Andrew Sullivan on drag queens; R.R. Reno on gay marriage; Matt Shapiro on a classic CDC blooper; Hanania's book reviewed; Dalibor Rohac on Ukraine and Israel
‘As I recall, the gay marriage movement was marketed in a way to appeal to conservatives, by putting the emphasis on marriage. They made it sound like legal gay marriage was an end point.
Instead, it turned out to be a launching pad. ’
The UK situation is instructive. Conservatives did not like the association with marriage for same sex couples. Homosexuals argued that marriage would give them equivalent legal and social status as opposite sex couples - such as pension rights, inheritance, funeral arrangements, etc.
In 2004 UK Parliament did its job and found the middle way to take into account the interests and views of all parties, and passed the Civil Partnership Act for same sex couples which was marriage in all but name.
“The Civil Partnership Act brings more than just the opportunity to register relationships. The British legislation is among the most comprehensive in the world in giving equality to same-sex relationships. Civil partners are treated equivalently to married couples in almost every respect.”
So issue resolved, matter closed? Of course not! After a few years, copying what was happening in the USA, Gay marriage once again became an issue in the UK. It had to be ‘marriage’. It had nothing to do with equal Rights, it was about spite and triumphing over conservatives and religious views and deciding what normal was.
In reality, only a tiny percentage of same sex couples used the Civil Partnership Act or Marriage Act because enduring partnerships between same sex couples are a rarity. So a tiny minority of a small minority overturned the majority will and defined the new normal.
A launchpad? Yes - for a gobby group of activists and political opportunists for ever more and more demands to overturn normality and accept any freakish fashion in its place.
And of course there is no ‘Right’ to marriage for anyone and never has been.
Americans via their Constitution have always claimed the right of association. They do not need the Federal government's permission or approval to sleep with whomever of consenting age.
The government has an interest in recognizing contracts entered into by it citizens. The government is not obligated to enforce all contracts. There is no "right" to have ones agreement with another person or persons recognized as a legal contract. There is law and the government follows the law on what contracts it honors
Traditional marriage is a contract attached to a particular association. The legal question is should the government accept as a marriage contract any association of people? In the USA, polygamy is not recognized by the government as a legal contract. Polygamous relationships are legal, however - it is not a crime for a man to father children with multiple women. It is only a crime for the father to not financially support those children.
The legal recognition of same-sex marriage is a no big deal by itself. It is a huge deal in opening the door for activists to push any and every personal affection as deserving government recognition and approval.
You are right - and Marriage actually is a licence. Governments have only been in the marriage licence business for a couple of centuries. Everyone got along fine without Government involvement for tens of thousands of years. Like with everything, problems only start when Govt sticks its nose in.
My view is Govt should repeal Marriage legislation - there’s no shortage of lawyers for those who want written contracts, and absence of Govt won’t prevent religious ceremonies for those who value them.
1) It's impossible to separate legal recognition and cultural approval/disapproval in our society as it stands today. Gay marriage is either celebrated or condemned, and the law reflects this. Mere "tolerance" is not something our culture does these days.
Saying that this can be done "in principal" might be theoretically true but not practically true.
2) As soon as we got gay marriage it was inevitable that gays (and anyone that could get a letter added to the end of the string) would get plugged right into Civil Rights Law. At that point not celebrating it would be a literal crime.
In general, I've found that anything not forbidden is mandatory.
Justice Thomas has a general problem with the doctrine of substantive due process. He thinks it’s a kludge. He dislikes it the way a carpenter dislikes shoddy carpentry, and for many of the same reasons.
RBG herself had problems with the reasoning in Roe v Wade.
I have a general problem with the creeping authoritarianism of the US federal government. Too many people in government think they have the unlimited right to tell people what to do.
Rohac is spinning a narrative when he writes: "The Balts, the Poles, and the Czechs understand well that Putin’s ambitions do not stop in Ukraine and their countries are next on the list."
Putin is doing what he said he would do if Ukraine allied with the West. It is the same thing Russia did when Georgia (the country) got friendly with NATO. Western pundits and politicians are indignant that Putin supports the Russian form of "The Monroe Doctrine".
