The Tin Man » 2005

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Some days I tool around the blogosphere and want to slit my wrists at all the exquisite prose I read. There are times when I feel so inadequate, so word-sloppy.

Good writing simultaneously turns me on and slays me. When I read an excellent piece of writing, particularly on a blog, I feel:

1) Admiration for the writer.

2) Desire for the writer.

3) Envy of the writer’s talent.

4) A competitive itch.

5) Personal despair.

It’s a potent brew. I don’t always feel all of these to the same degree, but they’re there.

5:05 PM | 4 drops of oil

Thursday, June 2, 2005

My mouth is watering.

The New Yorker, the weekly magazine that started as “a hectic book of gossip, cartoons and facetiae,” as Louis Menand once wrote, and has evolved into a citadel of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, will publish its entire 80-year archives on searchable computer discs this fall.

The collection, titled “The Complete New Yorker,” will consist of eight DVD’s containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be “every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement,” David Remnick, editor of the magazine, has written in an introduction to the collection.

The collection, which will also include a 123-page book containing Mr. Remnick’s essay, a New Yorker timeline and highlights of selected pages from the magazine, is being published by the magazine and will be distributed to stores by Random House. It will have a cover price of $100, although it is likely to be sold in many bookstores and online for considerably less. [Amazon.com will sell it for $63.] The magazine also plans to issue annual updates to the disc collection, and it expects a first printing of 200,000 copies.

I am so getting this.

11:13 AM | 5 drops of oil

Friday, June 3, 2005

Best Footnote Ever

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________
Nos. 04-2032, 04-2293 & 04-2309
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee, Cross-Appellant,
v.
DARRON J. MURPHY, SR.,
Defendant-Appellant, Cross-Appellee,
and
JENNIFER BAKER,
Defendant, Cross-Appellee.
____________
Appeals from the United States District Court
for the Southern District of Illinois.
No. 03 CR 30137—G. Patrick Murphy, Chief Judge.
____________
ARGUED JANUARY 13, 2005—DECIDED MAY 4, 2005

[snip]

On the evening of May 29, 2003, Hayden was smoking crack with three other folks at a trailer park home on Chain of Rocks Road in Granite City, Illinois. Murphy, Sr., who had sold drugs to Hayden several years earlier, showed up later that night. He was friendly at first, but he soon called Hayden a “snitch bitch ho”¹ and hit her in the head with the back of his hand….

[snip]

¹ The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”

9:51 AM | 5 drops of oil

Saturday, June 4, 2005

New York’s Sixth: a new blog about Jersey City and Hoboken, a.k.a. New York City’s “sixth borough” (a.k.a. the place where I will soon no longer be living):

Downtown Jersey City and Hoboken in recent years has seen a rise in popularity as New York City realestate prices skyrocket. With subway access via the Port Authority’s PATH trains putting Manhattan just minutes away– literally closer than Brooklyn or even Harlem– New York’s unofficial Sixth Borough is coming into its own.

New York’s Sixth is dedicated to filling the void that many New York blogs have left vacant.

And I’m amused by this New York City area map created by the blog’s author (particulary Delta Kappa Phi Epsilon, or Hoboken).

1:32 PM | 1 drop of oil

Sunday, June 5, 2005

Interesting piece in the Times today about sex drive in relationships, even though it’s geared toward women:

A drop in partnered sex among cohabitating or married partners is a fact of life - advice on how to maintain or rekindle desire has been around since the beginning of written history. Almost universally, humans seem to struggle against the notion that sex is just for reproduction.

Professor Laumann’s study indicates that by age 30, three-quarters of Americans are either married or living with someone, but they are starting to have “partnered sex” less often than people in their 20’s. In their 30’s, more people are having sex with a partner a few times a month, and fewer are having sex a few times a week. By their 40’s, this disparity more than doubles for both men and women.

… Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and the author of, most recently, “Why We Love,” has long studied the human brain and love. She theorizes that the brain has evolved three mating drives: lust, the craving for sexual gratification; romantic love, a focused attention on another, often compared to an opiate-like state; and attachment, the feelings of calm, security and union with a long-term partner. Each drive travels along a different pathway in the brain, Dr. Fisher and colleagues say, each associated with different neurochemicals.

“Lust is associated primarily with testosterone in both men and women,” she said. “Romantic love is linked with the natural stimulant dopamine and perhaps norepinephrine and serotonin. And feelings of attachment are produced primarily by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which at elevated levels can actually suppress the circuits for lust.” …

Dr. Nachtigall of New York University makes a further point: “We’re the only mammal that outlives its reproductive functions. Technology helps us live longer and longer. We aren’t supposed to go into menopause; we were only supposed to live about 50 years.”

