Posts - May 2008

Tomorrow we’re moving to the new apartment. I worked from home today so I could pick up the keys during lunch. (Matt has been crazy busy at work so I volunteered to get the keys. I work in New Jersey and the apartment’s in New York, so it was easier to just stay in the city today.)

Packing is annoying. Matt’s way more stressed about the move than I am, although I’m not what I would call calm. Fortunately, since we knew our current apartment was going to be temporary, we left much of our stuff in boxes. I never unpacked my books or DVDs, so that was one less thing to worry about.

We’ve been really spoiled these last six months. The temporary apartment that Barnard (Matt’s employer) gave us has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a huge living room. So we’re going to have to downsize again. I know, boo hoo. We told ourselves we wouldn’t let ourselves get spoiled… but we let ourselves get spoiled. Still, it’ll be fine.

Tonight we finish packing, and tomorrow morning the movers come. I was trying to figure out the best way to not be stressed about the move, and I decided that the best way to do that is to not expect perfection. If there are glitches, if we have to pay a little more than we expect, if something breaks, then whatever. It’s not like it’s death.

Wish us luck.

We’ve moved! We’re in the new place. The Time Warner guy left about 45 minutes ago, so we have cable and Internet, and I can blog.

The move went off without a hitch. Moving is SO much easier when you pay people to do it for you. We used Rabbit Movers and they did a good job.

I unpacked all my books yesterday, most of which I hadn’t seen in months. I got rid of tons of books last fall, but I still have too many. Last night I’d open a box and find yet more books in it and shake my head. I like having shelves of books, though. They make a home more homey.

It’ll take more time to unpack everything, figure out where it all goes, get curtains, get settled, etc. But eventually this will be home.

From an article about the upcoming “Sex and the City” movie:

While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, Mr. King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. “My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,” he said. “The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.”

Also driving Mr. King’s decision was his fear of falling into cliché. “Who was going to play Carrie’s mother? Connie Stevens? It’s such a traditional sitcom limb. It’s the Thanksgiving episode, and there are Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch. I never wanted to do anything like that.”

I would pay to see Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch as anyone’s parents in a sitcom episode.

How did I never hear that Glenn Scarpelli, my childhood crush from “One Day at a Time,” came out a few years ago?

If you want to get any more work done today, do not click on this list of YouTube videos. Many of these videos are 9-minute compilations of various TV show openings from 1979 to 1992. This one from 1983 contains “We Got It Made” (sexy maid) and “Jennifer Slept Here” (Ann Jillian as a ghost). This one from 1981 contains “Mr. Merlin” (Merlin’s alive today as an auto mechanic), an obscure sitcom I’d always remembered but had sometimes thought I’d imagined.

You can also see the cast of “One Day at a Time” change through the years.

I’m pretty sure I saw Paul Krugman on my NJ Transit train this morning. He was sitting across and two seats behind me in a quarter-full car and was typing on a laptop. I know he’s affiliated with Princeton, and he might have been going there — I was on an express train and Princeton was the next stop after Newark.

I’ve disagreed with stuff he’s written about Clinton and Obama lately, but I wouldn’t have known what to say to him.

Here are some musings that are not very well organized or polished, are probably naive, and might seem silly to anyone else but me. But I want to get them down.

I was having weird thoughts the other day about television, popular culture, and the passage of time, and particularly, for some reason, the vast gulf between the years 1977 and 1983. This was triggered by these compilations of TV show openings that I discovered on Sunday morning, especially the ones from the early 80s.

Why 1977 and 1983? Perhaps because of the nice symmetry — three years on either side of 1980.

In 1977, we were in the Carter era. In 1983, we were in the Reagan era.

In 1977, “Star Wars” came out. In 1983, we had “Return of the Jedi.” (Side note: a long time ago I found an online list of pop-cultural touchstones – “you know you’re a child of the 80s if…”, or something like that. One of the touchstones: when you saw “Star Wars,” you noticed all the cool spaceships. By the time you saw “Return of the Jedi,” you noticed Princess Leia’s breasts or Han Solo’s tight black pants. I was a little too young for that, being just nine years old for most of 1983.)

It’s weird that most of the TV shows we associate with the ’70s were still on the air in the early ’80s, and aging: Three’s Company, The Jeffersons, Alice, One Day at a Time, Happy Days, Benson, The Love Boat. Inga Swenson’s ’70s bowl cut was replaced by a chic, short ’80s do, and she and Benson were still trading insults. I can’t think of many ’80s shows that lasted into the early ’90s, but for some reason there’s this big ’70s-’80s overlap.

In 1977 there was disco. In 1983, there were personal computers. Remember those Charlie-Chaplinesque commercials for the IBM PC? Disco and PCs seem to belong to totally different eras.

In 1977, gay people seemed to live in a paradise. I think of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City.” But by 1983, AIDS had begun to destroy the gay community. On the other side of 1980 lay devastation. My fourth-grade mustachioed math teacher (1983-84) would one day die of AIDS.

In 1977, the big thing in television was jiggle TV. Sex abounded. By the early ’80s, the conservative Reagan era was beginning to take hold and kids and families were coming to dominate TV sitcoms again. Diff’rent Strokes, Silver Spoons, The Facts of Life, and Gimme a Break were essentially about blended or nontraditional families; soon the nuclear family would make a comeback with The Cosby Show and Growing Pains, and Family Ties, already on the air in 1982, would become a big hit. Early-80′s TV, with its kid-filled sitcoms, seemed tailor-made for my age group; what would kids have watched in the late ’70s? The Fonz? Laverne & Shirley? (My own kid-centric experience of the early ’80s is no doubt distorting things. There were probably shows of both eras that don’t fit this mold. See Cheers.)

All of these long transitional years led up to what is, for me, the quintessential ’80s year: 1985. In 1985, my friends and I were in fifth grade, the highest grade in the elementary school, so we were sort of the equivalent of high school seniors and felt cool. My favorite movie, “Back to the Future,” came out that year. I discovered comic books. “We are the World” was the big pop-cultural thing and made us all feel happy and uplifted because, if we put our minds together, we could end world hunger!

I think the greatest year of childhood is the final year before you hit puberty. You’ve come to know who you are as a kid; your brain has developed far enough along that you can understand things well; and hormones haven’t yet begun to mess with everything you’ve come to be. In 1977, when I was three years old, we’d moved to the suburbs and into our New Jersey house. By 1985, I was 11. I’d lived in that house in that idyllic suburban town for eight years. It was home, and familiar; I’d grown comfortable in my skin and my school; I’d come to know who I was.

Over the next 2-3-4 years, it all changed. The decade aged. I went on to middle school, I was forced to skip a grade, I started to have troubling sexual feelings. In 1986, Iran Contra would damage the Reagan image and I’d discover “Saturday Night Live,” with its cynical skewering of politicians. In 1987, the stock market would crash. The ’80s seemed to go on forever, but everything after, say, 1986 didn’t feel like the ’80s to me anymore. By 1987, the ’80s were past their prime, like Christmas lights on December 29th. The ’80s for me basically ended in 1985.

