BREAKING: The Daily's Editorial Page Becomes Wingnut Megaphone

John Fay says: “Gay Marriage? Let’s Stop and Think About This.”

Oh yes. Let us please.

First of all, thank you to Sarah Gaither for holding down the fort. Someone in her article’s comments suggested framing her piece next to John Fay’s bizarre screed. I second. The difference in the quality of the articles – the writing, the reasoning, the basic connection to the reality most of us on the planet Earth live in – is staggering.

As such, I refuse to be angered by this article. I prefer to be entertained.

Now, I realize the gay marriage issue surrounding the California voters’ decision on Proposition 8 is extremely emotional for a lot of people, and I respect their difference of opinion, but let us try and consider the vote from a rational basis.

Early on, we get an important window into the American theocrat mindset. If you look carefully, you’ll notice the application of the Wingnut Transitive Property of Hysterical Faggotry. It goes something like this:

(1) Fags = Feminine
(2) Feminine = Hysterical
(3) hence Fags = Hysterical. QED.

As far as John Fay is concerned, the massive nationwide protests we saw last week were really just an enormous temper tantrum – much, he surely imagines, like the wailing of an incorrigible housewife whose husband tells her he’s cutting her weekly allowance. And like the hysterical housewife, Teh Gayz can be mollified by a moment of patronizing, feigned validation, a la “I respect their difference of opinion.”

But here’s the kicker (and the part that leads one to believe that The Daily has decided it doesn’t need editors):

[T]he court argued that forbidding marriage rights to gays is discrimination, “like a person’s race or gender.” Race is a biological state; homosexuality is more of an emotional condition, and we should not, for that reason alone, start passing laws condoning it.

Being homosexual, like other emotional tendencies, doesn’t make someone a bad person, but it’s a problem that needs to be dealt with, not denied.

Yes, admitting you have a problem is the first step. A serious problem that no doubt needs to be dealt with aggressively by frontal lobotomy and possibly exorcism… Argh. Where to begin?

“Race” is not a “biological state.” It is a social construct that assigns human beings different innate characteristics according to the color of their skin, the size of their jaw, the fullness of their lips, etc. It’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race because race, as such, tells you nothing about an individual’s abilities, character, temperament, or intelligence. So too with sexual orientation. Clear?

What makes this so interesting is that it lays bare what I think most of the people reading this note already suspect: People of John Fay’s ilk have so internalized their privilege that they think it’s a result of their "biological state." They have rights and advantages others do not because they were born superior. It’s an inversion of reality that resides exclusively in oblivious minds. Fags can’t marry? Well, that’s because they have an “emotional condition”; just as soon as they plug that up with prayer and pills, they can have a woman too (or, alternately, the cured former lesbians can have a man like me).

I was almost disappointed when he moved on to the Christian Right boilerplate:

Now, there are several major problems with legalizing gay marriage. Once you’ve legalized gay marriage, why not polygamy, incest, bestiality or any other form of union? If the only criteria is that people love each other, then who says it’s wrong for a 70-year-old man to marry 10 underage girls?

It has a lot to do with the fact that sheep and underage girls can’t give consent to the union. Which actually leads nicely into this:

Also, the Christian concept of marriage predates any state-sanctioned licensing program, which means marriage is an inherently religious concept in America. Any state interpretation of marriage that violates traditional church views may well be a violation of the First Amendment.

Yikes, the boilerplate didn’t last for long. This is the first time I’ve encountered the notion that that “any state interpretation of marriage that violates traditional church views may well be a violation of the First Amendment.” Left out, of course, is a precise definition of what traditional church views are. The traditional church view is that a marriage ceremony is a transfer of chattel labor between the father of the bride and the new husband, preferably accompanied by a dowry and signaling a collectivization of the two families’ landed property. The consent of the woman is a total non-issue.

And oh yes, polygamy is a-ok, the missionary position is the only acceptable form of marital intercourse, and if she gives you some lip you’re under no obligation to spare her the rod.

And predictably, John Fay gets the legal question completely assbackwards. Legalizing gay marriage doesn’t compel any church to perform a ceremony it doesn’t want to perform. That would plausibly be a Free Exercise clause violation. Hence, gay couples in California were married either by willing churches or justices of the peace.

The fact that it’s a matter of state licensing does the exact opposite of what he thinks it does: It removes religious tradition as a consideration. That’s a pretty basic Establishment clause concept.

Tell me more, tell me more:

Once people become accustomed to violating certain social norms, they tend to feel less constrained about breaking others.

God willing. And the really disgusting thing is that John Fay thinks this is some sort of tragedy, when it’s actually the core strength of free societies. People challenge social norms, the ones that are just and useful come out the stronger, and the ones based in ignorance and superstition are discarded. The fact that Prop. H8 barely won, and only after an intense and paranoid misinformation campaign, is a sign of progress. Excruciatingly slow, sure, but progress.