Putin did not become aggressive until certain triggers were pulled by Western, in particular US, leaders. Those triggers are very precise. Putin said what they were.
The proper narrative is Russia has made public it's basis for aggression against its neighbors. It has acted true to what it said. You think Russia is wrong? Well, how do you think the USA would respond if China started building a naval base in South America?
Furthermore, the USA ventures to the other side of the world to have mitary conflict to defend what it says are its interests. Russia is fighting with a neighboring country. And yet the narrative is Russia is an imperialist aggressor. Fine then. Let's use that standard from now on to label all military intervention!
Bottom line is the longer the Ukraine war goes on the worse it will be for the Ukrainians. That the West is pushing eternal war shows the immorality of Western culture. Please let us follow the wisdom of Vizzini and not get involved in a land war in Asia. Unfortunately, that error has already been made and the West seems determined to double down on it, at an American cost of over $50 billion a month
Not comparable. The USA did not kill eight to twelve million Cubans in the Holodomor. The Soviet Empire forfeited Russia’s claims for union with Ukraine.
Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if the USA had told Ukraine it would never be part of NATO?
Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if the USA had not meddled in Ukraine politics and military training?
It is dishonest to blame the reaction and not acknowledge what precipitated it. Putin has explained what triggers him. The US has disregarded Putin's argument. And so we have war. War is destroying the Ukraine. It is hurting Europe and creating global economic disruption.
War should be avoided! Yet the USA invited war with Russia by meddling in Ukraine and encouraging Ukraine to ally with the West. This foreign policy will go down in history as one of the most idiotic of American strategies. Everyone is going to be made worse off. And for what benefits? The ego of American imperialists.
How quickly the lessons of Vietnam have been neglected. Heck, how quickly the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have been forgotten!
Ukraine has the ultimate stake in this. Do they want to be a Russian satrapy, ruled for the benefit of the Kremlin, or to run their own country as they see fit?
You apparently have no idea how bad things were in the Warsaw Pact, let alone the USSR. The Soviet Union turned entire countries into maximum security prisons complete with armed guards ordered to shoot people attempting to escape. What do you think the Berlin Wall was?
Of _course_ the people of the former Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics want closer ties to the West!
You are conflating two concerns. What Ukraine wants and what is good for world peace. A faction of Ukraine may want alignment with the West. But alignment of the nation with the West will spawn WWIII.
Seems pretty bad foreign policy to.invite WWIII just so a group of people can be happy.
Similarly, as much as Taiwanese leaders have desired to be recognized as independent of China, Western leaders are more sanguine. Why? Because what is desired by Taiwan may not be beneficial to the world as long as China can spoil the fun for everyone.
And China would go to war to enforce its claim on Taiwan. Knowing that, how dumb would an American president be to kick the hornets nest and assist Taiwan in separating from China? Fortunately, none have been that dumb.
RE: Matt Shapiro's points on the slide: It might well be a mistake to assume that slide was created in error. Misrepresenting data has been the standard procedure since the beginning of this mess, to put it lightly. The only big change is that the woman wasn't banned from Twitter for pointing out the lies in the slide. Progress!
I think California did have the right idea on gay marriage; civil unions for everyone. If you want to get married, find an officiant willing to perform the ceremony. Or, just jump over a broomstick together. The two were separate things.
Unfortunately, later on, people who fetishized government got a separate marriage law passed for straights.
I take exception to your glorification of a lifestyle that leads to being a grandparent. I write this as a 60 year old who has been married for 37 years, has three adult children and is expecting his first grandchild later this year.
There are many paths to happiness,. Your view that being a grandparent is equal to "victory in life" is hopelessly narrow and actually cruel to those who might not be able to be grandparents.
Written exactly like someone who is going to be a grandparent.
Look, I am on the opposite side of you- unmarried, no children, and thus no grandchildren and no chance at grandchildren. Kling is right, and I recognize that he is right.
Long ago I used to be in favor of gay marriage. I couldn't be further to the other side of the issue now.
Sullivan makes his home in Provincetown, MA, which is a gaytown USA. I had never heard about it until there was a Delta variant outbreak that was used as justification to re-impose mask mandates.