4:53 PM | 4 drops of oil

Monday, June 6, 2005

Where the hell did this weather come from? We barely get a real spring and then BOOM, it’s like the middle of July. I’ve had to walk outside of my office building to two different meetings today, and it’s just icky. It’s days like this that I start missing winter.

Since last night’s Tony Awards broadcast, my site has received a number of hits from Google searches for “Sarah Paulson gay.” Yes, the actress who plays Laura Wingfield in the current Broadway revival of “The Glass Menagerie” is the girlfriend of Cherry Jones, star of Broadway’s “Doubt,” and yes, it is Sarah whom Cherry kissed last night before going up to receive her award, and yes, that’s why she referred to Laura Wingfield in her acceptance speech.

Matt and I had a busy weekend. It was basically The Weekend We Spent on the Subway.

On Friday night we went all the way up to Harlem for our weekly movie gathering - this week it was “All Over the Guy” and “The Broken Hearts Club,” both of which I’d seen before. (I originally saw “The Broken Hearts Club” at the Chelsea Clearview in a theater full of queens. What an experience.) Watching these movies back to back allowed me to compare them. They both take place in L.A., both have nary a chest hair in sight, and both use odd slang. I was going to criticize both movies for having scenes in which gay men unrealistically describe things using cryptic initials, but then I found myself referring to some little boy on TV yesterday as an F.I.T. (fag in training), so I can’t really criticize it anymore. Still, you really shouldn’t use initials unless everyone in the conversation knows what they mean; otherwise it comes off as obnoxious. (I do criticize the men in “Broken Hearts Club” for referring to people as “[Blank] Guy,” like “J. Crew Guy” or “Purple Guy.” In my circles it’s not “Guy” but “Boy.” For instance, a friend of mine used to refer to this particularly pretentious and verbose guy he dated as “Efficacious Boy,” because that was one of the guy’s typical pretentious words.)

On Saturday afternoon we rode the Staten Island Ferry, which, admittedly, didn’t involve the subway, but I did want to mention it.

On Saturday night we went uptown again - from Battery Park (or thereabouts), way up to Washington Heights, for Jon and JP’s apartment-warming party. The gays were in one room, the straights in the other. I drank too much; I basically skipped the fun part of being drunk and went right to feeling ill and nearly falling asleep on Jon and JP’s apartment floor. Fortunately, my sweet boyfriend took excellent care of me. After the party, a few of us got on the subway, and when the train started moving I thought I was going to be sick. I leaned against Matt’s shoulder and fell asleep around 168th Street, and the next thing I knew we were at 59th Street and his arm was around me. Several subway stops later, we were home.

Last night, before the Tonys, we went out to dinner with my parents and my brother and his girlfriend, because my dad, my brother and my brother’s girlfriend all had birthdays last week. We ate at the new Bar Room at MoMa, which was absolutely wonderful. I had grilled shrimp with a green cabbage and gruyere salad, followed by sesame-encrusted tuna; my dessert, which was out of this world, was a few beignets with maple ice cream, caramel & citrus mango marmelade. I also had a Mango Passion Mojito. It was an outstanding meal. Go there if you can.

Now that The Weekend We Spent on the Subway is over, we might need The Weekend in Front of the TV. I’m kidding; I enjoy tooling around the city. As long as next weekend isn’t as hot as it was yesterday and today.

4:12 PM | 5 drops of oil

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

I’ve been having major body-image issues lately. It all started late last summer, at age 30, when I realized that I’d begun to gain a little weight for the first time in my life. My jeans were suddenly too snug, and some of my underwear was not fitting quite as comfortably as it used to. Then, on Sunday, when we were out to dinner with family, I was wearing a tight-fitting Polo shirt, and my brother patted my stomach and said, “What’s going on there?” Sure enough, there is a little bit of a belly there. Not much, but more than I used to have.

What’s worse, now that the weather is hot, there are guys walking around everywhere with well-developed bodies. Biceps and triceps and chests, oh my. It makes me feel worse.

I’m not sure if I can convey how foreign this is to me. I’ve always been slim. Always. I’d read articles about people trying to lose weight and I’d laugh inwardly. Thank god I’ll never have to worry about that, I’d think. My dad is on the husky side, but while we have very similar faces, our bodies were always different. My brother’s body took after his, but mine took after my grandfather’s lean frame. I could eat whatever I wanted, barely exercise, and not have to worry about a thing. I figured I’d always be immune. Slim was part of who I was.

