Ever wonder what happened to Wil Wheaton, the young lad who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation? Well wonder no more.

“We left – onto the freeway shoulders – under the tough old stars. In the shadow bluffs I came back to myself. To the real work, to ‘What is to be done.’” – Gary Snyder, I Went into the Maverick Bar

I want to double back to a conversation that was we were having earlier this week regarding how we choose to approach one another in political discourse and the use of snark in that discourse. I came in for some criticism for agreeing with Sonny Bunch that Freddie’s interaction with Robert Stacy McCain, while McCain was certainly due for a take down, was unhelpfully snarky and ad hominem ridden.

In response to E.D.’s defense of snark, Max Socol wrote,

And how many more people have read that post, than would have if it was a mild-mannered suggestion? Drama sells.

Right, I guess it depends on what we understand our undertaking to be when blogging. To get this out of the way, I did not suggest that Freddie’s response needed to be mild mannered and the idea that if one doesn’t riddle one’s comments with snarkiness and ad hominem attacks it is therefore “mild mannered” strikes me as going a bit far. What I said was,

And please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that we can’t get into good vehement rows over important issues, because that isn’t the point of this lamentation. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had and some of the best interactions that I’ve been privy to online have also been the hardest hitting.

So, look, civil and mild mannered are not the same thing. By all means, avoid pulling punches, but leave the name calling in the sandbox where it belongs and focus your take downs on the substance of the person’s arguments. [Read more →]

Blagojevich: I’ve been wanting to be on your show in the worst way for the longest time.

Letterman: Well, you’re on in the worst way, believe me.

POW! And that, folks, is why Letterman kicks Leno’s ass. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either a fool or a communist.

(h/t: Conventional Folly)

So given that Iraq had largely peaceful provincial elections this past weekend, in which voter turn out was much higher than in 2005, where a certain proportion of the seats up for grabs were allocated to women who ran in the election, and where no one seems to be disputing the results, let me propose a highly contingent hypothetical.

If this is a trend that continues and increasingly results in a lowering of violence that both adds to the stability of Iraq and enables American troops to come sooner rather than later, and if the democratic process in Iraq presents the conditions under which a greater degree of civil society is able to take greater hold better integrating Iraq into the global economy and thereby raising the general quality of life for Iraqis and imporiving the degree of stability in the region, would we not count that as a positive development for Iraq and the world generally?

Now, let me say that in posing that question I’m not intending to be an apologist for the Bush administration and its decision to invade Iraq. It remains clear that the decision was based on the manipulation of information and the public, that it was accompanied by significant infringements of civil liberties, that it has contributed to dire economic consequences, and that the most heinous interrogation techniques and treatment of enemy combatants have been utilized in the overall “war on terror”. There is much that has been wound up in the invasion of Iraq and the corresponding war on terror that is despicable and to be condemned.

However, some time ago I made an argument for a sort of developmentally based interventionism wherein said intervention should only seek to remove undue barriers to the development of nations,

To my mind, the key in formulating an acceptable approach to interventionism is to decouple notions of modernization and evolution from ideas of westernization. It seems relatively evident to me that cultures and nations do in fact go through a process of evolution: these entities are dynamic and change over time. I would also be willing to suggest that the deeper structures of that evolution are the same across cultures and nations – which is to say that cultural and national evolution is, in fact, a teleological affair: it has a directionality. But I’m also inclined to suggest that each unique instance of culture and nation will instantiate that evolution in different surface structures. The evolution of China will not look the same as the evolution of America, or India, for that matter–though the direction of their evolution will roughly approximate one another. It is in regard to these surface structures that I think we need to pay the most attention when talking about intervention.

The break from neoconservative interventionism, then, is a move away from remaking nations in one’s own image. Rather, responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution. I say unwarranted because, of course, there are challenges that any culture or nation will face in manifesting its own evolution. But it is also the case that there are often brutal and corrupt forces that stand in the way of such a natural evolution, often against the will and desires of peoples within those cultures and nations. Such impediments seem to stand out in terms of their overt use of force and suffering to impede an evolution against which they stand to lose power and influence.

While it is true that the Bush administration’s  foray into Iraq is perhaps a text book case of how not to do this, I have to wonder if the potential evolution of Iraq demonstrates that, even accidentally, such interventionism can achieve its end goal.

