine

New research suggests that "staying interested" in life through old age can mitigate symptoms of Alzheimer's disease: 

[A] strong sense of purpose in life evidently strengthens or provides a higher level of what's known as "neural reserve" in the brain. "Reserve" is the quality that allows many physiological systems in the human body to sustain what the Rush [University] researchers call "extensive organ damage" before showing clinical deficits.

Read On »

Charts Of The Day

Polarization is real, and mostly on the GOP side:

The authors caption:

[W]e should be careful not to equate the two parties’ roles in contemporary political polarization: the data are clear that this is a Republican-led phenomenon where very conservative Republicans have replaced moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats. 

Our Lawyer Surplus

Law school debt is a major problem:

[O]ne out of every two law graduates will not have a legal career, and most of the rest will never make enough money to pay back their educational loans. This means they will either have to rely on other sources of income (spouses, extended family) to service their debts, or they will have to go into the federal government’s new Income-Based Repayment program.

Read On »

Mental Health Break

It's been a while since we've seen a good light-painting video - this one's from Cologne:

Engineering The Perfect Soldier

Is fraught with ethical dilemmas:

Read On »

Romney And The Press

Campaign staff and volunteers trying to physically prevent reporters from approaching the rope line to ask questions of Romney.

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) May 16, 2012

Joe Klein is miffed: 

Mitt Romney is clearly a candidate terrified by his own mouth. What other explanation for his campaign’s extreme efforts to prevent reporters from asking him questions? ... I don’t know how to improve this situation, but I suspect that reporters shouting questions at Romney when he’s trying to shake hands with citizens on a rope-line isn’t helping any. You do have to wonder, though, how much skill and confidence Romney will bring to meetings with foreign and Congressional leaders if he can’t figure out how to talk to the press.

Naturally, Jonah Goldberg wants Romney to "get very angry" at the MSM. 

Hewitt Award Nominee

"Americans find Kim [Jong Il] mythology endlessly funny for two reasons: first, it’s outlandish; second, it’s desperate. In the United States, allegiance to elected leaders isn’t obtained with fairytales, historical embellishment, and mandatory celebration. It’s earned with responsiveness to popular sentiment, sound leadership, and policy results. Gimmick-laden personality cults are for self-appointed paranoiacs who can’t deliver the goods. Which is probably what Americans are thinking about since Seth’s discovery yesterday that Barack Obama has inserted his name into White House presidential biographies starting with Calvin Coolidge’s...[it's] a wholly foreign understanding of what it means to be a good elected official," - Abe Greenwald, Commentary.

Future Gay Republicans

Marc Tracy imagines them. He points out that "27 percent of gays voted for Sen. John McCain" in 2008:

Maybe that number will go down this year given Obama’s announcement, but in terms of a longer trend, it implies that eventually the gay vote—at least the gay male vote—will be very much up-for-grabs. And why shouldn’t it be? 50, 30, or even 20 years from now, both parties will support gay rights, at least on its face, and the issue will be largely uncontroversial. ... At that point, roughly half of the gay population will be men who are disproportionately wealthy; disproportionately childless; and likely less concerned with social issues, their primary one having been resolved. And what do we call wealthy American men who care about economic policies with a limited personal commitment to public education? Usually, we call them Republicans. (I’d expect lesbians to remain a strongly Democratic group, in part because they’re women.) 

I've long thought that gay men are a natural fit for a non-bigoted GOP. We await one. And the wait seems to be getting longer.

(Photo: Potential Republican presidential candidate Fred Karger talks to citizens on January 31, 2011, at the Golden Egg, a diner in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, about his potential presidential candidacy and the planned closure of the nearby Sagamore Bridge, a vital conduit for commerce. By Dan Zak/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

My "Gift" To Romney

Jennifer Rubin claims that my Newsweek cover-story will help Romney. She pens an imaginary Thank You note from Romney to Newsweek:

[R]eally, to characterize the president as the first "gay president" was an unexpected joy for Ann, the boys and me. I’m not about to go stoking the flames of anti-gay fervor in my base. That’s not my style, and as I always say to Ann, a moment not talking about Obama’s economic bellyflop is a moment wasted. But you’ve done it for me! Why, I don’t suppose there is a social conservative activist in the country who wouldn’t toss his cookies (excuse my language) over that label. They tell me they are fired up and ready to go! It’s very important in business and government to delegate, so I am relieved that you and your other journalist friends have taken care of this for me.