That’s why it’s so strange to stand in front of the bathroom mirror these days, look at my shirtless body sideways, and see a bit more than I’d like. It’s like I’m not me anymore. I’m someone else.

I have horrific visions of it getting worse as I get older. I’ll blimp out until I’m not only short but fat, too. In ten years I could be short, fat and middle aged.

That’s why I have to stop this now. When Matt and I move next month, we’ll have discount access to the nearby YMCA, and I’m going to start doing cardio activities. Exercise bike, stairmaster, treadmill. Ideally I’d like to lift weights, too, and tone my body up, but I find exercise incredibly boring. I’ve never been able to keep at a routine for more than a week. So I’m going to start easy. No weights. Just 30-45 minutes of cardio, three times a week. That should be enough to help me return to my formerly svelte self, right?

Otherwise, I’m going to change my name and enter the Federal Witness Protection Program. A witness to my own weight increase. He saw things that were never meant to be seen…

This is just not who I am. I want to be me again. The me I’ve always known.

4:24 PM | 21 drops of oil

Thursday, June 9, 2005

By the end of the month, the U.S. Supreme Court will have completed its current term (and Chief Justice Rehnquist will very likely have announced his retirement, although I hope not).

Here are the cases yet to be decided this term that I find the most interesting (taken from here - any case that has nothing listed under “Opinion” and does not say “2005-06 term” under “Oral Argument” will be decided this month; the following links provide nice summaries of the cases mentioned as well as links to case materials):

Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County v. ACLU - These are probably the highest-profile cases remaining and will likely be decided together. They involve whether a government-sponsored display of the Ten Commandments violates the First Amendment.

MGM v. Grokster - The Court will decide whether the distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing computer software can be held vicariously or contributorily liable for copyright infringement. This will be high-profile as well.

National Cable & Telecommunications Assn., et al. v. Brand X Internet Services / FCC v. Brand X Internet Services - The Court will decide whether it is proper for the FCC to classify cable modem service as an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service” for purposes of regulation under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. DSL is subject to stricter FCC regulation than cable modem service because it is owned by telecommunications companies and is therefore classified as a “telecommunications service.”

In all, there are 26 decisions remaining to be announced by the end of this term. Supreme Court decisions are announced on Mondays and sometimes on Thursdays as well.

There are no gay-rights cases this term, but next term there’s Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, about whether the federal government can withhold funding from law schools that bar military recruiters from campus. Several law schools bar military recruiters because they say the ban on gays serving openly in the military violates those schools’ non-discrimination policies. See also this article that discusses the case in light of Dale v. Boy Scouts of America.

The Court seems to take up a gay-related case every three or four years. The last one was Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.

1:25 PM | 2 drops of oil

The Times today has an article about how hard it is for short men to find clothes that fit, accompanied by a guide to places that sell small sizes. It also links to this clothing guide for short men.

3:51 PM | 5 drops of oil

Friday, June 10, 2005

I went running on Wednesday night for the first time in over a year. I ran a mile and a half, which was possibly a mistake, because when I was finished, my right leg cramped up, and today, for the second day in a row, my thighs are painfully sore. Guess it takes a few days to recover.

I’ve taken a look at the South Beach Diet and I might give it a shot, or at least follow its guidelines as to what foods to eat or avoid. I’m only about 10-15 pounds above my ideal weight, I think.

There’s this whole low-carb craze, but I just don’t get how things like bread and rice, staples of the human diet for millennia, can be bad for a person. I guess we’re less physically active as a species than we used to be - we don’t need to wash our clothes by hand or farm our own food anymore. I’m just glad I’m a city person and do lots of walking, otherwise I might not be as slim as I actually am.

11:37 AM | 10 drops of oil

Monday, June 13, 2005

Andy writes a very funny review of the audience at a concert he saw at Carnegie Hall. The concert was sponsored by MidAmerica Productions. Matt and I performed in a MidAmerica-sponsored concert at Carnegie Hall a few months ago, but Andy’s story is much more entertaining. Seems like the yokels take over Carnegie Hall whenever MidAmerica sponsors a concert there.

Related, from last week’s Times: At Carnegie Hall, All May Not Be as It Seems.