I love the idea of people living at the end of the ’70s, on the cusp of the ’80s, not knowing what was in store. Hedonism would be replaced by conservatism. Self-actualization would be replaced by money. Wide neckties would be replaced by skinny ties. Disco clubs would be replaced by clubs where Wall Street Masters-of-the-Universe types would order expensive bottles of champagne.

Every decade grows old and encrusted before the people who have lived it move en masse into the next era. The people of 1977 found themselves living in a different world six years later — just as the people of 1997 would barely recognize the mood of 2003 (with the intervening impeachment, election recount, dot-com crash, and massive terrorist attack).

Ah, the passage of time.

Related to my previous post: here are my two favorite ABC-TV jingles ever, from 1981 (“Now is the Time, ABC is the Place”) and 1982 (“Come on Along with ABC”). These promo spots are filled with TV stars and the tunes are just so damn catchy.

TV networks would never spend money like this today, and this wonderful schmaltz would never fly in our irony-dominated age.

Glory Days, the new musical about four college friends, has closed after opening night. One official performance. The reviews were pretty miserable. We saw one of the preview performances a couple of weeks ago; it was a cute show (with cute guys), earnest and somewhat poignant, but it didn’t belong on Broadway.

The songs aren’t bad. You can hear some of them on the show’s MySpace page.

(The last show to close after one performance was The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman show starring Ellen Burstyn five years ago. But at least both those shows opened, unlike Bobbi Boland, starring Farrah Fawcett, which closed in previews.)

From the Times:

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, was among those on Wednesday giving Mrs. Clinton room to make her own calculations about the race, saying “a win is a win,” in reference to the Indiana results.

This is something that has annoyed me throughout this nomination process. A win isn’t a win. There’s no such thing as “winning a state” in the Democratic nomination process, or rather, there’s no real importance to winning a state, since states aren’t winner-take-all. These primary nights are not about winning a state; they’re about adding proportional chunks of delegates to running totals. But to the news media, that’s not quite as exciting.

News anchors were up past midnight waiting to see whether Obama or Clinton had won Indiana, when it really only meant the difference of one or two delegates out of 2,000. The media is used to covering winner-take-all presidential elections, and they’re wedded to the concept of “calling a state” for one candidate or another. Determining a “winner” creates news. But it’s inaccurate to say that “winning a state” matters in anything but a symbolic sense.

Other Jeff linked to this video of the end of last week’s Brothers and Sisters, where Kevin proposes to his boyfriend Scotty. I got all teary watching it again. I’m such a creampuff.

This Times editorial says something silly that I’ve also seen elsewhere.

There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process.

Will people stop using this straw man? Has anyone ever said she has no right to continue campaigning? No.

I have the right to wear a clown suit to work every day. But if someone says “You shouldn’t wear a clown suit to work every day,” and I respond by saying, “But I have the right to do it,” that doesn’t really address the point. “I can if I want to” is rarely a useful answer to anything. It’s what a five year old says.

The question isn’t whether Clinton has the right to continue campaigning. Of course she does. The question is whether it serves any purpose. Me, I don’t care if she continues campaigning or not, as long as she stops bringing the likely nominee down with her. Also, superdelegates are allowed to change their minds as many times as they want until the convention at the end of August, and since neither candidate will reach a majority without superdelegates and Obama could still somehow collapse over the next three and a half months, she’s there as a backup.

But she’d be there as a backup anyway. Maybe the best thing for her to do is not end her campaign, but “suspend” it, right after the Montana and South Dakota primaries on June 3. At that point, there won’t be anyone left but superdelegates to convince, and while it’s unlikely a publicly-declared superdelegate will have a change of heart, she can still be there as a backup in case Obama falls apart.

Side note: how weird is it that Puerto Rico has more delegates than Montana and South Dakota combined, and more delegates than Kentucky alone, but Puerto Ricans don’t get to vote for president?

This is a great video about how yogurt is marketed to women. It has some very funny moments. [via Salon]

Howard Kurtz writes about one of my political crushes, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.

On a cable channel packed with such opinionated personalities as Olbermann and Chris Matthews, Todd stands out by not being flamboyant. While others are getting punch-drunk on polls, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley observed, Todd is “the designated driver of MSNBC’s political coverage.”

He is accustomed to the role. During his boyhood in Miami, Todd recalls, his conservative father and a liberal cousin often got sloshed and argued about politics.

Todd was 16 when his dad died. Strapped for cash, Todd was accepted by George Washington University on a music scholarship — he played the French horn — and pursued a double major in politics.

Longtime friend Andrew Flagel, now George Mason University’s dean of admissions, says Todd had phenomenal recall, “whether it had to do with every sports fact you could ever have at your fingertips or every congressional race. He was the Jimmy the Greek of politics. We’d be out at one of the bars in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom and he’d end up with 20 people around us, arguing about either politics or sports, and he’s emceeing the discussion.”

Inspired by Jere’s recent post, I tried out yesterday for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. I applied online a couple of weeks ago and was scheduled for a tryout yesterday after work. I also received via email a list of open-ended questions to fill out, presumably in order to elicit interesting facts about me.

So I went to the ABC offices yesterday for my tryout. It was similar to Jere’s — a large group of people taking a 10-minute, 30-trivia-question multiple-choice Scantron test in an ABC cafeteria. The guy sitting next to me was a burly, middle-aged, gray-goateed man with a thick Boston accent who seemed like he’d do well on TV.

A portion of us passed the test, including me. Everyone who passed had a Polaroid picture taken and was ushered to another part of the cafeteria, where we sat at round tables to await a short interview with one of seven interviewers, who were lined up at seven adjacent two-person tables along one wall. We were told that some people might have second interviews but that that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

While waiting for my interview, I noticed that one woman was picked for a second interview, which was taped by a video camera. She was a smartly-dressed 30-something Asian-American woman with a very cute smile; I could hear her speak, and she sounded utterly charming, talking about how she watches the show every day and how when she told her four-year-old daughter that she was going to try out, her daughter said, “So you might get a chance to be in the hot seat?” She seemed like a very promising contestant. I knew I didn’t have half her charisma and I felt envious.

Eventually my name was called by one of the interviewers. The interviewer gave off a definite gay vibe. On my application I’d mentioned that I sing in a gay men’s chorus, and when the interviewer got to that part, he said, “What chorus do you sing with?” I told him which one, and he said he knew a particular person in the chorus. I asked him some questions to see if it was the same person, and it was. He even knew that this is a busy week of rehearsals for us. And then he said, “Well, this isn’t awkward at all, is it?” and got all flustered and remarked that his face was probably bright red. I said, “I can’t tell at all — it blends right into the red in the upholstery of the seat behind you!” I don’t know why he was nervous when I was the one trying out for a game show. Maybe he and the chorus member are dating? I don’t know.

Anyway, he told me I’d get a postcard in the mail in a couple of weeks informing me of whether I’d be entered into the contestant pool. I’m guessing probably not. No matter — it was at least fun to try out and prove to myself that I could pass the qualifying test.

Guess this means I have to pay off the rest of my student loan the old-fashioned way.

I can watch this forever.

