Quick thought

You know how the excuse for not repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is always something like: "we've got a lot on our plate, maybe when things settle down a bit"? Well I was just thinking that, as a matter of tactics, this probably has it completely backwards.

I would think the best time to roll out a change like this would be while the military is stretched thin and engaged in multiple theaters of combat, because in these circumstances the pragmatic case for equality--we need everyone we can get for the task at hand--would be at its most salient. When things are quiet, on the other hand, is when the armed forces has the luxury of kicking out perfectly good men and women.

Newt Gingrich: A Reminder

There has been an idea floating around that erstwhile Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the heir apparent for the struggling GOP, and may end up running in 2012. If that comes to pass, I hope everyone remembers well the sorts of things he says today, because he really does say batty things. A snippet from a Bill O'Reilly interview about the aftermath of the Prop 8 result:

O'REILLY: OK, now the culture war, I know you’ve been flying around the country and doing stuff. In the last three or four days, really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper. We’re going to show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re going to show you the video on Monday of that. We have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We have boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants impose its will on the rest of us. It is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government, if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact, and frankly for that matter if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that the secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they’re the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.

Gingrich has an interesting habit--on display here--of taking some emotionally charged but unrelated concept, such as fascism, and shoehorning it into his argument via the strategic deployment of adjectives. Thus, we get constructions like "gay and secular fascism" and "historic Christianity"--phrases that don't actually mean anything, but are just academic-seeming enough to not sound completely ridiculous on television. It's pseudo-intellectualism providing cover for the ugliest kind of divisive rhetoric.

I mean, think of it: even if we accept for the sake of argument O'Reilly's (shamelessly) exaggerated portrayal of secular/gay reaction to the Prop 8 results, Gingrich's comments are still out to lunch. Surely, violently "invading" churches and knocking things out of people's hands is unjustified and wrong, but how on earth is it the 20th-century-era anti-liberal form of government known as fascism? When an extremist pro-lifer bombs an abortion clinic, is that "pro-life fascism"? When some civil rights protesters went too far in the 1960s, was that "black fascism"? The only way "fascism" has any bearing at all to any of this is if we trivially define "fascism" to be merely the violent pursuit of some political ends--a definition that renders the observation "the violent gay reaction to Prop 8 is fascist" completely redundant.

And what does it mean to add the word "historic" to the front of "Christianity", "Judaism", and "Islam"? Certainly, Gingrich could not say simply that "if you believe in Christianity, then you will be confronted with the reality that secular extremists will impose values that are antithetical to yours", because it's not true: there are plenty of Christians who are okay with gay marriage, separation of church and state, and other secular values. And so he says, "if you believe in historic Christianity...". But what kind of Christianity is that? It is a term that he just makes up, and which apart from having a sort of anti-modernity tone to it, doesn't really contain any information aside from what we can trivially infer, which is that someone who believes in "historic Christianity" is someone who is a Christian that believes that gay marriage is antithetical to Christianity. And what does "historic Judaism" mean? Does it mean Orthodox Judaism? It's true that Orthodox Jews are anti-gay-marriage, on the whole--but it's also true that most Jews aren't Orthodox and are, in fact, a fairly liberal and tolerant bunch. Is Newt really pandering here to Orthodox Jews? And what does "historic Islam" mean? If it means a strain of Islam that has remained relatively untouched by modernity, well then, er--isn't that what Republicans like Gingrich are always so quick to label "Islamo-fascism"?

I get the impression that when Gingrich orders a bagel, and it is not toasted to his liking, he decries the bagel fascism he has been subjected to, and yearns for a proper historical bagel.

William Kristol's distortion

In his latest op-ed, William Kristol portrays the California Supreme Court's gay marriage decision as a case of an over-active judiciary overturning the will of the people:

On Thursday, the California Supreme Court did precisely what much of the American public doesn’t want judges doing: it made social policy from the bench. With a 4-to-3 majority, the judges chose not to defer to a ballot initiative approved by 61 percent of California voters eight years ago, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

What Kristol fails to mention is that, since that ballot initiative, the California legislature has enacted civil unions for gay couples, which include all of the legal benefits and responsibilities of marriage. The issue before the court was whether officially calling these arrangements "domestic partnerhsips" instead of "marriages" violated a provision against discrimination in the state Constitution of California. As it says plainly in the opinion:

Accordingly, the legal issue we must resolve is not whether it would be constitutionally permissible under the California Constitution for the state to limit marriage only to opposite-sex couples while denying same-sex couples any opportunity to enter into an official relationship with all or virtually all of the same substantive attributes, but rather whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designated a “marriage” whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a “domestic partnership.” The question we must address is whether, under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

From what Kristol says, you get the impression that the decision substantively altered California's policy on gay marriage. In reality, though, the decision's impact was on semantics, not substance. So Kristol and other conservatives will continue to hold this up as an example of extreme judicial activism, when in fact there was very little of this so-called activism going on.