Two fight of center writers I generally like, Jennifer Roback Morse and Dorian Davis, both discuss gay marriage today in problematic pieces. 

Morse’s column is more problematic.  I normally like her a great deal, and I wholeheartedly recommend her pamphlet 101 tips on a happier marriage.  That said, here’s a bit of what she wrote today:

Well, it is official. You won. We lost. Same sex marriage is the law in California. We might win the amendment in the fall, but let’s face it. The momentum is on your side: the Inexorable March of Progress and all that.

Other states will recognize California’s same sex marriages?  The Federal government will?  (Answers: no and no.)  Morse surely knows this, which is why much of the rest of her piece, giving advice to same sex quasi-married people has a less than happy tone:

Now that same sex couples can marry, there is no longer any excuse for the State of California to encourage non-marital cohabitation, by opposite sex couples or same sex couples. California should shut down the domestic partnership registries. Cohabitation is socially and privately inferior to marriage. The state should insist that couples either put up or shut up: get married or be single. No more half-way house of marriage-lite.

Few same sex couples have taken advantage of the opportunity to marry, even where it is legal. So far, Massachusetts has the highest rate of marriage among gay individuals: a mere 16% of the gay population has married. I somehow doubt that the remaining 84% are living celibate lives. Some of them are cohabiting. These high rates of same sex cohabitation have got to stop.

If there actually was genuine marriage available, I’d agree with her.  But since there isn’t, I can’t.  For sake of argument, I can’t marry a British man and expect the federal government to recognize the marriage for the sake of citizenship.  We’re still dealing with marriage-lite right now.  If a couple married in California moves out of state, I’d recommend they get a domestic partnership in their new state of residence because there’s no guarantee that their California marriage will be valid in Connecticut.

Still, I actually do agree with Morse on one key point in her column:

I have in my filing cabinet some model legislation that would make adultery a civil offense. That means that a faithful spouse has the right to sue an adulterous spouse for damages. Don’t get me wrong: no policemen will be peaking in people’s windows. The injured party gets to decide whether it is worthwhile, all things considered, to sue. My guess is that few people would bring such suits. But lawyers and marriage counselors who practiced back in the Bad Old Days before no-fault will tell you: the threat of such lawsuits deterred a lot of bad behavior. Now that gays can marry, you have just as great an interest in marital fidelity as the rest of us.

I’ve been looking for someone to introduce this legislation. Maybe if a member of GLBTQ caucus introduces the legislation, it will get some traction.

You who made the conservative case for same sex marriage convinced the public that same sex marriage would provide the same private and social benefits as opposite sex marriage. But marriage is more than just a set of benefits: marriage also is a set of obligations and constraints. Those of us in the Marriage Movement have been trying to help people see that there is freedom within those constraints. But it has been a tough sell. People want only the benefits and none of the obligations. People go for the short-term gratification and miss the Big Prize: lifelong married love.

Now that you can marry, I assume that you are on board. I look forward to hearing from you.

I’m not an elected official, but strengthening marriage with civil offense laws makes sense to me.  Even though there isn’t gay marriage yet, of course.  Given the confusing mishmash of state, local, and federal laws, today’s committed same sex couples get lots of extra obligations and fewer benefits.  And I think having Dr. Morse speak at some couples’ retreats that I know some gay people do before commitment ceremonies would be a good idea.  (See her pamphlet for more; I link twice because it really is among the best $4.77 you can spend.)

Dorian Davis (H/T) argues that Republicans should embrace gay marriage:

It also puts Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage on the losing end of a civil rights issue - the last place that Republicans can afford to be considering their already damaged brand. Indeed, the collateral damage from their same-sex marriage exploitation now could be the loss of much of a new generation of Republicans later - a fate more catastrophic, one could argue, than seeing Ellen Degeneres and Portia De Rossi married. In California, for instance, almost 70 percent of respondents under 30 support same-sex marriage, compared with just 35 percent of those over 65, according to the Field Poll. National numbers bare out the same idea. In their May 2008 poll, USA Today/Washington Post reported that almost 80 percent of the under-30 crowd considered same-sex marriage a “private” matter, while just 45 percent of seniors agreed. Of all the lost causes to pursue, then, a same-sex marriage ban seems not just futile but dangerous if Republicans hope to be competitive with the next generation of voters.

As I recall, the Equal Rights Amendment was also inevitable and had large majorities of the country behind it and then it flopped.  Further, just because most people support an issue doesn’t mean that their support of it will determine their votes.  For example, most polls show that gun control is popular in the nation at large; pluralities and majorities favor stricter gun control laws.  But the gun owning minority cares much more about gun control as an issue, which is why most politicians try to be pro-gun rather than pro-gun control. 

The overwhelming majority of people are straight, and most of them aren’t particularly hard-core supporters of gay marriage.  I think most of us on this blog support gay marriage, but all of us (queer me included) are willing to vote for politicians who oppose gay marriage; it isn’t a make-or-break issue for us.

So, contra Morse, gay marriage isn’t here yet; contra Davis, it isn’t inevitable.  Alas.

Hubbard posted this at 11:41 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 as Kulturkampf, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

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Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice, writes about feminism.  Her childhood was uncommonly dysfunctional, but it sounds like she’s going to be a good mother because she’s learned what not to do from her own childhood:

Ironically, my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa  —  offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities  —  after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

My mother would always do what she wanted  —  for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me  —  a ‘delightful distraction’, but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting.

According to the strident feminist ideology of the Seventies, women were sisters first, and my mother chose to see me as a sister rather than a daughter. From the age of 13, I spent days at a time alone while my mother retreated to her writing studio  —  some 100 miles away. I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.

Alice Walker sounds like a modern day Mrs Jellyby (I haven’t quoted the most disturbing parts of Rebecca’s essay).  So much hurt—but at least there’s hope.