Reading about it from the people there it seemed something like this:
"I was high on drugs for Bear Week having bareback orgies with random strangers I met, then I got COVID."
I also remember Sullivan saying that "masks were the new condoms" as if something that covers your face to stop you from breathing all day and sticking a rubber on for a few minutes so you don't spread AIDS are the same thing. Then again, Sullivan has STDs from his own behavior.
Sullivan says he made the conservative case for gay marriage, but I'm not sure that was ever true. He doesn't believe in monogamy, even in marriage. A non-monogamous marriage...isn't a marriage. By definition.
Beyond that he is against any kind of sexual restraint or public propriety. He calls even the tamest attempts to protect the innocence of children "puritanical".
I don't see how people who defend Bear Week and people who want family values can share a movement. We want entirely different societies.
The US would be much more effective enforcing the Order if it did not itself violate it so often.
I sort of wish we DID fear China just enough to eliminates some of the obstacles to a more prosperous and faster growing economy -- restrictions on skilled immigration, NIMBYism about infrastructure and residential-commercial development in urban areas, trade restrictions, and the structural deficit.
Having drag queen read books to kinds IS fun if you idea a fun is to "own the Cons." (And boy did it work! :)) To be really harmless though it could have been a drag queen whose day job IS fire fighter or test pilot.
I wonder if we might be seeing female reproductive suppression here. Note that many of the proponents of alternative lifestyles practice and promote very much more conservative lifestyles for their own families.
I'm not at all convinced drag shows aren't just fetishistic behavior on the part of (some) gay men. Also, to the extent that Sullivan is correct about "drag was for a long time ubiquitous in US military shows," I think part of the entertainment value in having a bunch of masculine, macho military guys put on dresses and caricature various female mannerisms was in the contrast in appearance vs behavior. An effeminate gay man with three pounds of makeup on doing a fairly convincing Lady Gaga or whatever just isn't the same thing.
Interested in your thoughts on free trade. Have you looked at Matt Klein and Michael Pettis’s Trade Wars are Class Wars. My understanding of the thesis is that trade surplus countries suppress wages to recycle trade gains into US assets keeping their currency from adjusting and making their exports less competitive. This benefits the owners of the exporting companies and Wall St and Americans with financial assets. They believe we should rebalance trade by taxing those financial inflows but leave trade itself unrestricted. Thoughts?
While he softens his language quite a bit, it is pretty clear that Sullivan, as well as a few other gay/lesbian iconoclasts, recognize that the root of transgenderism is remaking homophobia into a socially acceptable form. You can try to normalize same-sex coupling all you want but in the end the prospect of getting grandkids wins, as you like to point out.
I like the Zeihan snark of 'bribing up an alliance'. We kept the Cold War from warming up too much because we primarily fought it on economic terms (remember that the point of Reagan's 'Star Wars' anti-ICBM program was forcing the Soviets to unsustainably expand their missile forces). He has pointed out a couple of times, in his prior books especially, that trade for the US was always a defense strategy not an economic one. In percentage terms we were one of the least involved nations in international trade.
I would agree that Zeihan definitely would like to see The Order rebooted on some firmer footing than opposing whatever boogeyman is handy. He has suggested a couple of times that we might be entering a period like the 1880s or 1920s where American businesses did more outreach than the government. How sustainable that will be is an open question since that was done under the protection of the British Empire before it crashed after WWII.
‘As I recall, the gay marriage movement was marketed in a way to appeal to conservatives, by putting the emphasis on marriage. They made it sound like legal gay marriage was an end point.
Instead, it turned out to be a launching pad. ’
The UK situation is instructive. Conservatives did not like the association with marriage for same sex couples. Homosexuals argued that marriage would give them equivalent legal and social status as opposite sex couples - such as pension rights, inheritance, funeral arrangements, etc.
In 2004 UK Parliament did its job and found the middle way to take into account the interests and views of all parties, and passed the Civil Partnership Act for same sex couples which was marriage in all but name.