4:59 PM | 2 drops of oil

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

I’ve mentioned this in passing, but I haven’t officially announced it, so: Matt and I are moving in together this summer. We’ve been together more than a year and a half now, and we started talking about this almost a year ago. Since Matt’s moving to a new building anyway, and since my landlord (who bought my building several months ago) is planning to either sell my apartment as a condo when the lease comes up or raise my rent, and doesn’t mind if I end my lease early, it seems like a good time. Matt’s a residence hall director for the New School (I bet you didn’t even know the New School had residence halls), and he gets his own apartment in the building he runs, but he’s switching to a different building in a couple of weeks. We’ll be living on West Eighth Street, right in the Village.

I’ve lived with Matt de facto in his current apartment since last fall. I sleep there every night, most of my clothes are there, my weekend newspaper gets delivered there, etc. Officially moving in together will be slightly different, of course; it will officially be our place, and I won’t have that buffer zone of my Jersey City apartment if I ever feel like spending some time alone. But I’ll have my computer, all my books and bookshelves, my CDs and DVDs, the rest of my clothes, and all my little tchotchkes that make a place home. Plus there’ll be a spare office on the floor above us that we might set up as a little “study” for me if I ever feel like having a quiet space.

In general, there are three big plusses to this move.

One, Matt and I will be living together!

Two, I’ll be living in Manhattan. Finally. Long, longtime readers of this blog will recall that for many years now, I’ve wanted to leave Jersey City and finally move into Manhattan. It’s comical how many times in the past I’ve written something here like “I’m moving to Manhattan. I mean it this time,” and didn’t actually do it. Well, I’m doing it.

Three, the apartment is rent-free. Yup. Living in Manhattan, rent-free. Living in the Village, rent-free. And it’s a great apartment with a nice view, and a large kitchen by Manhattan standards. So all the money I’m currently paying in rent, I will instead put toward my student loans.

Matt gets the place next Friday (and two days later the Pride Parade marches right down our street), and during the month of July I’ll be moving in my stuff and selling the things I no longer want.

I guess it’s normal to be nervous, and I am. But I’m also excited.

6:09 PM | 18 drops of oil

Thursday, June 16, 2005

The other night I was riding the 2 train uptown to chorus rehearsal. Sitting across from me was this guy who just had to be a Jewish lawyer. He looked the part. He was intently studying a pile of paper, wearing glasses, sweating, balding (in a bad way), and chewing a pen. If Woody Allen had a younger cousin and he was a lawyer, it might have been this guy. I sent contemptuous thoughts his way. Hah, you overstressed law firm slave! I thought. Glad I’m not you!

At one point he pulled something out of his pocket and I realized it contained an ID card with his name and - bingo - the name of a law firm. It can be fun to play detective, so later on I decided to look him up online.

[Originally I linked here to his online attorney profile, but I’ve decided that wasn’t very nice. See comments.]

Wow - Yale Law School, Highest Honors at Oxford, a Fulbright Scholar, and a former clerk for the First Circuit.

Some credentials, eh? You never know who’s riding the subway with you.

3:16 PM | 6 drops of oil

Friday, June 17, 2005

Oooh, Neal Stephenson has a piece in today’s Times about “geeking out” vs. “vegging out.”

To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

For all you Stephenson completists out there. (I’m not one - yet.)

11:34 AM | 1 drop of oil

From Steve Jobs’s commencement speech last Sunday at Stanford:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. …

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

4:48 PM | 3 drops of oil

Sunday, June 19, 2005

This is what happens when Supreme Court justices try to decide where to go for lunch. (Supreme Court geeks will appreciate this.)

12:32 AM | 2 drops of oil

This article from today’s NY Times Magazine, looking at the Christian-centered anti-gay-marriage movement, depresses me.

For [anti-gay-marriage Christians], the issue isn’t one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual — being black, say, or a woman — and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can’t be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.

How do you communicate with people who have such a completely different world view from your own?

”My concern is the health issue,” said Evalena Gray, an activist in southern Maryland. ”I want to get these people away from AIDS, out of that unhealthy lifestyle.”

Then wouldn’t you want to support gay marriage? Monogamous marriage, particularly? Even most gay people weren’t thinking about gay marriage in the 1970s, and that’s when HIV first started to spread. How is keeping the status quo going to change the number of people seroconverting? And haven’t you heard of protected sex? I get so angered and frustrated by people who don’t know how to think.

When I met [Lisa] Polyak [a lesbian who is raising two children in a committed relationship], she told me how, when she first testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage activist, a woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why she was ”doing this” to the woman’s children and grandchildren. Polyak said the encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat in Evalena Gray’s Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a story of how during the same testimony she approached a blond lesbian and talked to her about the effect that gay marriage would have on her grandchildren. ”Then I hugged her neck,” she said, ”and I said, ‘We love you.’ I was kind of consoling her to some extent, out of compassion.”