Hubbard posted this at 9:26 PM EDT on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 as Kulturkampf, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

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This story is pure class.

The Starbucks logo has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute….Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves, Slutbucks.

I think Slutbucks says it all.

I can’t imagine a man who doesn’t get excited by a drawing of a woman with scales on her legs. Well, maybe Hubbard, but I suspect this drawing has crossover appeal. Doesn’t that just look inviting? It’s perhaps the most erotic thing I’ve seen since the last time I read the phrase vagina dentata.

Apollo posted this at 10:32 PM EDT on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 as Kulturkampf

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It lookes like the California Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage:

California’s supreme court ruled that a ban on gay marriage was unlawful Thursday, effectively leaving same-sex couples in America’s most populous state free to tie the knot in a landmark ruling. In an opinion that analysts say could have nationwide implications for the issue, the seven-member panel voted 4-3 in favor of plaintiffs who argued that restricting marriage to men and women was discriminatory.

“… limiting the designation of marriage to a union ‘between a man and a woman’ is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute,” California Chief Justice Ron George said in the written opinion.

I’d like to read the opinion (warning: link in PDF) for details.  That’ll take time, since it’s 172 pages. 

My reaction so far is mixed.  Good: there’s gay marriage. Yay!  Bad: it’s from the courts.  I’m not a fan of using the courts to reshape society.  Must read the opinion—and brace for the inevitable appeal.

Hubbard posted this at 2:03 PM EDT on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 as Kulturkampf

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In light of a previous post, I think it’s worth pointing out that Stop-Loss is petering out and will probably fail to hit $11 million at the box office. This is well short of the paltry $15 million that Lions for Lambs brought in. That movie starred Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford, and was the 126th best grossing movie last year, so I’m not sure what the studio expected from Ryan Phillipe when they bought this movie a Super Bowl ad spot.

Two amazing facts:

1. We are five years into a war that has been the top news story almost every single day, and we’ve only recently passed the 4,000th American death.
2. We are five years into a war that has been the top news story almost every single day, and there has not been a single studio movie portraying American soldiers or the American war effort in a positive light.

Apollo posted this at 10:14 PM EDT on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 as Kulturkampf

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Yuval Levin has a fascinating — and lengthy — article about the sibling relationship between the political left and the scientific revolution of the 19th Century.  It has its problems.  Levin acknowledges, but does not truly discuss, the benefits that have come through this shared heritage and presumes the Right has been right to apply the civilizational brakes in every situation (Levin avoids conversation about teaching evolution).  Those are worthy arguments, but they’re presented without serious refutation.

But even with these problems, it’s a fascinating read and interesting intellectual history.  By far, the best part is its discussion of the contradictions of inherent in Environmentalism:

Modern science is grounded in a particular view of nature, both material and moral. The natural world, thought the fathers of science, is matter in motion; it is best understood by being pulled apart into its constituent forces and pieces, and experimented upon under duress. “The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom,” Bacon argued, because nature is not a whole but a sum of parts, and is not moved by a purpose, but driven by discrete causes alone. Nature, moreover, is the chief constraint on human power and human comfort, and the extension of the empire of man over nature is a noble and necessary goal. For too long, they thought, human beings had been subject to the whims of nature and chance, but by coming to know the workings of nature, we could master it, both removing natural obstacles and constructing artificial advantages for ourselves. “Nature, to be commanded,” Bacon wrote, “must be obeyed,” so the purpose of the new natural science was to learn nature’s ways so as to overcome them. This desire for knowledge of and power over nature was not power-hunger, it was humanitarianism. Nature, cold and cruel, oppresses man at every turn, and bold human action is needed in response. Science arose to meet that need.

If you had to devise a complete opposite to this scientific view of nature, a mirror image in essentially every respect, you would probably end up with roughly the notion of nature that gives shape to the modern environmentalist ethic. Nature in this view is, to begin with, a complete and ordered system, to be understood in whole and not in part. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote John Muir, a founder of modern environmentalism. Far from conquering and manipulating nature for his benefit, moreover, man must be careful and humble enough to tread gently upon it, and respect the integrity (and even the beauty) of its wholeness. We are to stand in awe before nature, and never to overestimate our ability to overcome it or underestimate our ability to harm it (and with it ourselves). “We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do,” wrote the great British environmentalist Barbara Ward in her 1972 book Only One Earth.

Taken to the extreme, this approach turns the scientific view of nature on its head, and looks at man as an oppressor of the natural world instead of the other way around.

I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot more to Environmentalism than just Climatology.

Tom posted this at 11:50 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 as Science & Evolution, Kulturkampf, Philosophy

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A month and a half after the last anti-war flop finally quit flopping around and actually died, Hollywood sends out a new dispatch. This one, despite advertising during the Super Bowl, opened in a thousand fewer theaters than Leftists for Losing, and, while Ryan Phillipe is a name I think I’ve heard before, packs significantly less star power. Anyone want to give me odds that it will match the miserable $15,000,115 that LforL limped to? Were I a betting man, I’d happily give 20:1.

More than five years after invading Iraq, I’m still waiting for a movie that shows our soldiers as an ideological force for good fighting against mass-murdering would-be despots. Actually, I can’t think of a single movie casting our military efforts in a positive light since, at least, Black Hawk Down. Speaking of which: $108 million domestic during a recession for a pretty mediocre movie.

If only the Duke were still around; he knew what to do, unlike the America-hating ass clowns running the industry today. I predict we will not see a positive portrayal of the American military in a movie until there’s a Democrat in the White House, however long that takes. Because Hollywood would rather keep producing anti-military flops than to actually make money by praising an institution they despise that serves a country they barely tolerate.

Apollo posted this at 11:49 PM EDT on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 as Kulturkampf

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