I’m feeling very ambivalent about the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the passing of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

On the one hand, by far the likeliest outcome is that a new proposition to overturn the ban will be on the ballot in less than two years, and it will pass. I don’t think out-of-state religious groups are going to keep throwing huge amounts of money at the issue election after election, nor is the same scare campaign going to work a second time. Without everyone’s attention riveted on the presidential campaign, we’ll have time to prepare better to counter the false arguments and to put on a better campaign than we did the last time.

(We can hardly put on a worse one. As a friend of mine said, there are two things we need to remember about the people who ran the No on 8 campaign. We mustn’t forget to be grateful for their enormous effort. And we must never let them run a campaign for us ever again.)

And I know that in the long run this will be a securer step forward if it’s accomplished by popular vote than by a court ruling.

But dammit, the decision still pisses me off. For a court to say that it’s okay to put it in the freaking state constitution that some people are barred from getting privileges that everybody else gets — that’s just flat-out wrong.

If I’m getting this all straight, the official Republican position on interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and slamming someone against a wall is

1. It’s not torture.
2. Okay, so it’s torture, but torture isn’t wrong.
3. Okay, so it’s wrong, but the Democrats didn’t stop us.

Dave has suggested that since it’s caused by some kind of mutant hybrid of swine flu virus and avian flu virus, they really ought to be calling this Flying Pig Flu.

Everybody’s talking like Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch to Democrat is going to make things so-o-o-o much easier for the Dems because now they have the magic number 60. That might be true if the Dems were good at the marching in lockstep thing, but they aren’t so much. Seems to me that all this means is we have one more cat to herd.

I often like Leonard Pitts, but not his column on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. His point, essentially, is that there is no point at all in trying to understand why people do things like this; it’s just evil and he’s not evil and that’s the end of it.

Did Adolf Hitler murder six million Jews because he had a strained relationship with his father? Would it matter if he did?

As a matter of fact, the answers are, first, yes, if you can call brutal physical abuse “a strained relationship”, and second, only if you think it’s more important to try to keep other children from growing up to do the same kind of thing that Hitler did than it is for us to maintain our comfortable illusions of ego and separateness by pointing at things that grieve us and saying, I am somebody who could never possibly have been that — while never looking too closely at anything that risks upsetting our fine high notions of who we are, and aren’t.

As for him, Mr. Pitts says,

I will give them not an hour of my one and only life trying to comprehend their incomprehensible deed.

Well, yay him. Deliberately choosing not to work to understand something difficult and unpleasant — oh my yes, that’s certainly something to boast about.

Interesting analysis by Nate Silver of gay marriage votes:

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:
1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

Race, education, political party, and every other variable he looked at either didn’t have an effect or duplicated the effect of #2.

Marriage bans, however, are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we’d project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year. …

So what does this mean for Iowa? … [T]he model predicts that if Iowans voted on a marriage ban today, it would pass with 56.0 percent of the vote. By 2012, however, the model projects a toss-up: 50.4 percent of Iowans voting to approve the ban, and 49.6 percent opposed. In 2013 and all subsequent years, the model thinks the marriage ban would fail.

I’ve read so much about the New Yorker cover, and even seen a little bitty reproduction of it on some news site, that I thought I had made up my mind about it. Kind of a lame and misguided attempt at satire, I had decided, but at the same time it’s a bit silly to criticize it on the grounds that it is itself racist, or even to expend the mental energy to get bent out of shape about it.

But then I finally got my issue in the mail today. I took one look at the cover, seeing it at full size for the first time, and I immediately burst out laughing. No intellectualizing going on, it was just my first real look at the cover as it was intended to be seen, going straight from my eyeballs and along my nerves to the part of my brain that governs laughter, before I had a chance to think about it with the part of my brain that governs my politics.

Man, that is just one hell of a funny cover. It is possibly an irresponsible statement, but it is also a really, really brilliantly executed one.

Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos moderate the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858:

LINCOLN: I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect slavery will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other …

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?

LINCOLN: I think we covered this …

GIBSON: If I may interrupt …

LINCOLN: Please.

GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down …

Let me get this clear in my head. If I understand our punditry correctly:

If I support Obama and I’m black, there are plenty of pundits to let me know that that’s racist, because I’m only voting for him because he’s the same color as I am, not because I think he’s the more competent candidate.

If I support Obama and I’m white, any number of pundits are happy to inform me that it’s still racist, because I’m only voting for him because he’s black and cleancut and that alleviates my white liberal guilt, and it’s not because I think he’s the more competent candidate.

But if I’m one of the 30% or so of Clinton supporters who say in the polls that they’d sooner vote for McCain than Obama, even though the platforms of Clinton and Obama are not all that far apart while McCain is basically running as George Bush III, now it’s all about the competence of the candidates, and the R-word is not even whispered by anyone in the media.

Gee, this politics stuff is hard to keep straight sometimes.

John McCain, quoted today in the New York Times:

The United States and its allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism.

Makes me think of Wile E. Coyote standing on the precipice of catching the Roadrunner.