I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That’s a hard gap to bridge.

How do we bridge this gap? I used to think that conversation was the way to do it - that if I could sit down one-on-one with someone like Evalena Gray, and have a calm conversation in which she and I explained our views to each other, that my appeals to logic and compassion couldn’t help but win her over. Actually, I still think it can help. It requires not a lecture, but communication based on empathy - putting yourself in another’s shoes and “understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing” that person’s “feelings, thoughts, and experience.” People don’t like being lectured to, so in order to change people’s minds, you have to communicate with them on their own terms. And even if they don’t admit to agreeing with you, your words can leave some impression on them.

Barring that, though, sometimes I think the best move is to focus our energy on the moderates, those who are more open-minded and more amenable to rethinking their position on this. And I also sometimes think it’s best to focus on civil unions, if calling it a different name will garner more support. After all, calling it “marriage” isn’t going to give it any more legitimacy in some people’s eyes than calling it a civil union; if the goal of calling it “marriage” is to give us social legitimacy, then sorry, that’s not going to do it. People who oppose us and think we’re evil will continue to do so. Why waste our time trying to make people like us when we’d be better off focusing on the pragmatic goal of getting solid rights, whatever we wind up calling them?

4:15 PM | 20 drops of oil

Monday, June 20, 2005

I’ve been thinking about my prior post. Sometimes I wish I could write simply and forcefully about my views on gay marriage and anti-gay Christians, but I have conflicting thoughts and feelings on those subjects. To explain, I’ll have to describe things in personal terms.

I am, by nature, a conciliator. I don’t like conflict. I like to concede some ground in order to have some peace. It can make me feel magnanimous, mature, and good. I like to be liked. I’m also afraid of my enemies and of what they can do to me if I push too hard. They might attack me or kill me. (I’m sure there are parental- or other upbringing-related reasons for all of this.)

At the same, I often doubt whether concession and compromise are really the way to go. The fact is, none of us know what the consequences of our actions will be. Therefore, do you try to act out of pragmatism, or out of principle? Or do you act from a mix of pragmatism and idealism - be pragmatic, but do it because you think that’s the best way to eventually achieve your goal? I tend to take that last view.

But I know that my actions and views on gay marriage tend to be unconsciously motivated more by fear than by principle; that is, into the basket of calculations, I throw an assessment of how other people will react. And I’m sure I do it in areas beyond gay marriage; it’s just the way I tend to be.

Another thing about me is that I’m very interested in what makes other people tick. I tend to be empathic - which means, of course, not that I agree with another person’s views, but that I try to understand why that person has those views. I used to consider becoming a psychotherapist because I can find it interesting to try and understand other people’s motivations.

But you can’t put yourself completely into another person’s body. I’ve never actually sat down and had a one-on-one conversation with a conservative Christian. The most I’ve done is participate in online debates on message boards and the comment sections of some people’s blog posts. But those never last because people stop commenting. I’ve never completely delved into the mind of a conservative Christian, like some of the commenters on the previous post have. So I don’t know if my empathy and understanding and psychotherapeutic impulses can change a thing in other people. Since I haven’t experienced such a conversation with a conservative Christian, I have to concede that I’m speaking from idealism and naivete. To put it crudely, I’m speaking out of my ass. What the hell do I know?

I don’t know nuthin’, to be honest.

1:13 PM | 7 drops of oil

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

In honor of this week, the culminating week of Gay Pride Month, I present, from my archives, tributes to two men who greatly affected me during my coming-out process.

Here’s the story of Kirk.

Here’s the the story of “Scott.”

10:39 AM | 1 drop of oil

I didn’t even know this until today, but last week, the New Jersey Appellate Division issued a decision in Lewis v. Harris, the state’s same-sex marriage case. The Appellate Division, 2-1, affirmed the trial court’s ruling against same-sex marriage. (The decision includes a published dissent, which should be interesting reading.) This is not really a big deal, because everyone has known that the outcome ultimately depends on the New Jersey Supreme Court, which now gets the case. It’ll probably take at least a year to get through the state supreme court, after which I expect this liberal court to find same-sex marriage constitutional in the state. (It was the New Jersey Supreme Court that issued the pro-gay decision in the Boy Scouts case a few years ago, which of course got overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

We shall see.

(Here’s a Lambda Legal press release on the decision.)

