Now, when do we get it in my new home, Washington? We can’t even travel to MA to get married because the state chose to enforce a 1913 law (intended to put the brakes on interracial marriage) that MA will not perform marriages that are not recognized in one’s state of residence. That means that Knox and I have to get legally married in Canada, where there are no residency requirements. As I understand it, the marriage will then be recognized not only in countries that allow gay marriage (Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and South Africa), but also in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York (these last two don’t yet perform gay marriages but recognize out-of-state marriages).

To be sure, today marks a major milestone, but until equality becomes a non-issue and couples like us do not have to deal with this crazy patchwork of laws and second-class status, the fight will continue.

We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.

Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite—provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence—they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home.

• Big Climb: successful, not anywhere as grueling as it sounds
• Eastern Washington state: The Potholes are amazing, the rodeos are thrilling
• Consider participating in The Day of Silence to bring attention to anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools
• On a lighter note, check out how to get from New York to Dublin; you may want to have broadband access

I found the following paragraphs particularly important:

Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control–a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.

And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: “inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life.”

The quote comes directly from Paul Starr, one of our most formidable public thinkers, whose forthcoming book, Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism, is a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America’s greatness as their own. Starr’s book is one of three new books that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate (emphasis mine)

That, you see, is why I’m a progressive. The purpose of government is not to make the rich richer, but to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to meet their basic needs and strive for their wants. With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes, and of course all of us have to give back to the society that sustains us, rich and poor alike. That is the social contract.

Neocons tend to go on about family values and community values. What can possibly speak more to the issue of “values” than having everyone participate, via the proxy of government, in a fair distribution of basic services to every member of society? Why is it acceptable to tithe in Sunday services and give alms to the poor but anathema to use the government to distribute aid fairly, without regard to the geographical and bias limits inherent in individual or local gestures of goodwill?

Take action to demand accurate and fair reporting by clicking here and here!

UPDATE: Several FBI agents declined to be associated with the making of the movie after producers refused to fix the inaccuracies.

UPDATE: Appletreeblog points out that advance copies were not in fact distributed to right-wing bloggers.

Welcome to Dan Savage’s world.

I just finished reading The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and my Family. I liked this book most of all because it is an entertaining read. Like a good relationship or a satisfying conversation, Savage strikes the right balance between light banter, Heartfelt Sharing, and Deep Topics. One of the passages I found most moving, for example, is the following:

Being single visits a kind of constant, low-intensity misery on a person—at least on a person who does not want to be single. Coming home to an empty house, not having anyone to confide in, facing illnesses on your own—being alone hurts, but people can get used to it. But being in a long-term relationship does not spare you from all that day-to-day pain. It just banks it. Every day I’m with Terry [Miller, Savage's partner], every day I’m not alone, a little misery gets put into a savings account, where interest is compounded hourly. The day Terry dies, all the pain I avoided when I was with him will be paid out all at once; I will suffer a windfall of misery. I imagine the pain would literally feel like being torn in two. Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about “one flesh”?

Savage, if you did not know, is not only the editor of Seattle’s Stranger who last week confronted Washington’s Chief Justice over the gay marriage ruling, but he is also a sex-advice columnist. As such, he is not afraid to tackle taboo subjects that make people on both sides of the gay marriage debate uncomfortable. After dispensing with the well-known fallacy that marriage is all about the children and thus should be reserved for straight couples (huh?), he proceeds to talk about monogamy:

Straight couples do not have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn’t compulsory and its absence doesn’t invalidate a marriage…. Married straight couples are presumed to be monogamous until proven otherwise, of course, and that assumption serves as a powerful inducement to be (or appear to be) monogamous.

By promoting the erroneous notion that monogamy defines marriage, and that all gay couples who want to marry want to be monogamous, supporters of gay marriage are creating and, in some cases, attempting to enforce a double standard of their own—one that opponents of gay marriage can poke holes in pretty easily. Just as supporters of gay marriage can produce gay and lesbian couples with children, opponents of gay marriage won’t have to search for long before they find nonmonogamous gay couples among the thousands who have wed in Canada and Massachusetts….

He goes on to cite James Dobson’s specious arguments about the supposed perniciousness of gay marriages, and continues:

Before I argue with Dobson, I would like to agree with him on one point: Dobson is absolutely correct when he says that children are naturally conservative creatures—but not in the modern sense of the term “conservative.”….Children are conservative inasmuch as they require stability in order to feel secure and therefore prefer things to stay the same. They need ritual and familiarity….

If we want to promote stable, lasting relationships—particularly for all those naturally conservative kids out there—we shouldn’t encourage people to have unrealistic expectations about sex, love, and desire.

As if on cue, the same week that I read The Committment, The New York Times published an article on gay men stuck in straight marriages. The stories there are just heartbreaking: in most cases, rather than participating in the consensual non-monogamy of the kind that Dan Savage discusses, the men are outright cheating on their wives because they cannot conceive of a life with an open adult emotional attachment to another man.

Perhaps it’s naïve at this point to expect America to have a sane discussion about same-sex marriage any time soon, but I think both sides would do well to read Savage’s book and understand what a gay family actually feels like—beyond the moralistic debates, the political posturing, and the hate-filled rhetoric.

If this doesn’t make the case for instant runoff voting, I don’t know what does.

Since commonly held ideas, attitudes and presumptions frame what is politically possible and create the “window,” a change in the opinions held by politicians and the people in general will shift it. Move the window of what is politically possible and those policies previously impractical can become the next great popular and legislative rage.

Section 1. The right of two individuals to enter into or dissolve a civil marriage, with all its attendant rights and responsibilites, shall not be denied or abridged on account of either participant’s sex.

Section 2. This article shall not be construed as obliging private institutions or faiths to recognize any marriages.

Section 3. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.