The Hall of Mirrors

There was a lot of talk yesterday about Ross Douthat’s column in the NY Times defending his conservative, Catholic view of marriage and the exclusion of same-sex couples from it. From a rhetorical perspective, I would say Amanda Marcotte had the best response, pretty well demolishing any point he tried to make. Andrew Sullivan had a much more sentimental and interesting take, being both gay and pretty conservative. But I think both authors missed the real message of Ross’s piece.

In a nutshell, what he’s saying is this:

Look, I don’t want gays to get married, because of the religion and the tradition. But I don’t have anything against gay people, honest! It’s just different, that’s all. Leave me be for a while, I’ve got to think this thing out.

As the Times’ resident social conservative, he was obligated to respond to the CA supreme court ruling, but he seems not to know what to say; as Amanda pointed out, he really spends several hundred words spinning his wheels. Here’s the conflict: Ross represents the religious in the Times’ opinion pages. The institutional religious, by and large, think gay people shouldn’t be able to get married, so he had to oppose the outcome of the court ruling. But he also represents the “thoughtful conservative,” the type that a liberal can read and not pass out from lack of oxygen.

Thoughtful conservatives can’t just say that marriage should be a discriminatory institution, since that is clearly irrational. Yet he just isn’t ready to admit that marriage isn’t what he thinks it ought to be. Hetero monogamy is “unique and indispensable” for some reason. He refers to people who have multiple relationships in their lives as postmodern polygamists.

And, as Amanda points out, he implies that the reason hetero marriage is worth preserving and separating is that it can produce children, making childless and adoptive families worth less in his point of view. This is coming from someone who claims to value the family!

So conservatives, my advice to you is this: if you don’t mind being called bigots, carry on. We’ll keep calling them as we see them, and you can keep reading your Bibles and talking about tradition and box turtles. If you don’t want to be called a bigot, shut up and get out of the way until gay marriage is legal, accepted and mundane. There is no way you can defend denying gay people the right to get married while preserving that right for male/female pairs (who may not have children, may not love each other or may actually be gay).

Anyone who denies that the state of marriage would be improved on average by admitting millions of gay and lesbian couples to its gates, denies objective reality.

Today the Anti-Defamation League, the US’s largest Jewish civil rights organization, sided with the bigots who oppose the construction of a muslim community center in Lower Manhattan. Apparently discrimination is bad and all that, but these bigots are really mad, and we should try not to hurt their feelings. We don’t want to cause pain to these bigots who don’t even live or work in New York (only 36% of New Yorkers oppose the construction), so we’ll just give them what they want. I’m sure they’ll stop being dickheads then.

Most Americans are like me. They are as scared of the right-wing extremists vilifying Obama as they were of the leftists vilifying Bush.

That’s Joe Scarborough on Twitter today. Joe Scarborough, cable news celebrity, former member of Congress, multi-millionaire. He’s just like the average people who were afraid of leftists vilifying former President Bush.

Does he not know that Bush’s disapproval rating was at or above 60% for the last year of his presidency? Or does he just think that most Americans are leftists?

The obvious answer is both. To get on cable news, you don’t have to actually know anything at all. You just have to talk to “influential” and “important” people. How can you tell who is influential and important? They’re on cable news. (continue reading…)

I still pay money to have a blog at my own domain? Why?

So, Ed Whelan of the National Review Online and the Ethics and Public Policy Center has outed noted political and legal blogger Publius, of Obsidian Wings. Here’s what happened:

Anonymous Liberal and Eugene Volokh called out Whelan for his (apparently to me; I am not a lawyer) ridiculous criticisms of Harold Koh and Sonia Sotomayor. Publius agreed with these posts and quoted them on OW. Volokh blogs under his real name, so there’s no way to punish him. I guess Whelan couldn’t figure out who AL, the original source of the quotation that piqued his ire, was, so he settled for outing Publius.

So, let me state for the record: Ed Whelan is a whiny-ass titty baby. He can’t take any criticism, especially repeated criticism from the same source, so he hopes to negatively affect Publius’s career. Whelan did not reveal a conflict of interest; he simply claimed that Publius was irresponsible abusing his anonymity (actually pseudonymity; I would expect a sharp legal mind such as Whelan’s to be able to grasp the distinction), then claimed the responsibility of punishing him.

Then, after being roundly criticized by pretty much everyone with a brain, he apologized. Sorry about that. I fucked up. Hope you don’t get fired!

Now, I agree that Whelan deserves some credit for figuring out that he did something wrong (with a little help from his friends). But seriously?

Anyway, this whole situation is dumb. Stay tuned for a more interesting post about anonymity and opinion on the internets.

One year ago, Barack Obama gave a speech on the occasion of his having clinched the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Just before the speech, he and his wife Michelle shared a special moment:

Today, take the time to dap the ones you love for National Fist Bump Day.

Also, this:

Via BooMan.

If I’m going to have a blog, I need to abide by the more important blogospheric conventions; chief among them is Friday cat blogging.

I don’t have a cat, but my neighbor does. This is Azazel.

He likes to come into my apartment whenever he can get in, then meow until I let him sit in my lap.

The official video wouldn’t let me embed it, so here’s some awards show or something. They’re lip syncing anyway. Also, Andy Fletcher looks like my grandpa Jay.

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to the radio in the middle of the night. A song I had never heard before came on, and I was immediately intrigued by it. Intending to google it later, I tried to memorize a couple lines of the lyrics; then I noticed that the music sounded a lot like Depeche Mode. Of course, then I recognized Dave Gahan’s distinctive voice, and I remembered that the new Depeche Mode album was coming out soon.

In a nutshell, that’s my reaction to Sounds of the Universe, the 12th  studio album from one of the few 80′s electronic bands to remain semi-relevant after the end of that decade. In many ways, the key to that success has been adapting to the times and new musical trends without sacrificing their simple pop sensibility. Unlike their new-romantic brothers-in-arms the Cure, however, Depeche Mode’s latest material sounds just like Depeche Mode.

The band has always paired a simple song structure with a unique sonic landscape, and this combination is on full display on Sounds. The current wave in rock music is full of acts who are not innovative but are interesting (see: Spoon, MGMT, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, more I can’t think of at the moment); count this decade’s Depeche Mode along with them. Proof once more that one needn’t break with convention to make great music.

Longtime fans of the band will appreciate this latest marker in their career as it approaches its fourth decade; casual observers may marvel at a bunch of dudes in their late forties making such a relevant record. Go buy it for $8.99 at Amazon (or at least download it off the Napster or whatever the hell you use these days).

Album highlights are below the fold.

(continue reading…)

This blog will be an outlet for my thoughts on politics, music, art, society, and general bullshit. Welcome.