“The Civil Partnership Act brings more than just the opportunity to register relationships. The British legislation is among the most comprehensive in the world in giving equality to same-sex relationships. Civil partners are treated equivalently to married couples in almost every respect.”
So issue resolved, matter closed? Of course not! After a few years, copying what was happening in the USA, Gay marriage once again became an issue in the UK. It had to be ‘marriage’. It had nothing to do with equal Rights, it was about spite and triumphing over conservatives and religious views and deciding what normal was.
In reality, only a tiny percentage of same sex couples used the Civil Partnership Act or Marriage Act because enduring partnerships between same sex couples are a rarity. So a tiny minority of a small minority overturned the majority will and defined the new normal.
A launchpad? Yes - for a gobby group of activists and political opportunists for ever more and more demands to overturn normality and accept any freakish fashion in its place.
And of course there is no ‘Right’ to marriage for anyone and never has been.
An expansion of your last sentence:
Americans via their Constitution have always claimed the right of association. They do not need the Federal government's permission or approval to sleep with whomever of consenting age.
The government has an interest in recognizing contracts entered into by it citizens. The government is not obligated to enforce all contracts. There is no "right" to have ones agreement with another person or persons recognized as a legal contract. There is law and the government follows the law on what contracts it honors
Traditional marriage is a contract attached to a particular association. The legal question is should the government accept as a marriage contract any association of people? In the USA, polygamy is not recognized by the government as a legal contract. Polygamous relationships are legal, however - it is not a crime for a man to father children with multiple women. It is only a crime for the father to not financially support those children.
The legal recognition of same-sex marriage is a no big deal by itself. It is a huge deal in opening the door for activists to push any and every personal affection as deserving government recognition and approval.
You are right - and Marriage actually is a licence. Governments have only been in the marriage licence business for a couple of centuries. Everyone got along fine without Government involvement for tens of thousands of years. Like with everything, problems only start when Govt sticks its nose in.
My view is Govt should repeal Marriage legislation - there’s no shortage of lawyers for those who want written contracts, and absence of Govt won’t prevent religious ceremonies for those who value them.
Marriage is a canned legal relationship providing for joint ownership, maintenance, and inheritance.
A woman is wise not to conceive a child without a legally binding contract with the father for support and paternal care.
1) It's impossible to separate legal recognition and cultural approval/disapproval in our society as it stands today. Gay marriage is either celebrated or condemned, and the law reflects this. Mere "tolerance" is not something our culture does these days.
Saying that this can be done "in principal" might be theoretically true but not practically true.
2) As soon as we got gay marriage it was inevitable that gays (and anyone that could get a letter added to the end of the string) would get plugged right into Civil Rights Law. At that point not celebrating it would be a literal crime.
In general, I've found that anything not forbidden is mandatory.
"there is no ‘Right’ to marriage for anyone and never has been"
According to now overturned understanding of the Fourteenth's Amendment that legalizes Justice Thomas's marriage there is.
Justice Thomas has a general problem with the doctrine of substantive due process. He thinks it’s a kludge. He dislikes it the way a carpenter dislikes shoddy carpentry, and for many of the same reasons.
RBG herself had problems with the reasoning in Roe v Wade.
I have a general problem with the creeping authoritarianism of the US federal government. Too many people in government think they have the unlimited right to tell people what to do.
We need to keep trying to get the limits right even as the circumstances change.
Rohac is spinning a narrative when he writes: "The Balts, the Poles, and the Czechs understand well that Putin’s ambitions do not stop in Ukraine and their countries are next on the list."
Putin is doing what he said he would do if Ukraine allied with the West. It is the same thing Russia did when Georgia (the country) got friendly with NATO. Western pundits and politicians are indignant that Putin supports the Russian form of "The Monroe Doctrine".
Putin did not become aggressive until certain triggers were pulled by Western, in particular US, leaders. Those triggers are very precise. Putin said what they were.
The proper narrative is Russia has made public it's basis for aggression against its neighbors. It has acted true to what it said. You think Russia is wrong? Well, how do you think the USA would respond if China started building a naval base in South America?
Furthermore, the USA ventures to the other side of the world to have mitary conflict to defend what it says are its interests. Russia is fighting with a neighboring country. And yet the narrative is Russia is an imperialist aggressor. Fine then. Let's use that standard from now on to label all military intervention!
