The past week or two has seen an extraordinary burst of both news and commentary on the marriage issue. Here are some highlights in case you missed them from my Twitter feed on gay issues, which you should consider following today:
- In one new poll Republican support for gay marriage has jumped from 13 to 37 percent in just 10 months [CBS News] If the numbers are to be believed, a plurality of under-50 Republicans now support it [Sargent, WaPo] 67-30 favor in California [KPIX]
- Andrew Ferguson is always worth reading, even when he’s on the wrong side of an issue, but he lost me at sentence 2 when he described Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield as “disinterested,” as opposed to all the gay-marriage-case amici who are actually committed to strong points of view [Weekly Standard; see also Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Ted Frank, etc. on the state of the social science on gays and parenthood]
- Jeff Rosen on federalism and the Prop 8/DOMA cases [New Republic]
- When Justice Kennedy meant when he raised the issue of the “voice of these children” [Ann Althouse; related, Sullivan] Sorry, Mr. Clement, but no one’s gonna buy the line that DOMA was meant to serve purposes of “uniformity” [John Steele Gordon, Commentary] And if you still haven’t watched, my Wednesday Cato panel on same-sex marriage is online [C-SPAN2]
- Freedom opens up possibilities: “Capitalism and the Family” [Steve Horwitz, FEE] “Why Gay Marriage Will Win, and Sexual Freedom Will Lose” [Megan McArdle] It’ll probably have a slight positive net effect on government fiscal coffers [Josh Barro] “Limited government means marriage equality” [Adam Bates, Daily Caller]
4 Comments for “After a tumultuous week”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
The past week or two has seen an extraordinary burst of both news and commentary on the marriage issue.
Every bit of it, from any quarter and all quarters, keeps the national discussion of equality going, and is good for us.
Thinking about the worst of anti-marriage screeds, I wouldn’t have said that (“good for us”) a couple of years ago, but now that pro-equality voices are speaking loud and clear, the anti-marriage screeds are doing us more good than harm because the voices of intolerance have become so full-throated that they turn decent people off.
Just think about the things said in the last couple of weeks about Ron Portman and his son Will by the anti-marriage forces — the hatred and vilification, and the complete lack of love or empathy, in those statements.
If there was any doubt at all that the religious right is vicious and cruel, the last few weeks have erased it. In fact, the religious right’s rhetoric of the last few weeks bring to mind Joseph Welch’s question: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
posted by Clayton on
“he lost me at sentence 2 when he described Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield as ‘disinterested,’ as opposed to all the gay-marriage-case amici who are actually committed to strong points of view”
You may be confusing the meaning of “disinterested” with “uninterested.”
“Uninterested” means apathetic, uncaring, uninvolved.
“disinterested” means objective, without a personal involvment in the case, or (as we say in the South) without a dog in the hunt.
i.e. “Because neither I nor any members of my family are gay, I can look at marriage equality cases from the point of view of a disinterested party.” Note that I don’t buy that particular line of reasoning (Maggie Gallagher could, in that sense, be described as disinterested; it is clear that she is vitally interested).
Be that as it may, I frequently see people write “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested,” and, as an English teacher, it drives me nuts.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
On the surface, all Andrew Ferguson probably meant was that neither Harvey Mansfield nor Leon Kass are paid by pro-equality or anti-equality organizations; both are tenured professors at respected universities, and any personal interest in the outcome of the case is indirect if at all, harvested through books sale and speaking engagements.
Neither is disinterested (that is to say unbiased and impartial) in the ordinary-language sense of the term, though; both have carved their niche in the academic world by advancing a particular understanding of culture, an understanding that traces back to the thought of Leo Strauss and the classical philosophers.
It is that sleight of hand on Ferguson’s part between the technical and the ordinary language senses of the word disinterested on Ferguson’s part that is, for me, discordant.
I picked up on something else in Ferguson’s commentary, something even more slippery. In his fulsome praise of the disinterested, Ferguson implies that he, too, is disinterested, in the sense of unbiased and impartial, and that is not the case.
Ferguson betrays himself in the second half of his commentary:
Among the many annoying tics of contemporary liberalism is its insistence that liberal social policies are always and everywhere determined by the latest findings of social science. Redistribution, affirmative action, tighter economic regulation—name the policy and you’re sure to find some associate professor of some social science or another beavering away with a labful of undergraduates to discover its benefits. Such are the claims made for gay marriage. “More than thirty years of social science,” as one piece of NPR agitprop declared on Morning Edition last week, have demonstrated that children raised by homosexual couples show “no difference” in social outcomes from children reared in heterosexual households. And more recent cutting-edge data show the salubrious effects of gay marriage in general. We are told.
Rather than dressing up a ten-cent idea in ten-dollar words, Ferguson could have simply said that when the social sciences contradict his biases, he puts his fingers in his ears.
posted by Walter Olson on
Clayton: Well, yes, I too would be happy if we could shore up that good old distinction. But Ferguson was contrasting the Kass/Mansfield brief with “the pile of amicus briefs filed by interested parties,” and his later discussion indicates that by this he had in mind especially those filed by associations of psychologists, sociologists, pediatricians, and suchlike professional and scholarly groups. These groups, like Kass and Mansfield, are not “interested” in the sense of having any legal interest in the outcome of the case. So I read Ferguson to be saying (rather plausibly) that organized psychologists, sociologists etc. have a known ideological stance but (implausibly) that Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield don’t. I suppose it’s possible that he was instead implying that organized sociologists etc. have some tangible interest in how the dispute turns out, and hope it will drum up more business for them or something, but that seems to me the less likely way to read his discussion.