3:13 PM | Comments Off

WYSIWYG last night was terrific as always, with several repeat performers and several new ones. And it left me feeling inferior and bummed out, which is my own issue to deal with, of course. I hid it from everyone except Matt. Afterwards, everyone went to Phoenix and I had a couple of Coronas, which Jon insulted. (They’ll get you back, Jon - they’ll get you back.) Matt’s warm arm around my shoulders, smooches on my cheek, and hand on my leg helped cheer me up from earlier in the evening.

Tomorrow will be the last day that I use the World Trade Center PATH station on a regular basis. I’m helping Matt move to the new digs on Friday (although I won’t be moving in all my stuff until sometime next month), and starting next week, when I commute to work from there, I’ll be taking the Sixth Avenue PATH line, which is my less favorite of the two. That Christopher-Street-to-New-Jersey ride is so damn slow. But I’ll be walking through the Village every morning on my way to the station, which will be so neat.

I’ve figured out that the closest gay bar to our new place (I think) will be Pieces on Christopher Street. I discovered Pieces a few years ago, and its lack of pretension made it my regular gay bar for a few months. Now it’ll be just a five-minute walk away. We actually did a test run the other night - we went there with David, who was in town, and were joined later by Jere. David proved quite popular with one of the bar patrons; Jere has the rest of the story from after Matt and I left.

(By the way, if you were at WYSIWYG last night and kept hearing something that sounded like a mule going through its death throes, that was Jere laughing. Jere has the most insane laugh of anyone I’ve ever met. I brought this up with him later, but he doesn’t seem able to control it. Poor guy.)

Anyway - the preparations for the big move continue, and I need to get my ass in gear as far as writing, and that’s the news from Lake Tinmanicville.

4:28 PM | 5 drops of oil

Thursday, June 23, 2005

I didn’t think this day would come, but today I find myself agreeing with Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist (and O’Connor) and think that the more liberal-minded justices (Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer, and sort of Kennedy) issued a really asinine decision this morning.

The Court ruled in Kelo v. New London, 5-4, that governmental entities can take private homes for private economic development. The “takings clause” of the Fifth Amendment states: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” A governmental entity has always been allowed to take someone’s private property and provide compensation for doing so, but only if it’s for a “public use” - a highway, a railroad, etc. (There are more examples, but I can’t think of any - I’m far from an expert on the takings clause.) This morning, in an opinion by Justice Stevens (who’s usually one of my favorites), the Court broadly interpreted “public use” and stated that private economic development can be considered a public use if a government entity thinks it is.

What’s weird is that this decision can be interpreted, in one way, as pro-corporation. Meanwhile, Thomas, dissenting, writes, “This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a ‘public use.’”

FYI, Kennedy agreed with the majority, but only based on the specific circumstances of this case. It’s possible that if the facts were a bit different, the decision might have gone the other way.

I don’t know what on earth the majority was thinking with this one.

12:27 PM | 8 drops of oil

Friday, June 24, 2005

We moved all of Matt’s stuff up to the new place in the Village today. We lugged all the boxes down to the lobby of the old building, Moishe’s showed up to load everything onto the truck, and now most of Matt’s stuff is in an empty dorm (since it’s mainly a dorm building) across the hall. Next we’ve got to sweep and Swiffer and mop the floors - I keep finding these long black hairs everywhere, because Matt’s predecessor had long black hair, and the floors are kind of dirty. The place also smells rather cigarette-smoky, so we may have to wash the walls or something; fortunately, there’s no carpeting, because I hear that cigarette smoke is difficult to get out of carpets.

I look forward to finishing all the cleaning and wiping down of cabinets, fridge, et cetera, so we can start setting things up. And then I’ll start moving in my own stuff over the next few weeks.

I can’t believe we’re going to be sleeping in the Village tonight. Hooray!

4:02 PM | 1 drop of oil

Saturday, June 25, 2005

The Dyke March just went by on Fifth Avenue. I was unpacking stuff, and I started to hear all these whistles and shouts, so I opened the window, looked out, and saw a huge crowd marching down Fifth. I saw some rainbow flags. It had to be the Dyke March, which is always the day before the Pride March.

Below us, down on Eighth Street, there’s an NYC truck unloading metal barricades for said Pride March, which will go right past our building. Yay! (Yay I think…)

The views from this apartment are beautiful. If I stick my head out the window (which makes Matt very nervous) and look left, I can see 8th Street all the way to Tomkins Square Park; if I look right, I can see 8th Street end at Sixth Avenue, and in the distance I can even see New Jersey. Looking south out the windows, we can see the tall buildings of the World Financial Center - this apartment must have had a great view of the World Trade Center towers. The kitchen has a window facing north, out of which, in the distance, we can see just the edge of One Penn Plaza on 34th Street.