Bottom line is the longer the Ukraine war goes on the worse it will be for the Ukrainians. That the West is pushing eternal war shows the immorality of Western culture. Please let us follow the wisdom of Vizzini and not get involved in a land war in Asia. Unfortunately, that error has already been made and the West seems determined to double down on it, at an American cost of over $50 billion a month
“Well, how do you think the USA would respond if China started building a naval base in South America?”
No real need to speculate as we know what happened with Cuba and the Soviets.
Not comparable. The USA did not kill eight to twelve million Cubans in the Holodomor. The Soviet Empire forfeited Russia’s claims for union with Ukraine.
Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if the USA had told Ukraine it would never be part of NATO?
Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if the USA had not meddled in Ukraine politics and military training?
It is dishonest to blame the reaction and not acknowledge what precipitated it. Putin has explained what triggers him. The US has disregarded Putin's argument. And so we have war. War is destroying the Ukraine. It is hurting Europe and creating global economic disruption.
War should be avoided! Yet the USA invited war with Russia by meddling in Ukraine and encouraging Ukraine to ally with the West. This foreign policy will go down in history as one of the most idiotic of American strategies. Everyone is going to be made worse off. And for what benefits? The ego of American imperialists.
How quickly the lessons of Vietnam have been neglected. Heck, how quickly the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have been forgotten!
Ukraine has the ultimate stake in this. Do they want to be a Russian satrapy, ruled for the benefit of the Kremlin, or to run their own country as they see fit?
You apparently have no idea how bad things were in the Warsaw Pact, let alone the USSR. The Soviet Union turned entire countries into maximum security prisons complete with armed guards ordered to shoot people attempting to escape. What do you think the Berlin Wall was?
Of _course_ the people of the former Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics want closer ties to the West!
You are conflating two concerns. What Ukraine wants and what is good for world peace. A faction of Ukraine may want alignment with the West. But alignment of the nation with the West will spawn WWIII.
Seems pretty bad foreign policy to.invite WWIII just so a group of people can be happy.
Similarly, as much as Taiwanese leaders have desired to be recognized as independent of China, Western leaders are more sanguine. Why? Because what is desired by Taiwan may not be beneficial to the world as long as China can spoil the fun for everyone.
And China would go to war to enforce its claim on Taiwan. Knowing that, how dumb would an American president be to kick the hornets nest and assist Taiwan in separating from China? Fortunately, none have been that dumb.
Yet what Biden is doing in Ukraine is that dumb.
Where do you draw the line? Ukraine? Estonia? Poland? Germany? The English Channel?
We can’t let Russia win this. They won’t stop at Ukraine.
Russia will stop the instant the Ukraine commits to staying politically neutral. But have Ukraine ally with the West and the war will continue.
I think a neutral Ukraine is a better way for world peace. How is peace realized any other way?
RE: Matt Shapiro's points on the slide: It might well be a mistake to assume that slide was created in error. Misrepresenting data has been the standard procedure since the beginning of this mess, to put it lightly. The only big change is that the woman wasn't banned from Twitter for pointing out the lies in the slide. Progress!
I think California did have the right idea on gay marriage; civil unions for everyone. If you want to get married, find an officiant willing to perform the ceremony. Or, just jump over a broomstick together. The two were separate things.
Unfortunately, later on, people who fetishized government got a separate marriage law passed for straights.
I take exception to your glorification of a lifestyle that leads to being a grandparent. I write this as a 60 year old who has been married for 37 years, has three adult children and is expecting his first grandchild later this year.
There are many paths to happiness,. Your view that being a grandparent is equal to "victory in life" is hopelessly narrow and actually cruel to those who might not be able to be grandparents.
Written exactly like someone who is going to be a grandparent.
Look, I am on the opposite side of you- unmarried, no children, and thus no grandchildren and no chance at grandchildren. Kling is right, and I recognize that he is right.
I think you're right that it is easy for me to criticize the view from the fortress of my familial good fortune.
And you are right that you have greater standing to agree with AK.