I think you have to be a New Yorker to fully appreciate it — you might even have to have grown up in the New York area. Sue Simmons and Chuck Scarborough have hosted the local news on Channel 4 for as long as I can remember. To hear Sue Simmons swear on the air — particularly with such vehemence — is, well… I was going to say delightful, but that’s not quite the word.

Maybe I just mean awesome.

(As a commenter on Gothamist said, “I think I’ve found my new ringtone.”)

Appalachia hearts Hillary. And not just in West Virginia. Intriguing analysis, and the matching maps do seem to make the point. Whether there’s another factor, I don’t know.

In a week and a half, HBO is airing a TV movie called Recount, about the 2000 Florida recount. Sounds interesting enough, although some people are criticizing the movie for portraying Gore team member (and former Secretary of State) Warren Christopher as too much of a wimp.

Even more intriguing: the writer of the screenplay happens to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Danny Strong, a.k.a. Jonathan Levinson.

Oh boy. The California Supreme Court has announced that it’s going to issue its decision on same-sex marriage equality tomorrow, 10 a.m. California time, 1 p.m. Eastern.

I’m going to be on pins and needles.

(Here’s the official notice.)

To my readers in the New York area: my chorus is performing two concerts this weekend with the Astoria Symphony, one on Saturday night on the Upper West Side and another on Sunday afternoon in Long Island City (Queens). We’re singing mostly modern music, including the premiere of a piece by legendary Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici called Queer Hosannas. We’re also performing Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor From Warsaw, about a survivor of the Holocaust; the beautiful Brahms Alto Rhapsody; and a piece by former chorus member Stefan Weisman called David and Jonathan, about the biblical pair who some have presumed to have been lovers.

Saturday night at 8pm:

The Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew
263 West 86th Street
Manhattan

Sunday afternoon at 3pm:

LaGuardia Performing Arts Center
31-10 Thompson Ave.
Long Island City, Queens

Hope some of you can make it!

Table of Democratic superdelegates’ declared candidate preferences, sortable by date of declaration.

Whether or not the California Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage equality today, Californians will probably be voting this fall on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex couples’ marriages. Apparently, 1.1 million signatures have been submitted, and only 694,354 need to be found valid in order for the amendment to get on the ballot — about 63% of those submitted.

What I don’t understand is why it’s so easy for Californians to amend their constitution. It merely requires a one-time majority vote by the public — the state legislature has no involvement. The process is exactly the same as for a ballot proposition, except that a ballot proposition requires signatures from 5% of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election in order to get on the ballot and can be found unconstitutional, while a proposed constitutional amendment requires 8% to get on the ballot and becomes part of the state constitution and therefore by definition cannot be unconstitutional — although whether it violates the U.S. Constitution is another matter.

Under traditional ideas of constitutional theory, this is bad. Amending a constitution is supposed to be harder than passing an ordinary law because constitutional law is supposed to be “higher” than ordinary law. If you can simply amend the constitution by popular vote, what’s the point of having a constitution?

This is particularly troublesome when it comes to individual rights. One of the purposes of a constitution is to protect individual rights from being taken away by a majority. If a majority of Californians can remove a minority’s individual rights through simple popular vote, something is really wrong.

In 2000, a majority of Californians voted in favor of a ballot proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Had it been a constitutional amendment instead of a ballot proposition, the ban would have been enshrined in the state constitution and the California Supreme Court wouldn’t be able to do anything about it today. We’re just lucky that it came up in the form it did.

Speaking of court decisions on same-sex marriage, what the hell is taking the Connecticut Supreme Court so long? It heard oral arguments in Kerrigan and Mock exactly one year ago yesterday. There’s no way they need a year to decide the case. It’s a travesty of justice.

Unless it’s going to come out the wrong way, in which case… keep taking your time.

Seriously though, in the interests of the justice system, it’s ridiculous that a court can hear a case and then not issue a decision.

California Supreme Court rules for same-sex marriage!

Key passage from the decision:

[W]e conclude that the purpose underlying differential treatment of opposite-sex and same-sex couples embodied in California’s current marriage statutes — the interest in retaining the traditional and well-established definition of marriage — cannot properly be viewed as a compelling state interest for purposes of the equal protection clause, or as necessary to serve such an interest.

A number of factors lead us to this conclusion. First, the exclusion of same-sex couples from the designation of marriage clearly is not necessary in order to afford full protection to all of the rights and benefits that currently are enjoyed by married opposite-sex couples; permitting same-sex couples access to the designation of marriage will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage, because same-sex couples who choose to marry will be subject to the same obligations and duties that currently are imposed on married opposite-sex couples. Second, retaining the traditional definition of marriage and affording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples. Third, because of the widespread disparagement that gay individuals historically have faced, it is all the more probable that excluding same-sex couples from the legal institution of marriage is likely to be viewed as reflecting an official view that their committed relationships are of lesser stature than the comparable relationships of opposite-sex couples. Finally, retaining the designation of marriage exclusively for opposite-sex couples and providing only a separate and distinct designation for same-sex couples may well have the effect of perpetuating a more general premise — now emphatically rejected by this state — that gay individuals and same-sex couples are in some respects “second-class citizens” who may, under the law, be treated differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals or opposite-sex couples. Under these circumstances, we cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling state interest. Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional.

Some quick thoughts on the wonderful California decision (still reading it):

It took me forever to find the actual decision of the court. I had to skim through the first seven pages before I found something resembling a ruling. Then on the next page it said something about not needing to deal with the word “marriage” and I thought maybe it was more like the New Jersey decision, pro-rights but not mandating the word. Thoroughly confused and figuring I wasn’t going to find anything definitive in the next few pages, I tried to find the end of the opinion but couldn’t (the end is in the middle, as the main opinion is followed by some concurrences/dissents). Finally found the end and realized the good news.

In six months, Californians will likely be voting on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Some people expect a backlash against the court’s decision. Some people, those who are anti-gay or who are against marriage equality for gay couples, will feel angered and energized by the decision and be even more eager to turn out to vote in favor of the amendment. Also, the vote will be happening in the context of the Obama-McCain race on the same day’s ballot; if McCain runs strong in California, this could help get out the Republican vote.

But I think this decision helps those of us on the side of equality more than those on the other side. Over the next six months, gay couples will be marrying in California. And Californians will see that gay couples have gotten legally married and the world hasn’t fallen apart. Just as important, there are many people who might oppose same-sex marriages in theory but who are good at heart, who have empathy for their fellow human beings, and who are not going to want to take marriage away from couples who have already been legally married under the imprimatur of the California constitution. They’re not going to want to tell the children of those couples, sorry, your parents are no longer married. This is different from the legally dicey San Francisco marriages four years ago; this is really and truly legal.

This is really and truly wonderful.