I can’t but heartily agree with Andrew Sullivan on this whole “pictures of Michael Phelps smoking pot” bruhaha. Sullivan notes,

What I love about the harrumphing is its total incoherence. The argument, so far as I can tell, is: a) marijuana destroys people, renders them incapable of productive and worthwhile lives; b) yes, the new president and the greatest Olympic swimmer of all time have smoked pot; c) but that means we have to punish them all the more!

Because they disprove the lies required to sustain the Prohibition. The more the myths of the anti-cannabis brigade are exposed, the more they have to be enforced.

I mean, I’m not in possession of any statistics on this, but does anyone seriously still consider marijuana to be a troubling gateway drug? It strikes me that those for whom this is true have a much more deeply entrenched addiction problem that could manifest just as easily with alcohol.

Maybe my head shaking has something to do with location. I was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, broadly considered the pot capital of North America (if not the world), so the whole drama of people smoking pot has long since worn off on me. Hell, I’ll admit to having walked by a police officer smoking a joint and not really gotten all that worried about what the consequences were going to be.

Which is to say that, yes, I have smoked pot. In fact, I had my “pothead” phase. But I don’t smoke anymore. Why? It’s not because I think it’s evil and it’s not because I realized one day that if I kept it up I was going to ruin my life.

I stopped smoking pot because it just got boring.

That’s right, my estimation is that pot is an a completely and utterly boring drug that functions as an overblown muscle relaxant ad isn’t worth including in your “war on drugs” nor harassing some poor twenty-three year old superstar who engaged in completely predictable behaviour.

Yeah, yeah, I know, Michael Phelps is a role model who kids across America and the world look up to and role models shouldn’t do drugs and other illegal things. Well, brace yourself, odds are your kid is going to smoke pot at some point. And odds are they’ll get a minimal effect from it but keeping doing it to some degree or another because her/his friends are all doing it. And then, at some point, he/she will mostly give it up and cultivate a life for themselves that you will tear up and be proud of. Slightly less likely may be that they continue to smoke pot on an occasional basis, but still cultivate that life you’re busy buying tissues for.

Honestly, there are a lot of troubling issues that permeate our world and we waste time and energy when we get all worked up about something that in the grand scheme of things doesn’t really matter. So go plant a tree, or volunteer at a soup kitchen or as a big brother or sister, or join your local community association and organize more community activities, pay more attention to your kid’s schooling or their life in general, write you elected official about the war in Iraq/Afghanistan/other place you have troops stationed, do whatever floats your boat.

But for god’s sake (dangerous term to use around these parts of late), do something on an issue that maters and actually stands to effect your life.

Update: I forgot to mention that while I am most certainly in favour of decriminalizing marijuana, I remain somewhat undecided on full blown legalization. The reason for my indecision stems from one of the most interesting anti-legalization arguments I have ever run across that was delivered to me by an avid pot smoker. Her argument was that if marijuana was legalized it would inevitably lead to government involvement in regulation, sale, and taxation.

My post smoing friend said with all due indignation, “Idon’t want the government having anything to do with the pot I smoke. I’m one hundred percent convinced that my smoking of pot is beter off without the government having anything to do with it ad all I’m really looking for is to ensure government doesn’t have anything to say about it, either.”

Given some of the gripes that people like John Schwenkler have noted about government over-involvement in good old fashioned capitalism of a variety of forms, I find this line of argument compelling enouh to make me think twice about marijuana legalization.

Sonny Bunch’s calling out Freddie for his take down of Robert Stacy McCain struck me as on target, particularly when Bunch pulls out the underlying point of David Denby’s book Snark saying,

[D]iscourse in the age of the Internet is fundamentally nasty and mean-spirited for no good reason and both the nastiness and the mean-spiritedness retards decent conversation

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m in full agreement with Freddie’s critique of McCain and having read John Schwenkler’s post that kicked all of this up I am at a loss to see what McCain chooses to read into it. So there is little question that on some level McCain deserved to be challenged on his reading of John’s post, but the question that stands out is: how best to do that?

The way that Freddie chose is one option, but I quote him back to himself talking about the approach of aggressive atheists,

You don’t argue your way out of niches by constantly thumbing your noses at the people who you’re trying to convert. The question then becomes, are they converting at all? Or are they merely asserting superiority?

