Apparently Monica Hesse's horrible puff piece on Brian Brown, the director of the National Organization for Marriage, wasn't enough to stop her from publishing more worthless drivel in the pages of the Washington Post. She didn't want to step too far from the topic she knows she can screw up write about: marriage.

See, Hesse is like other unimaginitive journalists. She cannot possibly comprehend that what's going on in her own personal life isn't interesting to the rest of the world. That's why, apparently she decided to write a very annoying article on the fact that she's getting married. Um, is this just some gaint scheme to link to her wedding registry?

Jeffrey Rosen isn't happy with the Court's decision:

So what makes the legal reasoning so inflammatory? Most controversially, the Court held that sexual orientation discrimination should be treated just as skeptically as racial discrimination–a conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court and the other state Supreme Courts have refused to accept. Social conservatives are already invoking contested science to question one of the premises of this conclusion: that sexual orientation, like race, is immutable. “There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race,” a lawyer for Advocates for Faith and Freedom told The New York Times. There was no need to open this Pandora’s Box: The Court could have held more modestly that there are no rational reasons for limiting the label “marriage” to straight people and denying it to gays and lesbians.

 

Via DCist. Maryland's Attorney General Douglas Gansler is in full support of gay marriage, making his case during a state senate judicial committee hearing.The committee hearing was to debate proposed legislation that would grant marriage and all marriage rights to gay couples in the state.

"This bill is fundamentally about equality," Gansler told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. "It would be wrong for me to have this job knowing there's something so wrong in our society and just ignore it." He said qualms about same-sex unions seem to be limited to older people: "For the younger generation, this is a non-issue."

Predictably, the Family Research Council who also testified at the hearing, said in an email to its subscribers, "If the sponsors think that reserving the definition of the word 'marriage' to churches and religious institutions will somehow make government subsidies for homosexual relationships more palatable, they should think again."

It's interesting that the gay marriage controversy has pretty much been left behind since 2004. Now, some states like Maryland are taking lessons from anti-gay groups and pushing legislation in the states.

Must-see video, via reddit, of San Diego's mayor, Jerry Sanders, struggling very publicly with the issue of gay marriage.

The AP has coverage here. 

While flyering for the Clean My Ride campaign, our fellow interns ran into some people from the Republican Youth Majority. It's not a clone of Young America's Fascists...er, Foundation, but rather has three main positions: pro-choice, pro-environment, and fiscally conservative. Board members include some of moderate Republicanism's greatest hits: Pete Wilson, Bill Cohen, William Weld, and so on. 

What to make of this? The not-surprising part is that there is a group like this; many young people (and plenty of older ones) are sick of the litmus tests in politics, and young people(even with evangelical Republicans) are almost always to the left of their parties - though the Iraq War is a notable exception to this rule. The surprising part is their choice of issues. More in extended.

From The Boston Globe: 

NEWS UPDATE: A joint session of the Massachusetts Legislature has defeated a constitutional ban on gay marriage 151-45, eliminating any chances of getting it on the ballot in November 2008. At least 50 votes were needed to advance the measure.  --Developing  

Somewhere, James Dobson just angrily punched a kitten.

South Africa has passed a ruling that homosexual couples can get married, which is a huge step in the gay rights movement. This is a large change in Africa, since homosexuals face attacks in South Africa, and it is illegal in many African countries. However, there is a clause included in the legislation that would allow clergy to “opt-out” from marrying the couple due to moral grounds. But if you read some of the comments that Christian leaders have made in South Africa about this legislation, it’s not surprising that an opt-out clause was included.

~世界の革命

This is just about the funniest prank so far in the 2008 presidential campaign.  Mad props to Mike D. from <i>Newsvine</i>:

John McCain's people commandeered my world-renowned MySpace design template and did a few things wrong:

 

1. They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.
2. They used my own unmodified imagery, specifically for the "Contacting John McCain" table.
3. As if #2 wasn't bad enough, the McCain crew is actually pulling their image directly from my server on each page load. So every time someone visits the McCain MySpace page, my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page! Bad McCain!

So...

Numerous people have written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain has been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn't really care. A lot of celebrities including Ryan "Van Wilder" Reynolds and the beautiful Nelly Furtado use my code and I'm totally cool with it.

But then I read the article in today's Newsweek about how politicians are all setting up MySpace pages in order to "connect" with younger audiences. McCain's MySpace page is listed, as are the pages from several other candidates. I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.

...

So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.

Abortion? The Iraq War? Probably too heavy to joke about. Gay marriage seemed like a more of a non-lethal subject to center the prank around.

So with a few minutes in Photoshop and a quick FTP, a new John McCain was born...

...and The Straight-Talk Express isn't just for straight people anymore.

Bravo, sir.  I salute you.