I appreciate your constructive critique.
Long ago I used to be in favor of gay marriage. I couldn't be further to the other side of the issue now.
Sullivan makes his home in Provincetown, MA, which is a gaytown USA. I had never heard about it until there was a Delta variant outbreak that was used as justification to re-impose mask mandates.
Reading about it from the people there it seemed something like this:
"I was high on drugs for Bear Week having bareback orgies with random strangers I met, then I got COVID."
I also remember Sullivan saying that "masks were the new condoms" as if something that covers your face to stop you from breathing all day and sticking a rubber on for a few minutes so you don't spread AIDS are the same thing. Then again, Sullivan has STDs from his own behavior.
Sullivan says he made the conservative case for gay marriage, but I'm not sure that was ever true. He doesn't believe in monogamy, even in marriage. A non-monogamous marriage...isn't a marriage. By definition.
Beyond that he is against any kind of sexual restraint or public propriety. He calls even the tamest attempts to protect the innocence of children "puritanical".
I don't see how people who defend Bear Week and people who want family values can share a movement. We want entirely different societies.
Israel need not stop fighting the Palestinians, just stop allowing settlers in the Occupied Territories.
That won’t help. Counting Coup on Israel is a route to prestige and power among Palestinians. Hamas rose after the PLO gave it up.
The US would be much more effective enforcing the Order if it did not itself violate it so often.
I sort of wish we DID fear China just enough to eliminates some of the obstacles to a more prosperous and faster growing economy -- restrictions on skilled immigration, NIMBYism about infrastructure and residential-commercial development in urban areas, trade restrictions, and the structural deficit.
Reno did not tell us what the "price" of the post gay marriage "cake and dancing" is. ??
Having drag queen read books to kinds IS fun if you idea a fun is to "own the Cons." (And boy did it work! :)) To be really harmless though it could have been a drag queen whose day job IS fire fighter or test pilot.
I wonder if we might be seeing female reproductive suppression here. Note that many of the proponents of alternative lifestyles practice and promote very much more conservative lifestyles for their own families.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rspb.2018.1332
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33871603/
>>I’m in favor of glorifying the lifestyle that gets you grandchildren.
Aren't you forgetting adoption?
I'm not at all convinced drag shows aren't just fetishistic behavior on the part of (some) gay men. Also, to the extent that Sullivan is correct about "drag was for a long time ubiquitous in US military shows," I think part of the entertainment value in having a bunch of masculine, macho military guys put on dresses and caricature various female mannerisms was in the contrast in appearance vs behavior. An effeminate gay man with three pounds of makeup on doing a fairly convincing Lady Gaga or whatever just isn't the same thing.
Interested in your thoughts on free trade. Have you looked at Matt Klein and Michael Pettis’s Trade Wars are Class Wars. My understanding of the thesis is that trade surplus countries suppress wages to recycle trade gains into US assets keeping their currency from adjusting and making their exports less competitive. This benefits the owners of the exporting companies and Wall St and Americans with financial assets. They believe we should rebalance trade by taxing those financial inflows but leave trade itself unrestricted. Thoughts?
While he softens his language quite a bit, it is pretty clear that Sullivan, as well as a few other gay/lesbian iconoclasts, recognize that the root of transgenderism is remaking homophobia into a socially acceptable form. You can try to normalize same-sex coupling all you want but in the end the prospect of getting grandkids wins, as you like to point out.
I like the Zeihan snark of 'bribing up an alliance'. We kept the Cold War from warming up too much because we primarily fought it on economic terms (remember that the point of Reagan's 'Star Wars' anti-ICBM program was forcing the Soviets to unsustainably expand their missile forces). He has pointed out a couple of times, in his prior books especially, that trade for the US was always a defense strategy not an economic one. In percentage terms we were one of the least involved nations in international trade.
I would agree that Zeihan definitely would like to see The Order rebooted on some firmer footing than opposing whatever boogeyman is handy. He has suggested a couple of times that we might be entering a period like the 1880s or 1920s where American businesses did more outreach than the government. How sustainable that will be is an open question since that was done under the protection of the British Empire before it crashed after WWII.