Now, Freddie might respond that he’s not seeking to convert McCain and that, in fact, McCain isn’t the type of person who is capable of being “converted”. Fair enough, but then what is the point of thrashing him? I wonder why the  effort put into something that is unlikely to yield any meaningful results.

And I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture, for all my reading American focused blogs and magazines and the like, remains partially opaque to me, but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

And please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that we can’t get into good vehement rows over important issues, because that isn’t the poit of this lamentation. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had and some of the best interactions that I’ve been privy to online have also been the hardest hitting. In particular, when I first read this response to a post of mine by Helen Rittelmeyer I felt like I’d been punched in gut, especially rereading this line,

Scott doesn’t want to appear more confident in his ideas than he actually feels, but the flipside of his kind of humility is this: While it may be a kind of pride to argue as if you were certainly right, it is more prideful still to nurse an unwillingness ever to be wrong. It takes the sin of pride to be wrong, but it takes the virtue of humility to be revealed to be wrong.

It hurt because it was true and was a valuable lesson to learn about my shadowy tendencies and arrogant pridefulness in always appearing to be right. In my estimation, Helen didn’t pull any punches with her analysis and I emailed her shortly after reading the post to thank her for its candor. But the only reason I got anything out of the post was because Helen had taken the time to frame it in such a way as to be honest in an unflinching way, but constructive and instructive and most of all supremely civil. Helene’s work in that regard is instructive to how we can go about aggressively challenging each other’s ideas with a modicum of respect that actually contributes to some kind of forward movement in our overall discourse. As she said in that same post: slug it out. But remember when people trained in fighting meet to battle, they bring with them a code of honour that infuses the fight. It is of little consequence to win the battle without honour: you’re not fighter in that instance, but rather a cheap brawler.

I believe that McCain’s response to John was an example of this type of brawling. And though I respect him greatly, I think that Freddie’s response took him from his usual stature of a prize fighter and lowered him to McCain’s level. And in that sense, I believe that McCain actually won.

The blogosphere is full of cheap brawlers who like to fancy themselves as prize fighters. And while those brawlers may delude themselves into believing that their efforts are contributing to some kind of larger movement, really they’re just busy feeding their own petty egos at the expense of real contribution. On a bad day its a pretty sad scene.

Something that is increasingly driving me around the bend is the tendency to make appeals to “the people”. Politicians and pundits do this all the time in trying to argue for a particular point of view they happen to be extolling, as if you can reliably count a broad cross section of individuals as thinking in a certain way at all times on particular class of issues. Appeals to “the people” are supposed to be a justifying buttress to one’s argument by demonstrating that you must be right because most individuals agree with you.

Now, in a democracy it is certainly true that a particular course of action or decision on a certain issue requires legitimizing by demonstrating support from those for whom the decision or course of action will have consequences. But on the face of it, the fact that a certain cross section of people agree with and idea doesn’t mean that a particular idea is a good one. Individuals can and have been known to support bad ideas for a variety of reasons. But my distaste for this type of appeal doesn’t just have to do with undermining a good faith debate on ideas based on the merrit of those ideas. Rather, I find the appeal to be disingenuous in terms of the way it describes the content of the subject at which it is aimed.

Talk about “the people” is, by my lights, on par with reference to the “masses”. When appealing to “the people”, one is doing violence to the individuality that is exhibited by thinking citizens of democracy, and thereby disenfranchising those thinking citizens from the process of determining the direction of their polity. It goes without saying that in a democracy there is no way of homogenizing the beliefs and stances of citizens on issues at any time. Not only does the diversity of views means that it is next to impossible, nor desirable, to realize complete unanimity on any given issue, but individuals will change their views on issues over time. So assuming some kind of static consensus on even the most minor of issues within a certain graft of people is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical tool. But the assumption of consensus as a means of justifying an argument/idea/decision/course of action functions as short cut to actually discussing the issue and inviting individuals to consider all of the nuances on a particular topic to arrive at what they might think to be the correct conclusion. The effect is to have prominent voices and personages essentially dictate to citizens what they will think on a particular issues based usually on some kind of ideological identification. The approach is anathema to democracy in the extreme. [Read more →]

When Freddie suggests that part of the problem with modern atheism is that it seems like many (most?) prominent atheists couch their arguments in the folds of derision I can’t but heartily agree with him. I’m not a religious individual myself, but it rankles me something fierce when I listen to a PZ Meyers or a Bill Maher hold forth about the stupidity/absurdity of religion. I mean, people should feel free to disagree about things all they want and debate those disagreements, we’re better off when we have those types of debates. But we fail to receive the benefits of having those types of important debates when they take place within a context lacking respect and dignity for all parties involved.