One of us will take some photos soon and post them.

7:19 PM | 9 drops of oil

Matt has posted some photos of the new place.

10:52 PM | 1 drop of oil

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Eighth Street, After the Pride Parade

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6:26 PM | 11 drops of oil

Monday, June 27, 2005

A scenario for Monday: “Amid layer upon layer of uncertainty, one thing seems reasonably predictable about the Supreme Court’s public session on Monday, the last public sitting of the current Term. That is that the Court will formally recess for the summer without a word being said about any retirement, or retirements, from the Court. Too much, however, can be read into that, and should not be.”

10:58 AM | 3 drops of oil

Yesterday, instead of going to the Pride parade, we let the parade come to us.

It’s really strange living in the new place.

We hung out on the front steps of our (wow, our!) building with a few of Matt’s colleagues, and because we were set back from the sidewalk, we could watch both the parade and the passers-by. We saw lots of shirtless guys with half-exposed G.I. Joe muscles. We saw Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Gifford Miller and Al Sharpton and the Altoids float. We looked for Andy as the Lambda Legal group marched by, but we didn’t see him, even though he was apparently there.

I wish I’d taken a picture from our apartment window as the parade went by, instead of just after it was over, because the view of the crowds was really stunning.

Later at night, we heard boom-boom-booming, so I looked out the apartment window, craned my neck around, and saw fireworks going off at the Pier Dance.

I’m overwhelmed. This is a lot to experience all at once. The shock of finally being a New Yorker, and living on a rather urban street at that, and living right in the neighborhood I used to visit all the time, but I’m THERE without having to take the PATH or subway to get there — and on top of that, the frigging PRIDE PARADE marches right down our street before we’ve even finished unpacking and getting settled. None of this feels real yet. It’s too outlandish to feel real.

Now that we’re in the new place, I’m more eager than ever to get my stuff all moved in — my books and bookshelves and my TV and TV stand and other stuff. And my bedframe is still at my old place, so we’re sleeping on a mattress and boxspring right now. And we don’t have a real couch or a coffee table or cable TV yet.

A little excitement is good, but I hope the place also becomes home - a place we can relax in, cocoon in, a place where I can curl up with a good book instead of feeling like I’m in the midst of everything all the time.

This was clearly an atypical weekend in many ways. Eventually things will settle down, I suppose. I look forward to it.

3:33 PM | 2 drops of oil

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

I’ve read Scalia’s dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that found the display of the Ten Commandments in certain county courthouses unconstitutional. The majority opinion itself is problematic, but so is Scalia’s dissent.

Part One of Scalia’s dissent, which compromises more than half his written opinion, is what I find most problematic. (Kennedy, who dissented as well, declined to go along with this part of it.) First, Scalia states:

On September 11, 2001 I was attending in Rome, Italy an international conference of judges and lawyers, principally from Europe and the United States. That night and the next morning virtually all of the participants watched, in their hotel rooms, the address to the Nation by the President of the United States concerning the murderous attacks upon the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, in which thousands of Americans had been killed. The address ended, as Presidential addresses often do, with the prayer “God bless America.” The next afternoon I was approached by one of the judges from a European country, who, after extending his profound condolences for my country’s loss, sadly observed “How I wish that the Head of State of my country, at a similar time of national tragedy and distress, could conclude his address ‘God bless ______.’ It is of course absolutely forbidden.”

My alarm bell went off when I saw “September 11, 2001.” What purpose does this paragraph have other than appeal to people’s emotions? What legal purpose does it have?

More importantly, when did Scalia start finding validity in the opinions of European judges?

But my main issue with Part One is Scalia’s substantive arguments. In trying to interpret the First Amendment, Scalia provides numerous examples of actions by early presidents and founders and Congresses to show their views of religion and religious practice vis-a-vis the U.S. government. Scalia claims to be an originalist, but what do any of these examples - even those involving President Washington or the First Congress - have to do with originalism or the constitutional text? If you’re going to rely on originalism in interpreting the meaning of a constitutional amendment, you shouldn’t look past the date of that amendment’s ratification. Once that amendment goes into practice and flawed human beings start working with it, divergent interpretations, some correct and some flawed and some of indeterminable validity, are going to arise and multiply. Furthermore, why should we ascribe more validity to the practices of a particular individual or the decisions of a particular session of Congress than to the meaning given by the founders and ratifiers collectively? We shouldn’t rely on some presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation or some chaplain’s opening prayer at a legislative session as guidance in interpreting the Constitution.