My favorite comment on John Fay’s piece:

Wake up people! If we allow opinion pieces by John Fay, before long sheep, retarded infants and mermaid-shaped bits of wood will be demanding the right to contribute!

Seriously, what the fuck were The Daily’s editors thinking? Epic fail.


**Read this.

The Treasury Dept. Will Be Right Back After These Messages

I supported the bailout, which was duly made law yesterday, but I didn’t know it was going to take a whole month before Paulson started buying up any of these toxic assets:

Paulson never claimed the bailout package would solve all of Wall Street's woes or prevent the economy from falling into a deep recession. Treasury officials even warned banking groups this week that firms may collapse before the program launches, which likely will take place in mid-November.

Which is nice. And yes, I know (1) that the point of the bailout was first and foremost to increase confidence enough to get capital moving again and (2) it’s important for Paulson to get the policy as right as he can get it. But it may very well turn out that the credit markets need more than the grudging stamp of Congress and the weary signature of the President to thaw out. As Paul Krugman notes, both the Dow and the credit system continued to behave like frightened squirrels yesterday – no rally, no anything. For the first time in a long-time, it might just be that the country’s lenders want to see some money on the table before they commit to anything drastic.

Excuses, Excuses

And then my internet service got shut off. But it's back on now. And as a result, with a month to go before the big day, it's go-time.

Following Good Examples

Yglesias and Klein are back from vacation, so I guess I should come back too.

La Ressentiment

Karl Rove on Barack Obama:

Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.

A commenter at Yglesias’ place:

Shorter Karl Rove:

Barack Obama IS James Bond.

Priceless.

The Cylon Threat Emerges

Chemical robots?

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Ari Obama

David Brooks thinks “Republicans are saps”:

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

The impetus for this column? Obama’s decision to reject public financing for the final two months of the campaign and continue to accepts hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly from small donors. The fact that he’s breaking a public promise, yeah, that kinda bothers me. But it still gets me giddy for three reasons:

First, this is the kind of move that a winner makes – the kind that raises more money than he knows what to do with. If anything so far has convinced me that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States, this is it.

Second, I’ve always thought that campaign finance reform was a farce with dangerous implications for political speech, i.e., the most protected speech there is. Obama supporters who are also campaign reform nuts might have some trouble with this, but as far as I’m concerned, legions of small donors is vastly preferable to the era of nonsense the BCRA ushered in.

Third, as Brooks says, it would be nice to have a little bit of cunning sitting across the table from Vladimir Putin. This, as opposed to having an unlettered, credulous, and insecure man seeing a divine spark in a Russian dictators eyes. To wit:

Rape Now A "War Tactic" Under The Laws Of War

About bloody time.

Porn And Adultery

Julian Sanchez, Ross Douthat, and Will Wilkinson have been wondering if watching a bunch of hardcore porn while being partner to a monogamous relationship has such a “morally meaningful” connection to full-on adultery. Douthat:

Well, look at it this way: Is there any similarity between "having an actual affair" and having sex with a prostitute while you're married? I think most people would answer yes. Then consider: Is there any similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you're married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification? Again, I think a lot of people would say yes: There's a distinction, obviously, but I don't think all that many spouses would be inclined to forgive their husbands (or wives) if they explained that they only liked to watch the prostitute they'd hired.

Wilkinson responds (bringing up a side of President Carter I’d rather not have inflicted on me):

This reminds me of Jimmy Carter’s admission that he had “committed adultery in his heart many times.” Simply thinking about touching yourself while thinking of someone not your wife is somewhere on the Douthat-Carter moral continuum. However, for most people whose minds have not been addled by religious dogma, the distinction between touching yourself and touching someone not your spouse or committed monogamous partner is well nigh categorical. One’s just wrong, one’s just not.

Douthat again:

My point here, to be clear, is not that regularly watching hard-core pornography is exactly the same thing as committing adultery. My point is rather that there's a consistent continuum here - as opposed to the sort of inconsistent continuum that Will accuses me of mustering - that links the varying ways that a person who's committed to sexual monogamy can find sexual gratification outside of marriage.

I think Douthat is right here, but this whole discussion of how far the “continuum” of adultery extends seems a little beside the point. Wilkinson goes too far in bringing up the “committing adultery in my heart” thing, and he doesn’t lay down an actual guiding principle for behavior. A moral “ought” has to imply a practical “can”; I think we have good reason to believe our minds are hardwired to wander from our immediate partners, so an injunction against fantasizing is morally null.

