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.

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.

Think back to the last time you saw someone other than a Democratic politician on TV talking about what a disaster Bush was. Think about what passes for a conversation in our media climate. This is the “I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon” thing all over again. Joe Scarborough has no idea what actual people think. He has had his own TV show for years. He is surrounded by rich media personalities and rich politicians and rich political operatives. None of these people know any normal people either. They just know what their rich friends said.

So he sees news articles about people who criticize Obama, and he remembers news articles about people who criticized Bush, and voila, they’re the same. (Leave aside for the moment the fact that there was an order of magnitude more coverage of the70,000 people at the Tax Day Tea Party rally than there was of the millions of people all over the world protesting the beginning of the Iraq War.) He doesn’t seem to understand (or even recognize) the difference between the criticisms.

People were upset with Bush because he started a war for no reason, bankrupted the country and probably forever tilted the balance between citizen and government toward the latter, and then left the grown-ups to clean up his mess. People are upset at Obama because he is a socialist who wants to murder old people and filled his cabinet with Black Panthers.

The point is that Joe Scarborough has no idea what’s going on in this country, and he can’t even begin to care. His understanding of politics and policy is completely superficial, so all he has to go on are pictures of angry people. He can’t comprehend that there are people out there who want to, for example, give health insurance to poor people and reform the health care sector so that it can deliver more services for less money. It’s just another partisan pissing match to him, with blue people on one side and red people on the other side.

These are the people in all the high places in this country. We can elect a halfway-decent president, we can put 59 Democrats in the Senate and 253 in the House, but we can’t ever follow through on anything worth doing without watering it down with shitty ideas from the Republican sandbox, because most Americans think that both sides are to blame for our problems. I know, because Joe Scarborough told me.

(h/t Digby)

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.

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

Also, this:

Via BooMan.

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.

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.

The opening track, “In Chains,” sets the scene with a languishing tempo, simple but evocative poetry, and a great melody. (The only person I’ve spoken to in person about this album is my brother, and he called this track god-awful, saying he guessed the lyrics before they were sung: fair enough. Allow me to add: “Take my hand / Come back to the land / Let’s get away / Just for one day”)

The lead single “Wrong” contains what is probably Gahan’s best vocal performance on the album. I would imagine that one would have a tough time turning this one into some kind of club mix, a testament to the band’s willingness to leave the 80′s in the 80′s.

The back to back tracks “Little Soul” and “In Sympathy” remind me of classic 1987-90 Depeche Mode supporting tracks; that was a time when their records featured pretty much no filler, so that’s far from a criticism.

Listening to the closing track “Corrupt” makes me feel filthy, and I mean that in the best way. The pulsing bass (synthesizer) line grinds through lyrics such as “You’ll be crying out in pain / Begging me to play my games,” and Gahan manages to sound like a drunken lecher staring you in the eyes (if you don’t hear it, consider buying new speakers).