There’s also this. Scalia asks:

how can the Court possibly assert that ” ‘the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between … religion and nonreligion,’ ” … and that “[m]anifesting a purpose to favor … adherence to religion generally,” … is unconstitutional? Who says so? Surely not the words of the Constitution. Surely not the history and traditions that reflect our society’s constant understanding of those words. Surely not even the current sense of our society, recently reflected in an Act of Congress adopted unanimously by the Senate and with only 5 nays in the House of Representatives … criticizing a Court of Appeals opinion that had held “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

Last time I checked, it’s not Congress’s job to decide whether something is constitutional.

That said, part of Scalia’s dissent makes sense. He criticizes the majority, as well as the Lemon test (named for Lemon v. Kurtzman, which set forth a multi-pronged test for evaluating the constitutionality of a government action under the Establishment Clause), for relying too much on examining a government entity’s purpose when trying to decide whether a governmental action is constitutional under the First Amendment. One of the majority’s stated reasons for declaring the particular displays of the Ten Commandments in these cases unconstitutional was that earlier actions and statements by the county executive and legislative bodies showed that they had a religious purpose in displaying the Ten Commandments. It seems odd to me that the purpose in displaying the Ten Commandments should matter. As Scalia points out:

This inconsistency may be explicable in theory, but I suspect that the “objective observer” with whom the Court is so concerned will recognize its absurdity in practice. By virtue of details familiar only to the parties to litigation and their lawyers, McCreary and Pulaski Counties, Kentucky, and Rutherford County, Tennessee, have been ordered to remove the same display that appears in courthouses from Mercer County, Kentucky to Elkhart County, Indiana. … Displays erected in silence (and under the direction of good legal advice) are permissible, while those hung after discussion and debate are deemed unconstitutional. Reduction of the Establishment Clause to such minutiae trivializes the Clause’s protection against religious establishment; indeed, it may inflame religious passions by making the passing comments of every government official the subject of endless litigation.

I tend to agree. It’s a weird way to analyze the issue in this particular case. The physical context of the display matters more than the purpose behind it, I think.

Still, having said all this, even though I consider myself rather agnostic (albeit being born a Jew and self-identifying as a Jew), I’m not completely uncomfortable with the display of the Ten Commandments in a courtroom. It bothers me a little, but not as much as some other things might. It would be different if a judge cited the Ten Commandments in a court ruling, but that’s not the situation here. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to these cases. As Justice Breyer - the only justice who voted for two different outcomes in yesterday’s two Ten Commandments cases - wrote:

“In certain contexts, a display of the tablets of the Ten Commandments can convey not simply a religious message but also a secular moral message (about proper standards of social conduct). And in certain contexts, a display of the tablets can also convey a historical message (about a historic relation between those standards and the law) – a fact that helps to explain the display of those tablets in dozens of courthouses throughout the Nation, including the Supreme Court of the United States.”

4:52 PM | 3 drops of oil

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

There are a couple of good behind-the-scenes articles today on how the White House, Congress, and outside groups are prepared to react in the event of a Supreme Court retirement and subsequent nomination of a new justice. One conservative group, the Committee for Justice, “plans to feed research to conservative bloggers so they can fact-check and counter opponents’ claims,” according to the Washington Post. I was struck by the reference to bloggers - at the time of the last nomination, in 1994, the Web barely registered in our culture. The next nomination will be the first of the Internet Age.

Anyway, a retirement seems increasingly unlikely this year, especially given Justice Thomas’s remark yesterday that the Court’s recent term ended as “winds of controversy swirled about the Court’s decisions and, unfortunately, about the imagined resignations.” I’ve been annoyed by the media’s breathless speculations, both this week and two years ago, over non-existent retirements. And it would be sad if someone retired now, when the Court is achingly close to breaking the record of the longest period of time without a change in membership. The current record is just over 11 years, from February 3, 1812 (the arrival of Joseph Story) to March 18, 1823 (the death of Henry Brockholst Livingston). Since Stephen Breyer joined the Court on August 3, 1994, the record would presumably be broken around September 15, 2005. The new term doesn’t begin until the first Monday in October, so theoretically Rehnquist or O’Connor could announce his/her retirement now, I guess, but not make it effective until the second half of September. But that seems to me like cheating.

Meanwhile, poor Justice Breyer has been the junior justice for 11 years. That’s 11 years of answering the door. He must be sick of it. If anyone’s looking forward to a new justice, it would be him.

12:07 PM | Comments Off