I wonder how Rubin would respond to a similar analogy about, say, "the first Jewish president", as Peter Beinart has described Obama? If that had been a Newsweek cover, would she have written a post on how great it is that her candidate - running against a Jew - could now exploit anti-Semitism for his political advantage? I mean: there is no policy dispute here. She is simply delighted that her candidate can get an advantage through homophobia. PM Carpenter throws up his hands:

[F]or Rubin to mobocratically ridicule President Obama's attention (as well as Sullivan's and Brown's) to a piercing social issue that has caused immense and indescribable personal pain to millions of victimized Americans is, well, I guess one can say it is nothing but the unfurling of Rubin's truest colors.

Or to put it more bluntly: If I had said the same thing, in a Jewish context, I'd be a bigot. What does that make Rubin?

The View From Your Window

Newbridge, Ireland, 7.38 am

Quote For The Day II

"When evangelicals turn their anti-gay sentiments into a political campaign, all it does is confirm to my gay friends that they will never be welcome in the church. It makes them bitter, and it makes me mad too. This is why I never refer to myself as an evangelical. Ugh. I’m embarrassed to be part of that group,” - an evangelical college senior, in a blog post by Rachel Held Evans.

Money quote from the post written the day after Amendment One passed in North Carolina:

As I watched my Facebook and Twitter feeds last night, the reaction among my friends fell into an imperfect but highly predictable pattern. Christians over 40 were celebrating. Christians under 40 were mourning. Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that Billy Graham ad: You’re losing us.

Read On »

Pressuring The President

Conor Friedersdorf claims that I'm not doing it very much:

In the aftermath of a huge step like embracing gay equality, gushing is understandable. But the prior months of comments about how lucky we are to have him, the invocations of "12 dimensional chess," constantly comparing him to the Road Runner, the celebrations of his strategic acumen as if it's as laudable as doing what's right, and enthusing about how cool he is?

It's increasingly hard to take at the end of a first term littered with broken promises. And it obscures the fact that Obama ought to be pressured much more on myriad issues. If under the status quo, Sullivan constantly emphasizes to readers how lucky the country is to have Obama, how virtuous a person he is, and how much he deserves reelection, rather than holding him accountable -- which ought to be the priority -- there's no reason for Obama to fully investigate his predecessors for torture; to hold his Department of Justice accountable for Fast and Furious; to get Congressional approval before going to war; to repeal the Patriot Act rather than renewing it sans reform; to stop spying on Americans without warrants; to abandon his list of American citizens to extra-judicially kill; to reclassify marijuana under the controlled substances act; to end his war on whistleblowers; to stop invoking the state secrets privilege; and the list goes on.

Obama on his failure to investigate torture? Only a month ago I called him "craven". A few weeks earlier I wrote, "Not all countries are as cowardly, morally compromised and as authoritarian as the US when it comes to investigating claims of torture." And such criticism stretches back to the beginning of Obama's term. From April 2009:

And so Obama's refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture's cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

In February 2010, I called the administration's continued failure to investigate a "betrayal ... a travesty, a disgrace, an abomination, another example of how the government treats its own members in ways it would never ever treat anyone else":

We have known for a while that president Obama and attorney-general Eric Holder have decided to remain in breach of the Geneva Conventions and be complicit themselves in covering up the war crimes of their predecessors - which means, of course, that those of us who fought for Obama's election precisely because we wanted a return to the rule of law were conned.

Also that month:

The perverse truth is that, in some ways, the Obama administration is in greater violation of Geneva than even the Bush-Cheney administration.

September 2010:

With great courage and clarity, the Obamaites could have cut this Gordian knot; instead they tightened it. And torturers across the world - far, far worse than Bush or Cheney - are now smiling.

Earlier that month:

Yes war requires some secrecy. But Obama has gone much further than this now. The cloak of secrecy he is invoking is not protecting national security but protecting war crimes. And this is now inescapably his cloak. He is therefore a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more.