Still, when I form a monogamous relationship with you, one of the big implicit terms of that relationship is that I will direct all outward expressions of my sexual energy in your direction. That I do have control over. It’s silly to say that watching porn is the same as carrying on an affair, but it’s also silly to say that it doesn’t fly in the face of the spirit of the “contract” we’ve formed by promising exclusivity.

The Phone Companies Were Just Following Orders

Oh good:

After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

…

The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute. “I think the White House got a better deal than they even they had hoped to get,” said Senator Christopher Bond, the Missouri Republican who led the negotiations.

All the telecom giants have to do in order to have the privacy lawsuits dismissed is have the Attorney General say that the Bush Administration assured them that, under FISA, handing over the phone/email/internet visit records of its customers was legal. Which, of course, it manifestly was not; which, of course, the telecoms knew. The whole deal, we find out, was negotiated with the White House and congressional Republicans by Steny Hoyer and Jay Rockefeller. Two of the most senior Democrats in Washington. Russell Feingold is right, this “is not a compromise; it is a capitulation.”

Confused

I consider myself a moderately literate person, but I’m having trouble figuring out if there’s supposed to be some kind of underlying ironic point to this op-ed encouraging Barack Obama to take up smoking again in order to attract lower-income voters:

So here’s a piece of strategic advice for the candidate: Lose the Nicorette. Light up instead.

Consider these statistics, culled from studies of smoking patterns. Americans who make between $24,000 and $36,000 a year smoke at twice the rate of those earning $90,000 or more. The same applies to Americans with a high-school education rather than a college degree. Rural Americans smoke more than city-dwellers. As for race, there’s a close correlation between states with high rates of white smokers and those where Mr. Obama polled worst in the primaries. Leading the pack of smoking states are Kentucky and West Virginia; industrial states like Ohio aren’t far behind.

Huh. If there’s a reason Obama should keep smoking during the campaign, it’s that quitting makes you a cold, testy asshole. Can it be a coincidence that during the first few months of the season, when he first tried to quit, he was criticized for not being exciting and friendly enough?

John Derbyshire Writes An Article About Barack Obama And Race

One never ceases to be blown away by this man.

Stuff You Shouldn't Do With Soldiers Prone To Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder:

Test drugs that you know have a tendency to cause suicide thoughts on them. This seems pretty basic.

Via Pushback.

Is He Serious?

Andy McCarthy is apparently exceedingly stupid unfamiliar with the logic behind the Constitution’s habeas corpus protections:

So why is Scalia, having vigorously argued for a robust interpretation of constitutional habeas rights, so hopping mad about Boumediene? Very simple: aliens outside the United States — and particularly, alien enemy combatants whose only connection to the United States is to levy war on her — are not members of our body politic. As such, they aren't afforded habeas corpus or any other constitutional rights (or at least they weren't until last Thursday). That is why the United States has, in its history, indefinitely detained millions of enemy operatives, with no access to our courts, during wartime.

You know, this is really quite simple. One avails oneself of habeas to challenge the legality of one’s detention. The government has to demonstrate it has a right to lock you up. It has to demonstrate, for instance, that you are in fact an alien enemy combatant. Otherwise, counter-terrorism agents could arrest Andy McCarthy, fly him to Guantanamo Bay and he’d never be able to see a judge and point out that he is actually a shrill conservative partisan and not a foreigner with designs on bringing down the United States.

It’s also getting tiresome reminding our friends at NRO that legally, we’re not technically at war. It would have been pointless for Nazi or imperial Japanese captives to challenge their detention because every single one would have lost. The war is over when some future Congress decades from now decides, more or less arbitrarily, to call it a day, and until that time we’re going to have figure out some way to make sure the president doesn’t start imprisoning every man, woman, and child who looks at him cross-eyed.

The Peril Of 'Turning The Page'

Via Matthew Yglesias, today’s Washington Post has a rather damning piece that more or less confirms what we already know – the order to start abusing and torturing detainees at Guantanamo (and later at Abu Ghraib) came from the offices of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and probably George W. Bush:

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

…

Haynes [the Pentagon’s General Counsel under Rumsfeld] and other senior administration officials also visited Guantanamo Bay in September 2002 to "talk about techniques," said one congressional official. Also on the trip was David S. Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.

The Guantanamo Bay visit and the effort to compile interrogation tactics appear to show that Pentagon officials were moving toward a formal policy on interrogation before military commanders at the detention camp requested special measures, the officials said. However, top military officers objected to the proposals in a series of memos in November 2002, much earlier than previously reported, congressional investigators said. In early 2003, Rumsfeld formally authorized the techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay.