Summary of the main opinion in the California marriage decision:

pp. 1-12: intro; summary of the conclusion.

pp. 12-18: history of the litigation, which began in 2004.

pp. 19-22: procedural point on the mootness of a challenge involving a previous stay.

pp. 23-28: history of California marriage statutes from 1849 to 1992.

pp. 28-36: discussion of whether Prop 22, passed in 2000, was intended to ban same-sex marriages from being performed in the state, or just to ban recognition of same-sex marriages performed out of state. The court says: both, therefore this case involves a challenge to Prop 22 as well as to legislatively-enacted marriage statutes.

pp. 36-47: history of California’s domestic partnership legislation as it evolved from 1999 to present.

p. 48: intro to substantive discussion.

pp. 49-51: beginning of discussion of marriage as a fundamental right; the right touches on liberty and privacy/autonomy.

pp. 51-53: The proper scope of analysis is the fundamental right to marry, not the fundamental right to same-sex marriage:

[Plaintiffs] are not seeking to create a new constitutional right — the right to “same-sex marriage” — or to change, modify, or (as some have suggested) “deinstitutionalize” the existing institution of marriage. Instead, plaintiffs contend that, properly interpreted, the state constitutional right to marry affords same-sex couples the same rights and benefits — accompanied by the same mutual responsibilities and obligations — as this constitutional right affords to opposite-sex couples.

pp. 53-66: examination of the nature and substance of the interests that the right to marriage protects. Marriage has both societal and individual benefits.

pp. 66-72: the state constitution guarantees this fundamental right to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

pp. 72-79: procreation is irrelevant to the right of marriage. Married couples are not required to have children (pp. 73-77); some couples raise their non-biological children (couples who adopt; same-sex couples) (pp. 77-78); conclusion of fundamental-rights analysis.

pp. 80-82: the word “marriage” is important here because opposite-sex couples have been allowed to use it but same-sex couples have not.

pp. 82-84: beginning of equal protection analysis; what standard of review is appropriate: rational-basis scrutiny (where discriminated party has burden of proof), or strict scrutiny (where discriminator has burden of proof)?

pp. 85-93: same-sex marriage discrimination cannot be considered sex discrimination, so no strict scrutiny on that basis.

pp. 93-95: same-sex marriage discrimination is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

pp. 95-101: sexual orientation discrimination deserves strict scrutiny because it is a suspect classification (first time CA Supreme Court has stated this! yay!).

pp. 101-106: the classification also impinges on a fundamental right, marriage; this is a further reason why strict scrutiny is required.

pp. 106-119: under strict scrutiny analysis, the discrimination — denying same-sex couples the right to marry — is unconstitutional because it is not a necessary classification that furthers a compelling government interest, as follows:

pp. 107-108: the CA constitution does not require that marriage be limited to a man and a woman.

pp. 108-111: courts are not precluded from weighing in on the matter but rather are obligated to do so.

pp. 111-114: laws passed by popular initiative are not exempt from constitutional scrutiny, because a constitution is a higher expression of the people’s will than a popular initiative.

pp. 114-116: historic and well-established nature of the marriage discrimination is not compelling, because values can change over time, as has been shown with other issues.

pp. 116-119: allowing same-sex couples to get married does not harm opposite-sex couples or their children, and it does help same-sex couples and their children; therefore, no compelling interest in marriage discrimation against same-sex couples.

pp. 119-121: what is the proper remedy: deny marriage rights to everyone, or extend marriage rights to same-sex couples? The latter. The marriage limitation as set forth in state law and in Prop 22 falls. State officials are ordered to take all actions necessary to effectuate this ruling.

There’s one aspect of the California marriage decision that’s almost as important as the outcome: the legal reasoning the court used in reaching its result. The opinion contains great news for gays and lesbians in California — and perhaps elsewhere — that goes beyond marriage.

The California Supreme Court didn’t just state yesterday that marriage is a fundamental right open to gay and lesbian couples. It also became the first high court in the nation to state that any law that discriminates against gay people will be treated with the same skepticism as laws that discriminate on the basis of race or gender. Any such laws will have to survive a heightened level of scrutiny in order not to be found unconstitutional. Not even the U.S. Supreme Court uses that heightened standard for sexual orientation discrimination.

In deciding cases involving equal protection violations, the U.S. Supreme Court uses different levels of scrutiny depending on the characteristic that is being discriminated against. Under the lowest level of scrutiny, “rational basis” scrutiny, a government entity merely has to show that the discrimination is rationally related to a legitimate government interest. The classic case comes from the 1950s, in which the Court upheld an Oklahoma law stating that optometrists were allowed to replace lenses but opticians were not. The Court found that the state legislature could have put forth a rational reason for the law.

The Court uses higher levels of scrutiny in evaluating laws that discriminate against certain groups. While the criteria seems flexible, these are generally groups that have a long history of suffering from discrimination. The most common are racial minorities and women. But the Supreme Court has never stated that gays and lesbians deserve the same heightened protection. Even when it’s struck down laws that discriminate against gays — such as the sodomy laws and the Colorado constitutional amendment that outlawed any laws that bar gay discrimination — the Court used rational basis scrutiny, finding that there was no rational reason for these laws.

In interpreting their own state constitutions, state supreme courts tend to follow the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court. State constitutions can’t provide fewer rights than the U.S. Constitution does. But since constitutional rights are a floor and not a ceiling, state constitutions are free to grant more rights than the U.S. Constitution does. To my knowledge, and to the knowledge of most commentators I’ve read since yesterday, until yesterday no state supreme court had treated sexual orientation as a suspect classification in a law. But now the California Supreme Court – allegedly the most influential state court in the nation — has done so.

Even if the proposed constitutional amendment restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples passes in November, that ruling will stand. (Except in the area of marriage, of course.) And perhaps other state supreme courts will eventually follow California’s lead.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

People can talk about activist liberal judges all they want. But the simple truth is that what has changed these past twenty years is not the nature of judges, but our collective understanding of what sexual orientation is. Behind all this is a deep, deep shift in our consciousness from thinking of gay people as defective straight people who perform certain sexual acts to their being the moral equivalent of heterosexuals, capable of forming relationships and building families as well as anyone. This is at the core of the generational divide: not that young people are more “liberal” or “progressive” than their parents. On an issue like abortion, they’re not. It is simply that the next generation has grown up with a different definition of who gay people are. They see gay people as interchangeable with straight people. They don’t think we’re inferior to them. Because they know us. …

Is this shift an ideological one? I don’t believe so. It’s an empirical one, based on increased knowledge of who gay people are. …

New York Law School professor Art Leonard, who edits the monthly Lesbian/Gay Law Notes, has written a fascinating look at the little-discussed parts of the California marriage decision. Some highlights:

When/if the court’s decision goes into effect, California will be the third largest polity in the world that has embraced marriage equality by allowing same-sex couples to marry. The largest is South Africa, with a population of almost 48 million, then Spain with about 45 million, then California, with about 38 million, followed by Canada, 33 million…

California freely allows out-of-state residents to marry there, regardless of what their home states will do in the way of marriage recognition, so we are likely to see plenty of action as out-of-staters flock to California to marry, then go home and try to assert their rights. Additionally, of course, with a population almost six times as large as Massachusetts and an enormous LGBT community, California will generate an enormous number of married same-sex spouses, some of whom will travel to and through other states, relocate for employment or other reasons, and find themselves embroiled in situations calling for marriage recognition.