More Dish pressure on the administration over torture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And that took about 10 minutes on Google. How about other issues mentioned by Conor, such as congressional approval on wars such as Libya?

Going to war with only 25 percent public support, with no Congressional buy-in, and opposition from the defense secretary is, to my mind, a form of madness. ... And as public doubts and fears multiply, the president will be in [Brazil talking about jobs] thousands of miles away. This is recklessness on a Bush-Cheney level.

In a related post titled "King Barack I":

Many of us supported this president because he promised to bring back the constitutional balance after the theories of Yoo, Delahunty, et al put the president on a par with emperors and kings in  wartime. And yet in this Libya move, what difference is there between Bush and Obama? In some ways, Bush was more respectful of the Congress, waiting for a vote of support before launching us like an angry bird into the desert.

Regarding Obama's war on medical marijuana? I wrote as recently as February:

What Obama is doing is causing sickness and death. It seems to me that the Obama generation who helped elect this president need to go to war against this betrayal. Every time you are sent a fundraising email or in any way contacted by the Obama election campaign, tell them to call you back when they call this war off. Hit them where it hurts. Heckle him and his surrogates whenever you can. Holder and Obama have betrayed us on this. Make sure they hear from you.

On indefinite detention? As recently as December:

[Obama's] abandonment of the promised veto of the military bill that threatened to unleash the military in the homeland to capture, and detain indefinitely without charges, anyone suspected of being a member of al Qaeda or of "substantially supporting" them is another sign that his campaign pledge to be vigilant about civil liberties in the war on terror was a lie. ... And something else much more damaging will be done: Obama will sign a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects.

On even small and obscure issues such as Fast and Furious? Critical posts here, here and here. The list goes on. At the same time, I try to see the whole picture - and explain why I think this president has achieved far more than his critics on the right and left believe. Politics is not just about purism, or demonstrating one's own independence; it's about prudential judgment. I made my case here.

I would simply ask: which other blog or commentator has the same balance of harsh criticism on specifics and serious praise for the long-term achievements of this president?

The End Of A Third-Party Pipe Dream

Avlon is sad that Americans Elect has failed to find a candidate. Chait is unsurprised:

I do think there is a general desire out there for a third-party candidate. It’s just that the desire isn’t ideological. Lots of Americans think the parties both stink and have little understanding of what the parties actually believe. The idea that there’s a third-party movement rooted in any set of policy goals is silly, and the notion that the there’s a third-party movement rooted in Tom Friedman’s particular policy goals is completely insane.

Larison nods:

Read On »

What Is Romney Worth?

A comprehensive analysis: 

Read On »

Yglesias Award Nominee

"I am happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree ... I would be very happy if there was a Palestinian state," - Bill Kristol (!), at a debate with J-Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami.

It's "if there were a Palestinian state," Bill. That reality is even more subjunctive than most.

"Simply Orthogonal To Facts"

In some ways, Romney is the reductio ad absurdum of what has been wrong with conservatism in America (but not Britain) this past decade:

In Romney’s telling, the terms debt and spending are essentially interchangeable. When presented with Obama’s position — that the solution to the debt ought to include both higher taxes and lower spending — he rejects it out of hand.

The AP notes that Chait's analysis is reality-based, and Romney's narrative is essentially a lie. But it's the "out of hand" dismissal of increasing revenues that is so telling. How many households take no account of their income when deciding what to spend? How feasible is it politically - as Jim Manzi notes here - that we will seriously lower the debt entirely on one party's terms, rather than by some bipartisan deal? Romney's position is, it seems to me a declaration that partisanship trumps debt-cutting in his mind. Given his own rhetoric about the danger of the debt, that's quite something. And it sure isn't conservative. It's radical to be playing ideological brinksmanship at this point.

And I think this is actually Romney's biggest liability in this race. On the key question of how to lower the long-term debt, Romney takes the view that only spending on entitlements matters. Everything else can and should actually add to the debt. More Pentagon spending and more tax cuts for everyone, including the 1 percent (even below the Bush era rates), are fine. That kind of debt is somehow not debt for Romney because he assumes that if you slash taxes, revenues will increase. This was an interesting theory in 1981. It is a failed experiment today. (Why we need to drastically increase defense spending in a period of necessary austerity is beyond me.)

