aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Again

From me, last week:

Andrew Sullivan asked the other day, in the first of many post-hiatus posts, why not an anti-abortion amendment? In light of the president’s gay-marriage-mention in last night’s [State of the Union] speech, I thought it worth pondering. Is gay marriage even more important than abortion to the Religious Right? Really?

democratic disappointments

As if the 13 states passing anti-gay marriage amendments wasn’t enough to sour me on our lurch towards a more direct democracy, today we have the Virginia House passing a gay marriage ban and here in Georgia they’re gutting Atlanta’s human right’s ordinance:

The Georgia House overwhelmingly approved legislation Monday that would bar the city of Atlanta from fining Druid Hills Golf Club for refusing to treat partners of gay members the same as spouses of married members.

As it happens I’m reading Fareed Zakaria’s ”The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.” In it he explains that democratic elections are not necessarily synonymous with liberty. “Democracy is flourishing; liberty is not.” He defines liberty as including the rule of law, the rights of free speech and religion and the protection of minorities. These liberties, he says, require the constitutional limitation of democratic power.

His book “is a call for self-control, for a restoration of balance between democracy and liberty.” We sure could use a dose of that in the Gay Marriage debate. Not likely. From the preface:

Slavery and segregation were entrenched in the American South through the democratic system. From the founding of the republic, those who abhorred salvery faced the problem that the majority of southern voters defended it passionately. In the end, slavery died not because it was lost in a vote but because the forces of the North crushed the South. Eventually the Jim Crow system that succeeded slavery in the South was destroyed during the 1950s and 1960s not by democracy but despite it. Although the final act of emancipation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was passed by Congress, all previous progress took place through the executive branch’s fiat-as with desegregation of the armed forces-or the Supreme Court’s writ-as with school desegregation.

A conservative makes the case against ID

Liberal Kevin Drum points to the conservative National Review for John Derbyshire’s point by point response to Intelligent Design arguments:

I understand why biologists get angry and frustrated with ID-ers. All the ID arguments have been patiently refuted many times over. The ID-ers response is to come back with… the same arguments.