Roberts Court to take on Gay Marriage Issue

Actually, mom-on-14-year-old-daughter is technically gay porn.

 

Only if you are a king, so if you are a queen I suppose the right answer is no?


We got some

We have some seriously sick mothertruckers in our world....

 

A bit of euro-snob-meme humour, entitled > ahem <

Scumbag Church of England:




Oh history -- you roguish jack'o'napes!

 

Occam's razor would indicate that government just get out of the marriage business and treat every citizen of legal age as a citizen. Problem solved get married at the venue of choice; first church of the self righteous or gatheirng of the fudge packers who cares if govt is not involved?

 

Wasn't there another thread about gay marriage?

oh well I will post here.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/...age-stance-son-comes-065826488--politics.html

 

So much for his religious and moral principles.

 

At first I wanted to comment on Portman's complete lack of empathy...and how now that it's HIS family he's cool with it, but before that, he didn't give a shit about any one else's family. And that's true - and very typically Republican to divide into "us" and "them" and deny "them" any rights until they become "us".

But it also struck me that everyone has a eureka moment, and it typically involves someone they're close to changing the way they see things. And so while I wish he would have not required a family member's gayness to come around on this, I realize that's what it takes for some; and that this issue is won by changing one mind at a time, however possible.

 

I thought that too, I just had to be a bit snarky.

This issue is won in the States. I mean not yet, but soon and inevitably. I've not seen anything quite like the turnaround for gay rights.

 

What a world we would be in if John Roberts upheld the ACA, destroyed campaign-finance reform, overturned DOMA, and overturned the Voting Rights Act.

 

Yeah, I maybe should be glad about Portman's epiphany, but the fact is it just pisses me off even more.

I'm sorry, but for me he's an asshole.

 

Maybe one of these days they'll figure out that their daughters are women, their neighbors are black, and their friends are poor.*





*well, not THEIR daughters, neighbors or friends but you know what I mean.

 

I want to agree but it also seems that every person who ever changes his mind on this issue is open to that insult. We want to welcome changes of opinion, right?

 

>....grumble, grumble, grumble....<

I suppose you're right...

I welcome those folks.








....assholes...

 

It reminds me a lot of Sarah Palin suddenly becoming interested in issues around Special Education once it affected her family. But I think it's too much to hope for a wider application of empathy given how ingrained that "Us v. them" mentality is.

 

You read the Times, huh?

 

Yes, we want to welcome anyone who comes to realize he/she was wrong. Changing minds is what it's all about. But! The problem is the deeper and wider problem of lacking empathy. It's great for gay rights that sooner or later everyone is gonna realize they have a gay family member or friend or colleague whom they really respect and love. One by one those realizations are changing minds and changing the course of gay rights in this country, and it's wonderful. But the fundamental mentality which requires that an issue harms your own immediate family before you can fully comprehend its impact... that's a serious problem for a leader to have.

 

Fixed

 

I would be suing this guy for plagiarism were I to have articulated my earlier expressed views on this issue in an ever so slightly less-lazy and hastily jotted-off fashion in a widely-circulated lad's magazine.

 

Never gonna be fixed...but as long as human rights wins the day, I'm not gonna nitpick how we got there....

 

Of course, that would be nice. But I don't expect better of some people. I would like to expect better of leaders, whose job is to represent their entire constituency.

 

And how do you represent your entire constituency when those people have strongly divergent views on a topic?

 

Actually, recent political science research invalidates that idea.

I don't get to say this often, but everything we think we know about political science is being reversed. We used to think that legislators would run to the middle to attract the median voter, but it doesn't happen any longer, thanks to gerrymandering, demographic consolidation, and primary elections. Most Republicans and Democrats these days are afraid of a primary challenge rather than a general election because the small proportion of primary voters who are extremely partisan, rabidly motivated, and very ideologically-linked to their party. This tends to not show up because, as Jim Messina said, polling is broken. The only people bothering to respond to phone surveys (and especially robopolls which might just be cheating) are the people who are also primary voters and insanely motivated to vote. Essentially, it'd be the same as trying to poll a race by asking DailyKos and National Review bloggers. You'd get a pretty representative sample of demographics, but you're not getting median voters.

Meanwhile, the electorate is still normally distributed in terms of partisanship and ideology:



where the crazies on either side (hint: P&CE) still make up just a small proportion of the population but receive an undue voice. Politicians who respond to these incentives are thus leapfrogging over the median voter to become more and more extreme to rouse the support of the people to the left and right. If you think about it, every aspect of civic engagement short of voting requires only the use of these rabid partisans:

Volunteering
Donating
Primary elections
Yard signs, bumper stickers, other community-oriented signals
blogging/social media
voter registration

So politicians raise a giant amount of money, plow it into civic engagement to maximize the turnout of the base, and the median voters come out anyway and let the miracle of aggregation
work its magic.

So to make a long story short, politicians don't listen to their electorates, most people in the electorate are moderate, apathetic, poorly informed, and ambivalent to most issues, and the rabid bases control how politics works in the country. In essence, the country is run by the people who care enough to show up, and the system represents them and not the median voter. Constituencies are just as moderate as they were before, but the incentives for moderates to engage in the system don't exist at the same level.

 

Fair enough. But let me ask you this: do you think opposition to gay marriage -- as a single issue -- breaks down solidly along Democrat and Republican lines? Or do you think there are significant numbers of people who vote solidly democratic on almost every other issue who can't stand the idea of gay marriage?

 

I think that the breakdown is along religious enthusiasm, but only for certain denominations like the Southern Baptists, Latter-Day Saints, Catholics, and the evangelical community vs. Episcopals, Unitarians, Methodists, etc. And even then, it's only for people who attend church weekly or more than weekly, and only then, it's for people who do not know any homosexual people. And even then, the sudden shift in public opinion on the issue over the last ten years suggests a lot of the people who switched were pretty ambivalent about it, so maybe the people I listed are also ambivalent. Who knows.