[T]he California Supreme Court’s holding that sexual orientation is a suspect classification is really huge, far beyond the marriage issue, because it makes any state policy or practice that discriminates based on sexual orientation presumptively unconstitutional. At one fell swoop, it says that gay public employees in California have the same level of constitutional protection from workplace discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation that racial minority employees have from race discrimination, for example. (To judge by the cases I see popping up on my regular westlaw searches, this could make a big difference, for example, in pro se litigation by state prisoners challenging homophobic treatment by guards and prison administrators, and could also be used to mount challenges against recalcitrant public school administrators. . .)

There’s more that con law nerds like me will enjoy.

Because I spent three years living in Japan, I laughed my head off at the Digital Short from this weekend’s SNL.

The L.A. Times interviewed the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Ronald George, who wrote the majority opinion in the marriage cases.

In the days leading up to the California Supreme Court’s historic same-sex marriage ruling Thursday, the decision “weighed most heavily” on Chief Justice Ronald M. George — more so, he said, than any previous case in his nearly 17 years on the court. …

[A]s he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning “No Negro” or “No colored” left “quite an indelible impression on me,” he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

“I think,” he concluded, “there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe.”

Yet he described his thinking on the constitutional status of state marriage laws as more of an evolution than an epiphany, the result of his reading and long discussions with staff lawyers. …

He indicated he saw the fight for same-sex marriage as a civil rights case akin to the legal battle that ended laws banning interracial marriage. He noted that the California Supreme Court moved ahead of public sentiment 60 years ago when it became the first in the country to strike down the anti-miscegenation laws.

California’s decision, in a case called Perez vs. Sharp, preceded the U.S. Supreme Court’s action on the issue by 19 years. Even after that ruling, Californians passed an initiative that would permit racial discrimination in housing. The state high court again responded by overturning the law, George said.

Rather than ignoring voters, “what you are doing is applying the Constitution, the ultimate expression of the people’s will,” George said. …

“When is it that a court should act?” George mused. “When is it that a court is shirking its responsibility by not acting, and when is a court overreaching? That’s a real conundrum. I have respect for people coming out on different sides of this issue.”

George’s reputation for caution is based on the court’s tendency, under him, to decide cases narrowly, refusing to reach issues not necessary to the case at hand. Advocates thrust the central constitutional question of equality for gay people on the court; there was no way to avoid it. …

Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen, who has closely followed George’s court tenure, said “the biggest surprise” of the marriage ruling was that George favored it. Uelmen said George must have done “some real soul searching.”

The “very carefully written opinion” reflects that George “is very sensitive to how this will be perceived,” Uelmen said. “He realized that this more than any other thing he does as chief justice will define his legacy. He’ll certainly take a good deal of political heat over this.”

Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, said he had long expected George to vote against same-sex marriage.

“His change from where I thought he would be is baffling,” said Staver, whose group promotes traditional marriage.

UCLA law professor Brad Sears said, “Definitely what created the majority was George’s support.”

There’s been so much talk in this presidential race about Hillary Clinton as a woman: about whether her campaign has been hurt by sexism, about her campaign’s effect on future female presidential candidates, about her effect on the women of tomorrow, and so on. I’ve seen this discussed most often by Salon.com editor Joan Walsh, who seems obsessed with sexism against Clinton to an unhealthy degree.

The most recent piece I’ve read on the subject is this one by Peggy Orenstein from the Sunday Times Magazine, in which she wonders what effect Clinton’s campaign will have on her daughter.

So it is not the attacks themselves that give me pause, but the form they consistently have taken, the default position of incessant, even gleeful (and, I admit it, sometimes clever) misogyny. Staring down the sightline of my daughter’s index finger, I wondered what to tell her — not only at this moment, but in years to come — about Hillary and about herself. Will the senator be my example of how far we’ve come as women or how far we have to go? Is she proof to my daughter that “you can do anything” or of the hell that will rain down on you if you try?

I have to admit — I just don’t see it. I’m baffled by those who say that Clinton’s treatment will discourage females from running for president in the future, or that it has anything at all to say about future female candidates. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Gen-Xer or because I’m male, but to me, Clinton’s gender has barely registered as an issue in this race. Stephen Colbert sometimes jokes about how he “doesn’t see race”; me, I haven’t seen gender in this campaign.

It’s not that there haven’t been some isolated sexist attacks against her. But “Iron my shirts!” was something yelled out by a couple of yahoos at a campaign event, and “How do we beat the bitch?” was a question asked by a single voter at a McCain event a few months back, and although Chris Matthews of MSNBC has said some dumb things (including some allegedly sexist comments that were not actually sexist), he’s one anchor. There are always going to be sexist people and attitudes in the world, just as there will always be racists and homophobes and antisemites and anticatholics. There will always be unenlightened idiots.

But there’s a big difference between isolated examples of sexism and systematic sexism. And I haven’t seen any systematic sexism in this campaign. Some people see any attacks against Clinton as sexist, particularly attacks by those in the media. Well, that’s the way politics goes. Cable news anchors are opinionated and they say dumb things about all candidates. Romney, Edwards, Giuliani, Thompson, McCain (sometimes), and even media darlings Huckabee and Obama have had to go through this.

There are at least ten reasons why Clinton isn’t going to be the nominee that have nothing to do with her gender. I don’t buy any of the crap about how “Americans are uncomfortable with an ambitious woman.” It’s not that she’s a woman, and it’s certainly not that she’s ambitious. It’s that she doesn’t know when to stop, which is an obnoxious quality in anyone, man or woman. Were Clinton a man, I would be just as scornful of her for the way she’s run and is continuing to run her campaign. Were the two remaining candidates Obama and Edwards instead of Obama and Clinton, and Edwards weres doing what Clinton has done over the last few months, I would still be thinking, “Come on, get out of the race already.” I feel the same way about Ralph Nader, who runs narcissistic and delusional campaigns. I feel contempt for him. It’s not sexism.

Perceptions of sexism in this race are primarily a generational thing: I didn’t live through the sexist ’50s and wasn’t scarred by the battles of the ’60s or ’70s. And it’s a gender thing: I’m a man, so I’ve never directly experienced sexism. (Some say anti-gay attitudes have ties to sexism, but it’s not the same.)

Which of us is correct? Are those of us who are younger, or male, or both, blind to the sexism that exists because we’re not its target? Or are those of the older generation paranoid, seeing sexism when it’s not there? I suspect it’s the latter.

We’re dealing with (1) people who want a female president more than anything, versus (2) people who are completely happy and even eager to vote for a female president but not if she’s not the best candidate. Some people in group #1 see people in group #2 as sexist, and some people in group #2 see people in group #1 as sexist in their own way.

This is how it always works with identity politics. Some claim A is just as good as B, some claim A is different and therefore better than B, some claim A needs an extra boost to make up for past injustice, some claim that true justice lies in treating A and B the same. Thus will it ever be.

Perhaps if I understand that, I can get over my irritation at the people who see nothing but gender in Clinton’s candidacy. I haven’t yet. But we’ll see.

(Update: I missed this in the Times today.)

Jimmy Stewart, one of my favorite actors, would have turned 100 years old today. I didn’t even realize it until I got home from work, flipped through the TV listings, saw that Turner Classic Movies was airing Jimmy Stewart movies all day, wondered why, and checked to see if it was his birthday.

