Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State — the guy who, last month, wanted to block thousands of new voter registrations because they were on the wrong paper stock — said on Tuesday that gay marriage “even defies barnyard logic.”

“I don’t know how many of you have a farming background, but I can tell you right now that notion [gay marriage] even defies barnyard logic… the barnyard knows better.”

Blackwell said he wasn’t criticizing gay people — just gay marriage.

“I believe this issue is not about civil rights, but about a sacred right,” he said in an interview. “One of the functions of marriage is for men and women to replenish the earth.”

He used the barnyard analogy, he said, “because if you’re on a farm and you want eggs to eat and little chickens to grow into big chickens, you need a rooster and a hen.”

Let’s see. It’s not about civil rights? It’s about a sacred right? Sorry, Blackwell — wrong country. The government here doesn’t get involved in “sacred rights.”

And the thing about the rooster and the hen? That’s one of the anti-gay-marriage arguments that infuriates me the most. It always become this slippery-slope thing — that if we permit gay marriage, we’re going to ban heterosexual marriage, or, worse, prohibit heterosexual intercourse. The flip side seems to be that if we ban gay marriage, we’ll somehow channel all those gay people into heterosexual marriage or heterosexual sex. Sorry — not gonna happen. After all, it’s not working now, is it?

And unless we’re raising human beings in order to eat them or their by-products, I don’t see how the analogy is even relevant.

I fucking hate it when people who can’t think are in positions of power.

“Supporters of President Bush are less knowledgeable about the president’s foreign policy positions and are more likely to be mistaken about factual issues in world affairs than voters who back John F. Kerry, a survey released yesterday indicated.”

So if everyone knew the facts, Kerry would win.

The Intenet was supposed to create a revolution in knowledge. So much for that.

Our country is fucked.

The New Republic, big surprise, endorses Kerry.

[Bush] pledged to defeat Islamist totalitarianism the same way we defeated European totalitarianism, by spreading democracy. For a publication that has long believed in the marriage of liberalism and American power, this was the right analysis. And its correctness mattered more than the limitations of the man from which it came.

Three years later, it has become tragically clear that the two cannot be separated.

. . .

On domestic policy, Bush has been Newt Gingrich without the candor. Like Gingrich, he envisions stripping away many of the welfare-state protections that shield economically vulnerable Americans from the vagaries of the free market (while insulating corporations ever more from those same forces). But, rather than explicitly opposing popular government programs, as Gingrich did, Bush has pursued a more duplicitous strategy: He is eviscerating the government’s ability to pay for them.

. . .

By contrast, John Kerry has a record of fiscal honesty and responsibility that continues the tradition of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. Unlike most Democrats, he supported the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction plan. Unlike most Republicans, he supported Clinton’s 1993 deficit-reduction package. And, unlike President Bush, he supports the “pay as you go” rules that, in the 1990s, helped produce a budget surplus.

It is true that, in this campaign, Kerry has proposed more spending than his partial repeal of the Bush tax cut will fund. But he has also said that, if the repeal does not bring in enough revenue, he will scale back his proposals. In fact, one of the virtues of Kerry’s health plan is that, unlike Clinton’s, it can easily be broken down into modest reforms. Even if Kerry merely makes good on his pledge to dramatically expand Medicaid and schip, programs that offer health coverage to poor children and adults, he will have done more to help struggling Americans than Bush has in his four years.

. . .

The Bush administration’s misguided tendency to see Al Qaeda as the instrument of rogue governments made it more willing to use force against Iraq but less willing to use force in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. Kerry, by contrast, seems inclined to use American power where it could genuinely damage Al Qaeda. Even during the Democratic primaries, he attacked the Bush administration for not sending U.S. troops into Tora Bora to destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the waning days of the Afghan war. He has proposed doubling U.S. Special Forces for operations just like that. And he has proposed strengthening America’s capacity to act — including even militarily — to prevent nuclear proliferation, an issue on which the Bush administration has proved astonishingly passive.

Kerry’s apparent willingness to act within states is particularly important because the U.N.’s obsession with sovereignty renders it impotent in such circumstances. His support for the Kosovo war, waged without U.N. approval, is encouraging in this regard, as is his openness to using U.S. troops — presumably without the Security Council’s blessing — in Darfur, Sudan. These encouraging signs counterbalance his worrying tendency to describe multilateralism — and U.N. support — as an end in itself rather than instrument of American power. If elected, this tension will likely be a theme of his presidency, as it was of Clinton’s.

Works for me.