This investigation will eventually prove two things. The first is that Rumsfeld and Cheney are odious liars. The second is that they’re war criminals, even under the strained legal theories of authoritarian lackeys like John Yoo. But we’re all ready – aren’t we? – to bet every last dollar we have that even if we get Barack Obama elected president, even if we get overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses, these men will never, ever be prosecuted.

There’s been a tacit understanding between both parties since the end of World War II that executive overreach can and will be forgiven when the White House changes hands, and it’s invariably dressed up as an insistence on (to take that stupid argot as an example) ‘turning the page’ and moving the country forward. Eisenhower forgave and sustained Truman’s executive empire-within-a-republic, forged by the war in Korea; Nixon forgave Johnson’s Vietnam deceptions; Ford pardoned Nixon for Vietnam and Watergate; and so forth. Similarly, the Obama campaign’s focus on “change” and moving past the “drama” of the past few decades gives him a convenient alibi for continuing in the same vein.

The problem is obviously that if there are no real costs for expanding executive prerogatives in this way, the trend toward building and increasingly imperial (and increasingly imperious) executive will continue unabated. Spending political capital on prosecuting the Bush cadre all but virtually ensures a perpetual presence in Iraq, indefinite delay in the drive for universal health care, etc. But the utilitarian calculus should change, I would think, since we’re dealing with a trend that is plainly poisonous to American democracy.

Gaza Ceasefire

An unexpected bit of good news. There's no way to tell how long this particular Hamas-Israel truce will last; the last one broke down a year ago with the Gaza coup. But this particular two-part deal - beginning with a ceasefire, and moving on to an agreement to get Gilad Shalit out of captivity in exchange for a loosening of the blockade - is being pushed hard by the Egyptians and, I suspect, Condoleezza Rice as well. More importantly, it's an opening for cooperation between Israel and a Palestinian Authority that includes a Parliament controlled by Hamas. It gets forgotten in the perennial hysteria over "appeasement" that an impressively substantial majority of Israelis support peace talks with Hamas, and of course Hamas' main leadership body has been saying for months that it's willing to break with it's charter and accept a Palestinian state along pre-1967 borders. Evidently, the ghost of Neville Chamberlain has found its way to the holy land and is up to no good.

Adventures In Subtle Advertising

Courtesy of my friend Ethan, who - sadly - doesn't have a blog.

Actually, It's Reagan's Poison Pill

The general thrust of Paul Krugman’s column today is that progressives, and Barack Obama in particular, should be more aggressive in challenging the “fiscal poison pill” – that is, anti-tax demagogy tax cut dogma – that George W. Bush has allegedly injected into American political discourse by with his sweeping 2001 and 2003 tax reductions. Bush’s tax policy shift, he reasons, has so changed the status quo that it’s now near-impossible for candidates of the left or right to move back to a more traditional, and more stable, fiscal model.

I think that gets it backwards. The Bush cuts were precisely the tax policy for which movement conservatism has been clamoring for well over three decades. The rhetoric of the Reagan years is exceedingly compelling politically, and once the establishment of both parties started to pay lip service to its principles, this was pretty much bound to happen. The politics precedes the policy, not the other way around.

Replace Tim Russert With Chuck Todd?

Count me in agreement with Ezra Klein - Chuck Todd is a very smart analyst and seems like a really nice guy. But Russert’s Meet the Press model is already a process-driven, thin sauce personality show. Todd specializes in talking about polls and counting delegates, and he’s damn good at it. Keep him on for the horserace coverage, but find someone with a bit more policy acumen to confront the actual policymakers.

Pro-Life Drug Stores

First off, I think this Washington Post article on the debate about the growing prevalence of pharmacies that refuse to stock emergency contraceptives is a little dumb. We learn that the soon-to-open DMC Pharmacy will be located in a plaza that includes a “Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart,” which is nice, but we find out nothing useful about the actual content of the debate. Which is partially, of course, about whether emergency contraceptives are a kind of abortifacient because they might possibly stop the implantation of a fertilized blastocyst. That kind of factual background information is useful primarily for illustrating how, in trying to point to “conception” as the only objective beginning point of a human life, the pro-life crowd has really just begged the question.

We do get to hear about the salient political argument over whether pro-life pharmacists should have to stock these drugs (or any contraceptives, for that matter). It seems possible that these pharmacies might pop up all over remote areas and prevent the rural female population from getting these drugs, but I think that’s more an argument for an increased Planned Parenthood presence than for state intervention. As a general rule, you shouldn’t have to sell anything you don’t want to sell, even if not selling it makes you a ridiculous person, a rather poor pharmacist, and a gigantic pain in the ass.

On the other hand, when using these drugs time is most definitely of the essence and you can’t be running all over town looking for a drug store that will give them to you, so I’m quite open to a requirement that pro-life pharmacies publicly announce their policy on emergency contraceptives on the front door or some such thing.