Stewart is best known these days for Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, but he also starred in two of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies — Rear Window and Vertigo (as well as the less celebrated Rope). Hitchcock famously cast him against type; in Rear Window and Vertigo, Stewart departs from his innocent, aw-shucks persona to play obsessive characters whose fixation verges on creepiness.

Stewart died in July 1997. I remember learning that he had died. Here’s his New York Times obituary.

R.I.P., Jimmy Stewart.

Among all the election hubbub in Kentucky and Oregon last night, it turns out that Portland, Oregon elected its first gay mayor, Sam Adams. (Not this Sam Adams or this one.) Portland will be the largest city in the U.S. ever to have a gay mayor.

He’s so cute, too. Andy sure is lucky to live there.

This disgusts me and worries me. All these elderly Florida Jews who won’t vote for Obama because he’s black. I don’t know what bothers me more — those who are prejudiced, or those who are misinformed.

Come on, people. You’re retired. Pick up a goddamn newspaper.

He’s going to have to work hard to win Florida. Hopefully he can make it up by winning states like Colorado and Virginia.

My blog has a bunch of readers who are mysterious to me.

I know that I’ve got visitors beyond those who leave comments or send emails — I can tell from my referral stats. I’m not talking about the visits that come from search engines; I get a bunch of hits from people who come to my site via Google and don’t find what they’re looking for. I’m talking about the visits that come without any URL attached. Presumably these are people who come to my site by clicking on a browser bookmark or typing in the URL directly. I know nothing about them but their IP addresses.

I love it when readers, new or old, leave comments. And I love finding out who my readers are.

So, mysterious readers, this is your chance to tell me: who are you?

Misleading headling of the day: As Race Wanes, Talk of Clinton as No. 2 Grows.

If you saw this headline, what would you expect to read? You might expect to read an article in which a whole bunch of Democrats and pundits are increasingly talking about the prospects of Obama choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

Instead, the only person in the article who seems to be talking about her prospects as VP is Bill Clinton. There’s sentence after sentence about what Bill Clinton wants.

Later in the article is this:

The growing discussion about a ticket of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton is largely being fueled by Clinton supporters, although it is a suggestion that Obama supporters do not dismiss.

Again, the article mentions exactly one of those Clinton supporters: the candidate’s husband. And the fact that Obama supporters “do not dismiss” the suggestion doesn’t mean that they’re actively talking about it.

There’s also this:

Jerry Crawford, a Des Moines lawyer who is the Midwest co-chairman of the Clinton campaign, said in an interview Thursday that he supported the notion of Mrs. Clinton serving as a vice presidential candidate for Mr. Obama should he become the nominee.

It sounds like reporter Patrick Healy asked Jerry Crawford about this in order to gin up a story. Again, it doesn’t sound like this is a grass-roots movement.

Worst headline ever.

How should we decide dicey constitutional issues? How should we decide whether or not a constitution requires that same-sex couples have the right to get married?

I was thinking about different ways judges interpreting the Constitution, and more specifically, about originalism. I noticed that the prolific judge Richard Posner has a new book out (as he always does), How Judges Think, and I was reading some discussion about it on Volokh.com. One commenter wrote:

[A particular critic of the book] asks why we shouldn’t choose the rules [for interpreting the Constitution] that are most “faithful” to history and text. Rules that are most “faithful” to separation of powers “principles.” Rules that are most “faithful” to the “properly” limited role of the judiciary.

… First, lets examine which of these things can be resolved with reference to the “original public meaning” of the Constitution and nothing else. First, the assertion that there even IS an original public meaning is somewhat retarded, because the “public” is an abstraction, not a real thing. Different individuals that constitute that thing we call the “public” have had different understandings of the Constitutions text (beyond the easy questions) from the very beginning. Exactly whose understanding do we privilege by labeling it as the “original public meaning.” You don’t really get anywhere with this move.

The originalist point of view says that because judges are not democratically elected, they should exercise restraint in interpreting ambiguous parts of the Constitution. As Odysseus straps himself to the mast in order to keep himself from heeding the Sirens’ call, judges need to grasp something so they don’t veer off course. What’s the “safest” way to interpret the Constitution? Once again, for instance: what’s the safest way for a judge to decide, without overstepping the bounds of judging, whether or not a constitution requires that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples be treated equally for the purpose of marriage?

I tend to agree with the commenter above about the problems of “original public meaning.” But in addition to the question of whether there is an ascertainable “original public meaning,” there’s another question: why should judges try to be faithful to the “original public meaning” of the Constitution in the first place? Why should the “dead hand of the past,” is it is often called, carry more weight than the present?

The response is that the Constitution was ratified by “We the People,” and that when in doubt, you should defer to the people, because the Constitution should mean one specific thing unless “we the people” amend it. If we haven’t amended it, that means we don’t want the Constitution interpreted in a particular way. Judges aren’t elected, so they should defer to these majorities.

But that presumes that the desires of the majority are the most important factor. Yet as Glenn Greenwald points out, “strictly speaking, the U.S. is not a ‘democracy’ as much as it a ‘constitutional republic,’ precisely because constitutional guarantees trump democratic majorities.”

In other words, individual rights are important, and majorities can’t take them away.

The problem, though, is that if judges needn’t follow the majority will, but should instead try to apply constitutional rights, then you’re going to get a different result depending on who the actual judges are.

But what other way works, really? I respect originalism, because it attempts to give judges something to guide those decisions. But originalism doesn’t work because it can’t explain why a narrower interpretation of the Constitution is better than a wider interpretation without appealing to the founders and some notion of safety and conservatism, and in order to do that, it has to explain why those notions are the best things to appeal to.

Is it inherently better for judges to find that there is no constitutional right for same-sex couples to get married, or that there is such a right? You can’t answer that question without making a value judgment. Even if you try to escape that task by making a process-oriented judgment (i.e., when in doubt, listen to “We the People”) instead of a substantive value judgment, the decision to use one process or another still requires a value judgment, because you need a reason for choosing one process over another. So much of the quest of judicial theory is about finding ways for judges to make the safest decisions possible. But you can’t decide what criteria to use for that decisionmaking process without making a value judgment.

Judges can’t escape making value judgments. It’s inherent in judging, because it’s inherent in being human. There really is no solid, absolute answer out there. As strongly as I believe in same-sex couples’ right to get married, that’s the dirty little secret.

In a world without God — which I believe is our world — we humans have to decide all this stuff for ourselves.

The L.A. Times did a poll on the proposed California constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. Right now the people who support the amendment are leading, 54%-37%. Boo. But apparently, “ballot measures on controversial topics often lose support during the course of a campaign,” according to the article.

One interesting fact:

[T]he poll found that views on gay marriage were greatly influenced by personal connections. Of those who said they knew a friend, a family member or a co-worker who was gay, nearly half approved of the court’s ruling — more than twice the proportion among those who said they were not acquainted with a gay person.

The divide was as stark when it came to the proposed constitutional amendment: 70% of voters who said they did not know a gay person would vote for it, a position taken by just 49% of voters who said they knew a gay person.

If you’re a closeted Californian, please come out to your families, friends, and co-workers between now and November. Your fellow gays need you.