The challenge here, I think, is to hold in mind that whether you are an atheist who rests her understanding of the world in science and empirical data or the religious believer who finds meaning through scripture and God, that both means of understanding are properly understood to be a process of inquiry.

In terms of resting one’s belief about the nature of the world in the revelations of science, there is often a corresponding failure to understand that doing so is, in itself, a choice to explore the world from a particular vantage point. The popular view of science is that is has to do only with the material, that whatever we can touch and feel, dissect and study with our senses is what is really real. Insofar as God and the process of understanding through religion don’t deal with the material, atheists thus assume that they are invalid and merely the hair-brained superstitions of the unenlightened.

But empiricism and materialism are not, in fact, the same thing. Empiricism is a study of reality through the avenue of experience and the assumption that only the material can be experienced is itself an unspoken premise that limits what we stand to discover. The explanatory power of the natural sciences not withstanding, operating under the assumption that only the material constitutes reality and is therefore deserving of consideration is as much a matter of faith as a belief in God.

I take the idea of whether one can have an experience of God to be an open question so long as experience isn’t necessarily relegated into the domain of the material. Despite not being a religious individual I have had what I would call an experience of God that was entirely subjective and has infused my own life with a deeply held spirituality. That the experience can’t be easily translated into material terms doesn’t, at least in my mind, invalidate it as an experience. Nor does it cause the influence of that experience on my life to be null and void.

It is this, in my mind, that gives religion the power that Freddie rightly notes it has: the infusion of one’s life with a deeper current of purposefulness through openness to an experience of something greater than one’s self. Again, rightly understood, I think such an experience isn’t so much determinative as it is dispositive.

Besides, I feel like the whole argument over the existence of God is misplaced. It’s not a belief in God that keeps me from adhering to any particular religious tradition, but my concerns around the way that most religious traditions operate, the stasis of belief that tends to become the norm in such communities, and the levels of discrimination and xenophobia that such stasis can tend to produce. Most of the criticisms that I’ve ever heard about religion are grounded in those same kinds of concerns, but those concerns have literally nothing to do with the belief in the existence of God, there are cultural not metaphysical. So a good faith argument about the problematic elements of religion ought to focus on those cultural elements, and would be a good deal more effective as a result I would wager.

Despite the fact that I don’t necessarily think that there is much to add to Freddie’s post regarding Culture 11, I feel moved to write at least a little something about a site I came to hold in such high regard.

I first learned of Culture 11 when fellow OG Chris Dierkes wrote me to say that the pre-eminently confusing James Poulos has approached him about doing some writing for an up and coming, “outside the beltway” conservative site on politics, culture, and all things Americana (and beyond). Chris and I shared what is commonly referred to as an “indie-blogger dork out moment” over the excitement and possibilities — I didn’t jump around shrieking, but I think Chris might have (ha ha!).

A little while later I wandered over to check out Chris’ “new digs” and was immediately struck by the originality of what C11’s creators had envisioned. While I’m not sure that the social networking elements of the site ever truly took off, it was clear that C11 was destined to be much more than just an online magazine or a series of blogs. C11 was set up to be a community, and a community dealing with politics and culture of all things. I was in heaven.

Like Freddie, E.D., Mark, and Chris (I think), C11 was the first place to give me a chance to actually publish thoughts I had only ever written on my own site. C11 was a site that brought new and fresh perspectives into the fold and featured them side by side with well published and respected writers and there was, frankly, no where else on the web that one might find such an amazing opportunity. The community that formed around this hooking into of possibilities was an impressive cadre all its own. The editors/bloggers of C11 proved themselves not just talented communicators, but, more often than not, interesting people who brought their own unqiue quirks and ticks to the table as an invitation to be real in all of this talk. They brought out the honest, if not at times intemperate, reactions of their readers and encouraged that sincerity to always be the first instinct of the site, as opposed to the sheltered fears we hid away.