More to the point, I just cannot see how that argument wins against the logic that this sacrifice needs to be shared, that we all need to do our part, that, at this stage in the debt-binge begun in earnest under Reagan, we should double down on supply side economics in the face of massive evidence that it doesn't fucking work. You need some kind of intravenous injection of Jude Wanniski to get this argument off the ground and in the air.

Let me be clear: I have long favored serious retrenchment of entitlement spending. It is the most important thing we can do to curtail future debt. But I do not only oppose the perverse unfairness of balancing the budget entirely on the backs of the needy; I don't think Romney's positions will help reduce the debt. Call me crazy, but I think a permanent and sustained reduction in revenues will increase the debt. Call me crazier, but I tend to think a balance between spending cuts and revenue increases is obviously a fairer, more effective, and more feasible path forward.

I'd be fine with 3-1 on the spending cuts-revenue increase question. I'd prefer the revenue increases were achieved through tax reform, rather than increasing tax rates. But Romney is stuck with the position that he would even turn down a 10-1 ratio, and that the cuts should be entirely on the backs of the poor, while increasing defense spending, and lowering still further the taxes paid by his own class.

How on earth do you win a general election when you are so far out on the fringe?

Quote For The Day

"What more do we want this man to do for us, honest to god?" - David Letterman, voice of sanity.

Meta-Washington

Marc Ambinder is leaving DC for LA. He lists what he's learned about the city. Number six:

The politico-media culture is obsessed with The Meta-Narrative, as if Baudrillard is enjoying a neo-American reconnaissance. When something happens, it is often much easier to place it into the context of a metaphor that captures something simpler to understand, often by applying a level of analysis that takes the thing out of its real context and Meta-izeses it. When Rush Limbaugh says something, the debate often turns on the people who have written about what he said; their motives and judgments are questioned more than his; somehow it becomes more important to ask "Why David Axelrod isn't slamming Bill Maher for calling Sarah Palin the C-word" than it is to keep Limbaugh's original action under a microscope.

Worse: some think this is actually more sophisticated than taking a stand on the core issues. Paul Waldman focuses on Marc's observation that politicians and "the media haven't developed the vocabulary to explain how positions evolve." That's because of the convention that somehow changing one's mind is a function of weakness rather than strength. See Bush v Kerry. And the entire Bush administration.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"My responsibility is to make judgments about hard, complex issues that I believe to be right. Simply looking at the status quo and suggesting that the tax code is sacrosanct and can never change, and that decisions made in the ’80s and ’90s can never change, is absurd. The tax code is weighted toward the ultra-wealthy and ultra-wealthy corporations, and has created an offshore aristocracy of people who can afford to hire an army of accountants and lawyers. This shifts the tax burden to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and others. I don’t want to see taxes go up on any hardworking American. We need a simpler, fairer tax code," - Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), on why he refused to renew his commitment to the Norquist pledge.

Ask Manzi Anything: Increase Taxes To Fix The Deficit?

Previous videos from Manzi here and here. You can buy his book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, here. Video archive here.

The Bible, African-Americans And Gays

A much-needed conversation Obama has belatedly started.

Why Are Baby Names So Different In The Red States?

One major reason:

Women in red states tend to have their first children earlier than women in blue states. A 23-year-old mom is more likely to come up with something out of the ordinary than one who is 33.

The fastest rising names nationwide?

Briella, which jumped 394 spots, to No. 497. Briella Calafiore stars in "Jerseylicious," a reality TV show about battling stylists at a beauty salon in Green Brook, N.J. She's also in a spinoff called "Glam Fairy." Brantley was the fastest rising name for boys, jumping 416 spots to No. 320. Brantley Gilbert is a singer who had a No. 1 country hit called "Country Must Be Country Wide".

[Apologies for the original "so unique."]

Trey Parker Bait

The First Gay President?

Scott Shackford takes issue with my cover-essay's thesis:

[Andrew Sullivan] concludes that Obama "learned" to be black the same way that gays "learn" to be gay, thus explaining the attention-grabbing headline. But even the idea of "learning to be gay" is getting old-fashioned, and it’s a little odd for Sullivan to be invoking it given his blog's periodic chafing at the gay establishment. In his need to make Obama "one of us," he has nearly gone collectivist. The gay community, to the extent one exists, has fractured and diversified significantly since the days of Harvey Milk, and we’re all the better for it.