In the current issue of New York Magazine, veteran journalist Pete Hamill writes beautifully about being friends with Robert F. Kennedy and witnessing his assassination, which happened 40 years ago next month.

By 11 p.m., it seemed clear that Kennedy had won California, a huge triumph that would erase the comparatively minor shame of defeat in Oregon. Now we were in Kennedy’s own room: Schulberg, Brian, Cesar Chavez, Newfield, Breslin. I remember squatting with my back against a wall. Kennedy was on the floor, back to a sofa, one arm resting on a raised knee, the other leg stretched out. Others came and went. Frank Mankiewicz handed him a sheet of paper. Maybe words for a speech. Maybe more results. The TV set was on, the sound off, showing Kennedy ahead. Most people had glasses in their hands. Beer. Harder stuff. Soft drinks.

The mood was light, almost giddy. Kennedy smiled and smiled, and laughed out loud at Breslin’s interminable New York joking. Then someone said, glancing at a watch, that it was time to go down. Kennedy stood up, buttoned his cuffs and his collar, went into the bathroom. Everybody else was standing now. Some went back to the larger room across the hall where television might offer a better view. Kennedy came out of the men’s room. He had combed his hair and donned a jacket. He was smiling broadly.

“Let’s go down,” he said.

We saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night. (Spoilers below, after the jump, although they only involve stuff from the first part of the movie.)

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved that it was in many ways a throwback to 1980s movie-making, which is what Spielberg intended, as he said in Vanity Fair a few months ago:

Rather than update the franchise to match current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’ look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski, who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

Spielberg promises no tricky editing for the new one, saying, “I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure.”

Spoilers follow.
[Read more →]

I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts about the infamous Emily Gould essay that the New York Times Magazine ran as its cover story this past weekend. My thoughts about it are complicated.

Emily Gould is a 26-year-old New Yorker and used to be co-editor of Gawker, the snarky New York media blog. (I don’t read Gawker regularly, so I’d never heard of her.) Her Times piece is an 8,000-word essay about how she had a blog, then got popular, then got picked to be co-editor of Gawker, then couldn’t deal with all the attention, then left Gawker and tried to become a regular blogger again. This is the cover story of the New York Times Magazine, mind you. It’s been roundly criticized all over the web as a piece of whiny narcissism, and some are wondering why it got printed, let alone why it deserved 8,000 words and the cover slot. Here are some of the more high-profile reactions.

My first reaction was that I hated the piece. Then I realized that part of my hatred was due to envy. Then I berated myself because sometimes I can be so judgmental. I don’t like it when I’m judgmental. After all, I don’t like it when people judge me, do I? And wouldn’t the world be a better place if we would all stop being so negative? There’s something very human about the urge to bad-mouth and look down on others. But does that make it okay?

But that’s my superego talking. Let’s get back to my id.

I saw the essay on the Times website late last week — it appeared online a few days in advance of the magazine — and my first thought was that I definitely wanted to read it, since I’m a blogger and I like reading about blog culture. So I read it over the weekend.

By the end of the first paragraph, I was turned off.

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college,

Oh, god. Another twentyomething wannabe writer trying to make it in the New York publishing scene.

and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Cliché number 2: lives with boyfriend in Brooklyn. She’ll go on to describe Henry as “a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about the contestants on ‘Project Runway’ and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks.” Great. Not only do they live in Brooklyn, but the boyfriend’s a hipster musician with an ironic sensibility. Is this real or is it from a fiction workshop? Too cute by half.

I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

This is when the anger kicked in. WTF? Your blog has a few hundred readers? That’s not fair. If I exclude search engines, my blog probably gets no more than 100 hits a day.

Much later in the article, post-Gawker, Emily starts a new blog, and she writes:

Word had spread through my immediate circle of friends about the blog, and it was now getting a few hundred visitors a day

Jesus Christ. How big is your “immediate circle of friends”? You just toss that out there in passing, “a few hundred visitors a day,” as if it’s no biggie? Do you know how many bloggers would kill to have a few hundred visitors a day? Do you know that I’ve been blogging for more than seven years now and I give lots of care and attention to my posts and I can’t come near that number of visitors?

That’s when I started to think, hmm… do you think maybe you might be envious?

As I read on, my revulsion and envy were joined by fear, because I realized I had some things in common with Emily, some things that are not so attractive. I wondered: Is this what I sound like when I write about my thoughts and feelings? Do I sound this self-centered and whiny? Is this what a desire for attention gets you?

So reading the essay was like looking at a train wreck and into a funhouse mirror at the same time.

My question is, why did this essay get printed? At such length? And as the cover story? The editors probably thought it would be oh-so-insightful. Overthinkers and academics love to extrapolate from anecdotes and find Meaning everywhere, even when there isn’t any. See, New York Times readers? This is What Young People Are Like Today. People don’t care about privacy anymore! It’s true because this one person wrote about it in a first-person essay!

Indeed, it turns out that’s totally what they were trying to do:

Putting Emily’s story on the cover was not a tough call. One of the things we are most interested in at the magazine are those lifestyle issues — what we call Way We Live Now issues — that blend personal narratives with larger political or ethical or philosophical concerns. These are the kinds of things readers are engaged by on Sunday morning (or anytime, in cyberspace). How the Internet is re-describing how we understand privacy, intimacy and personal history is, I think, such an issue, and the fact that the story — an 8,000-word story — has already, in 6 [h]ours or so, attracted more than 600 comments (most of them having nothing to do with why we published the piece as a cover story) leads me to believe a lot of folks agree.

No. The reason it attracted more than 600 comments is because it was awful.

The thing is, it’s fine if you want to write about a cultural trend. But if a piece of art isn’t going to be informative, then it has to be aesthetically pleasing, and this one wasn’t. It can’t just be about the destination; it also has to be about the journey. And this journey was cringeworthy.

But can I tell you what really got me riled about this article? In case you thought I wasn’t riled up enough about it?

Emily Gould is taking readers’ questions and comments. Responses to selected questions will be posted at nytimes.com/magazine on Tuesday, May 27.

Cripes. Not only do you let her write an 8,000-word self-indulgent piece of crap, but then you’re going to have her respond to readers’ questions and comments? Wow, New York Times. Let’s just give her more attention. And you’re so hip and cool, aren’t you? You probably think that people are going to be oh so intrigued by her essay and are going to want to ask her all these Big Idea sorts of questions, since, you know, she’s clearly representative of this whole blogging culture? Since, you know, you’ve just proclaimed her as such?

Her responses are now posted. Okay — she seems to be very aware of how her piece has come across. Not a big surprise. But it’s nice to know she’s not clueless about it.

A couple more points.

The first point is, I know that I’m being judgmental here. And again, if I were in Emily’s shoes, I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like having my essay called “an 8,000-word self-indulgent piece of crap.”

That’s what depresses me, though. Because this is my fantasy. I’m ashamed to say it, but part of me, some part deep down, the child that doesn’t feel it ever got enough love, craves this kind of attention. The kid in me would love to write the cover story for the New York Times Magazine and have it be all about me and my life and have it be read by thousands of people. Because it would mean that I exist, and I could make everyone love me! It’s an infantile urge — I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean that it’s what an infant feels: that I am the center of attention and it’s all about me.