In many ways, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen owes its inception to C11. All of the writers on this site in one fashion or another came into each other’s orbit by first entering the orbit of this exciting new site we’d all heard of and a mini-community of our own formed out of that trajectory. It is the dedication to real and considered dialogue, searching exploration, and enlivening debate that drew us all to C11 and those qualities very much infuse this site with which we’re all so excited.

C11 was setting up to be a premier site, I don’t hesitate to say that, and I, among many others, am better for the efforts that everyone there put forward. So thanks C11, we owe you, and as that Poulos character suggests — let us ride again in another life.

In responding to my post about a legal victory for same-sex couples being a necessary but not sufficient first step towards broad cultural equality, Andrew Sullivan writes,

An argument that rests on a simple resort to the legal status quo is not a very strong one. It’s perfectly possible (and logically necessary) to craft a compelling and winning case for marriage equality in the absence of its legality in any particular state. That’s especially true once the principle has been established somewhere in America. I think the progress we’ve made in such a short space of time leads to the opposite conclusion: that this is an area which can be won culturally before it is won legally.

So I agree with Andrew that people who premis their argument on the legal status quo aren’t presenting a very strong argument, but, look, that won’t stop them from doing it. As a proponent of marriage equality I might be willing to acknowledge that there are stronger and weaker oppositional arguments, but I hold the views that I do because at the end of the day I believe that are no strong arguments against marriage equality that aren’t eminently out weighed by arguments in its favour.

As mentioned further down the post and, actually, the primary thrust of the post, is my belief that marriage equality proponents must go about making cultural arguments not just against the discrimination against same-sex marriage, but also articulating why legalizing marriages presents a significant boon to society. I think those arguments can be made convincingly and I have on several occasions attempted to make them myself. But I think we need to recognize something about discussions that happen on a cultural plain, especially insofar as those discussion involve discrimination: they are extremely difficult conversations to have.

People whose discrimination is rooted in cultural reasoning are generaly fairly adverse to debating those reasons. There is the pervasive sense that people ought to be allowed to adhere to whatever cultural norms and customs they so choose, without exposure to recrimination. So if you choose to then go ahead and push the issue, the likely outcome is that your interlocutor will respond with defensiveness. People hold tightly to the cultural signposts that help to provide some maning to their lives and are loathe to give them up, even when it has become eveident that those signposts are out dated and poining in an unhelpful direction. So folks will tend to use whatever is within their reach to defend those held beleifs, preferably the more disposable arguments and reasoning first.

At the end of the day, the ball with regards to cultural equality for same-sex marriage lies largely in opponents courts. I say this by way of recognizing that you can’t really force people to alter their cultural beliefs. People may choose to hide those beliefs from the light of day in response to overwhelming pressure, but history shows us that this kind of victory really only gives rise to a more nuanced and insidious forms of discrimination. No, as Freddie warns, people cannot be coerced into accepting same-sex couples, they have to be persuaded. The choice, like it or not, is up to them. So my argument is that the fewer obstacles you have standing in the way of that genuine engagement — and the more you recognize the necessity for that engagement — the better equipped you are to realize your overall goal of full-bodied equality for same-sex marriages.

I also don’t quibble with Andrew around the strides that marriage equality proponents have made in recent decades, but I think it is important that we bear a realistic picture of the work in front of us in mind. While great strides have been made in race relations, culminating in the election of the first African-American President, no one serious about securing broad equality for traditionally marginalized minorities would suggest that the work is done. This more than a century after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation and several decades after the zenith of the civil rights movement. Great strides, yes, but the work of securing broad cultural equality is long, arduous, and pervasively tricky.

So I celebrate with Andrew how far marriage equality and gay rights activists have come, but am conversely humbled by the realization that in this work the hardest and most difficult push always comes at the end.

I read with great interest Kyle’s excellent post on partisanship wherein Kyle made some excellent points about the political process, its strengths and its faults. In that post, Kyle talked about his hopes around the election of Barack Obama saying,

I too am a partisan, and on rare occasions I could be viciously so.  But at the same time my approach to politics would suggest an eagerness for post partisanship that is echoed by my long time support of the newly minted President of the United States.  I am a lefty, but for two years I have been a staunch supporter of the single candidate who succeeded most in making post-partisanship one of the defining themes of his campaign.