Yes, mercifully, learning "how to be gay" is increasingly old-fashioned, and many of us worked hard to expand the range of experiences and opinions and lifestyles than can be included within a gay community, including being connected to our straight families and friends, serving in the military or voting Republican. But Obama is almost exactly my own age, and in my own generation, and I felt and feel a resonance with his description of his own grappling with identity in his youth in the 1960s and 1970s. I cannot speak for all gay people; but I can speak to my own experience and suggest common themes. And if my own experience were completely an outlier, marriage equality would have remained a quixotic intellectual game for a few gay conservatives.

But there is, of course, an aspect to this that is timeless, and that is the fact the vast majority of gay kids grow up in straight families.

Read On »

Netflix Gets Original

Nick Summers profiles Ted Sarandos, the executive behind the company's foray into original programming:

To writers and producers, some of Netflix’s inexperience at programming is an asset—there are no intrusive notes from network suits, because Netflix doesn’t employ any. Netflix is not subject to the FCC’s broadcast regulations or cable carriage disputes. Because everything on its service streams on demand, there is no programming grid—no worries about going up against Monday Night Football. Most significant, when Netflix makes a series available online, it posts all the episodes at once: no more parceling out the drama week by week. That is a fundamental change in the way “television” series can be created.

Constituency Politics

How not to do it:

Erin McPike unpacks Obama's method: 

Latino audiences are informed that Obama’s Justice Department has challenged the state of Arizona over its anti-illegal immigration legislation, that he supports the DREAM Act that would grant citizenship to some young people brought illegally to this country as children, and that the president vowed to produce comprehensive immigration reform legislation if elected to a second term. 

Read On »

Is Fundamentalism Winning The Population Battle?

Eric Kaufmann crunches the numbers:

In the Muslim world, women most in favor of sharia law have twice the birthrates of Muslim women who are most opposed. Religious Arabs have the numbers to reap the electoral rewards from the Arab Spring. Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans who report “no religion” are leading the shift to below-replacement fertility. In most of Europe, the nonreligious average around one child per woman. In the United States, they manage 1.5, considerably lower than the national 2.1. This disadvantage is not enough to prevent religious decline in much of Europe and America today, but secularism must run to stand still.

Israel's Orthodox population is another example:

Read On »

Acting Advice For Romney

Courtesy of James Lipton:

From the text:

Listen to his laugh.  It resembles the flat "Ha! Ha! Ha!" that appears in comic-strip dialogue balloons. But worse – far worse – it is mirthless. Mr. Romney expects us to be amused, although he himself is not amused. Freeze the frame, cover the bottom of his face with your hand, and study his eyes. There’s no pleasure there, no amusement. Genuine laughter is triggered only by, and is completely dependent on, shared perception. That’s why we say we "get" a joke.

Auden-77

Jim Holt explores numerology and the last century's greatest poet. Plus: an Iowa sailor in black silk stockings.

Why We Don't Have Comments

Allahpundit's comment section.

The Ethics Of Eating Plants

Michael Marder considers the vegetal souls on our plate:

For example, studies have found evidence of "deliberate behavior" in plants: foraging (note that the botanists themselves use this word usually associated with animal behavior) for nutrients, the roots can drastically change their branching pattern when they detect a resource-rich patch of soil, or they can grow so as to avoid contact with roots of other members of the same species, in order to prevent detrimental competition. Of course, plants are not capable of deliberation or of making decisions in the human sense of the term. But they do engage with their environments and with one another in ways that are incredibly sophisticated, plastic and responsive — in a word, intelligent, though not perhaps conscious.

Adam Kolber isn't buying Marder's call for "plant liberation":

Read On »

Automatic Automobiles

Alexis Madrigal waves goodbye to the manual transmission:

Nowadays ... more than 90 percent of American cars come with automatic transmissions. And the deskilling of teen drivers, I'm sure, has begun. One more skill, like efficient rotary phone dialing, will go missing and more more system will become a little easier to use and more opaque.

Relatedly, Adam Ozimek lays out how self-driving cars will become a reality.