But look what happens when you get that attention. People rightfully attack you, because why the hell should other people care about you and your petty problems? What makes you so special? Because, you know, you’re not so special. And it turns out that even though you’ve gotten all this attention, people don’t love you.

So the fantasy is worthless. I realized this a few years ago. If I can ever manage to become a published writer, I’d rather write about history and politics. Not only do I find it interesting, but it’s healthier, because it’s something external to yourself.

The second point is, I realize that I’ve just spent over a thousand words giving attention to an article that I claim deserves no attention.

Damn you, you New York Times and your jujitsu. You tricked me!

Wow! Things can change in a week. According to a new poll, 51% of Californians are in favor of same-sex marriage, while just 42% oppose it. A slight majority also opposes amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. The pollsters found that the younger you are, the more likely you are to support marriage equality.

Just last week, a poll found that 54% of voters favored changing the state constitution. So this is good news.

Here are the full poll results.

State agencies in New York are going to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside the state, thanks to a decision by Gov. David Paterson. “The revisions are most likely to involve as many as 1,300 statutes and regulations in New York governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses,” according to the Times.

This is great news, but there are a couple of interesting things about it. One, the governor’s office issued a directive announcing the new policy on May 14 (the day before the California court decision, incidentally). Why did it take two weeks to get reported? The article states that the governor discussed the move in a videotaped message to a dinner of gay community leaders on May 17. (Here’s the video and text of the message.) So the people at the dinner knew about it. Why didn’t the Times, or any other news organization, report it until now?

The other interesting thing is the question of where the legal authority comes from. As much as I think it’s a great decision, at first it seemed odd to me that the governor could just do this unilaterally. Isn’t it such a big deal that the legislature should get involved?

But I realized it’s not. A state appellate court ruled on February 1 that there’s no reason not to recognize valid same-sex marriages performed out of state; state policy is to recognize any marriage validly performed out of state unless there’s a state law prohibiting it, and New York has no law prohibiting same-sex marriages. (Here’s the court decision.) If the legislature cared about banning same-sex marriage, it could have followed the lead of the numerous other states that have done so. But it hasn’t.

This is a beautiful move on the governor’s part. Because even though it’s a big deal for same-sex couples that want to get married, and even though it might seem like a big deal to people who think the world will fall apart if same-sex couples can get married, it’s just a run-of-the-mill policy interpretation. The governor is showing that it’s really not a big deal to just go ahead and treat people equally.

Hopefully the Republican-controlled state senate will realize this as well and stop blocking a marriage equality law.

A blogger’s bloggy confessional about blogging and its bloggy complications turned out to be catnip for other bloggers who like blogging about blogs!

The Emily Gould essay has got me thinking deeply about first-person writing, and it’s made me very self-conscious about it. The closest metaphor I can come up with is, if you loved ice cream, and then you watched someone binge on ice cream until they got sick, and it made you never, ever want to eat ice cream again. I almost never again want to blog the words I, me, or my, even though I’ve done it many times in this paragraph.

I think most of our brains have a gate between the part that thinks and the part that thinks about our thinking. Most of us mostly live in the part that thinks. But my brain’s gate has always been permeable. Years of therapy have helped break that gate down, although I was like this even before therapy. I am often too aware of my thinking, to the point where my thoughts pile up and trip over each other, and I can’t articulate anything because while I’m formulating the words, new thoughts are already forming about what I’m saying. I form counterarguments almost as soon as I form arguments, preemptively judging myself and my arguments so nobody else does it first. I’d rather hit myself with the bludgeon than let someone else do it.

That’s one of my problems — I often think there’s someone with a bludgeon when there isn’t.

So my thinking gets very self-referential and I start to feel like I’m living in a schematic drawing of my life instead of just living. There are other people like this. I used to think it was just me.

A person cannot make a living writing these days. I’m trying to realize that. I’ve long known it. But it’s even more true today, when anyone can have a blog and share their thoughts about anything — their life, politics, culture. The barrier is lower than it ever was. Unfortunately, writing is something I love to do. The only thing I love to do as much as writing is learning. And you can’t make a living learning.

There are people out there who are content not to be ambitious. They’re happy with their lives. They don’t have grand expectations. I wish I were like that.

But wishing is futile. Perhaps there’s a way that I can be like that. I don’t know if there is, but maybe.

Richard E. Barnes, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said yesterday in response to Governor Paterson’s new policy interpretation recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages:

“No single politician or court or legislature should attempt to redefine the very building block of our society in a way that alters its entire meaning and purpose.”

He doesn’t seem to understand that the “entire meaning and purpose” of marriage has been altered many times over the years — over centuries, in fact — and that this is not because of a “single politician or court or legislature,” but because of the evolution of society. Marriage is no longer about the joining of two families for economic benefit; it’s no longer about dowries and the subsuming of a woman’s legal identity into that of a man; it’s no longer about the survival of your tribe. For some people it’s not even about having children. Marriage can be about having children, and raising a family, and it usually is. But not always. It can be about happiness and personal stability. It can be about economic benefits. People get married for all sorts of reasons today, and liberalized divorce laws attest to how much society’s definition of marriage has changed over the years.

Seriously, I wish some of these people would do some actual thinking sometimes, before or instead of running their mouths.

Also from the Times today on the governor’s decision: how the governor came to support gay rights early in his career, how same-sex marriage opponents face an uphill battle in challenging the decision, and an editorial on how this is a step closer to justice.

Charlie Savage is a hero of mine. Savage, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting in the Boston Globe on the hidden workings of the Bush administration, wrote last year’s Takeover, about how Dick Cheney has worked for over 30 years to eviscerate the system of governmental checks and balances and concentrate power in the executive branch.

Well, it turns out Savage has left the Boston Globe and joined the New York Times. I saw his byline on an article this morning and did a double take. I looked him up, and sure enough, he just started there. (This is his first Times article.) Awesome.

Big loss for the Globe, though.

This letter in the Times almost made me cry.

Governor Paterson will have a place in our hearts all of our lives. We have been married for 36 years and are blessed with four children. Our youngest, Jacob, happens to be gay. Three of them were married in the last couple of years. It has been a time of great joy for our family as they wed the love of their lives.

When our oldest son, Benjamin, got married, he asked Jacob to be his best man. Then our son Joshua got married and again Jacob was his best man. When our daughter, Britta, married her dear Matthew, she didn’t have a maid of honor. She had a man of honor, and it was her brother Jacob.

At each wedding, as Jacob stood by his siblings and signed the papers to make it legal, he did it knowing he did not have the right to marriage himself.

As a mom, I find that hard to understand and heartbreaking to know it is true. How can this country treat people in such a way that something as basic as finding love and being married can be denied to a whole segment of society?

We will do all that it takes to make sure our dear son Jacob can marry the love of his life. But right now, I want to send our love to Governor Paterson. He makes me want to move to New York!

Randi Reitan
Eden Prairie, Minn., May 30, 2008

Presumably her son is this Jacob Reitan.