Admittedly, I too was drawn in by Obama’s talk of post-partisanship, it formed much of my basis for support early on. But further consideration of a variety of issues and the future of political discourse in general has left me somewhat doubtful about post-partisanship as a likely phenomenon.

When we talk about post-partisanship, the indication is that we’re talking about a point in time at which we’ll get beyond partisanship. The problem here is that partisanship isn’t a temporally located phenomenon. Granted, various ideologies arise in specific time periods and may or may not undergo a process of evolution, but the perspectival interrelationships of those ideologies that give rise to a partisanship persist so long as there are contrasting points of view available. In other words, so long as there are different perspectives that people can take on a variety of issues and so long as those perspectives are roughly represented by some kind of ideological housing, we are likely to see the rise of partisanship. Given that it seems highly unlikely that all of the disagreements we have in the process of perpetuating political discourse will evaporate, it begins to look increasingly likely that post-partisanship is a conceptual misnomer.

One step further, as Kyle points out, we actually benefit from having contrasting points of view expressed on various topics. The veracity of our decisions is greatly bolstered when we’ve had a healthy debate on the issue at hand in which people of contrasting points of view have challenged one another on the strengths and weaknesses of each others’ claims. How else are we  to identify ideological blind spots and uncover previously unnoticed implications from various ideas? It seems fairly clear from the functioning of most modern polities that sincere and passionate debate is an intrinsic ingredient to the health of democracy.

And yet, one can’t escape the feeling that something is amiss in our political discourse. Moreover, much of the stagnation of government actually demonstrably belies the accuracy of that feeling. But if post-partisanship is a misnomer, then what is it we seek to remedy our perceived failings?

I would suggest that rather than post-partisanship, what we really seek is right relation of our partisan tendencies. Or, to put it as Kyle suggested, we seek some kind of guiding orientation towards the “good side of partisanship”, we want partisanship that works in a productive manner. [Read more →]

Since quoting animated characters seems to be the order of the day, let me playfully respond to Freddie’s latest on same-sex marriage with a line from one of my favourites, “suffering succotash!” Freddie is quite correct when he says,

To some degree this is a debate in search of a problem because legal and social acceptance will inevitably be deeply linked.

John Schwenkler and E.D. Kain aside, I think this especially true of Freddie’s take on the issue of marriage equality as compared to mine. While I acknowledge that the whole idea of developing distinctive nomenclature for same-sex marriage tugs at my philosophical ear, I have acknowledged that practically speaking it seems like a doomed project, at least in the short term. And I don’t differ with Freddie in believing that the current focus and primary focus in terms of marriage equality must be legal.

Look, to some degree this dichotomy of the “cultural work” and the “legal work” is just false. The work of legalizing same-sex marriages happens on the legal and cultural fronts simultaneously. And so E.D. is right when he notes that there are some cultural shifts necessary before we might expect to realize a legal victory for marriage equality. But the reason I identify legal victory as “the first step” is that I think its realization marks, in some senses, the beginning of a renewed and focused push for cultural equality. It strikes me that truly uncovering and addressing some of the more buried cultural elements of discrimination against same-sex couples is next to impossible so long as opponents have a legal basis to fall back on.

And this is where I tend to get pensive around Freddie’s arguments. On the whole I think we are on the same page, but statements like, “I do think, though, that the history of various civil rights struggles suggests that a passionate minority fights for and wins legal rights, and then, over time, social acceptance grows[,]” leave me feeling like part of the picture is being left out. What I mean is to say that, to my mind, legal equality is necessary but not sufficient for broad cultural equality. This notion that over time people will just come around doesn’t strike me as realistic. Rather, with legal rights secured, same-sex couples and their allies are enabled to take their cause beyond the realm of just the legal and push into some of the more embedded and, frankly, more difficult elements of realizing a robust equality that embodies both legal underpinnings and the respect and dignity that ought to be available to any loving relationship.

I recognize at this point that we are tangling the weeds of marriage equality and gay rights generally speaking, but as with cultural an legal work, I’m no sure to what degree the two aren’t inherently intertwined to begin with.

In response to my earlier post o the subject, commenter Josh pushed me on what exactly I meant by focusing on cultural elements to achieve some sense of full equality. It’s a good question and one that caused me to think more deeply about what exactly I meant by the statement. [Read more →]