Bookworm Room

Tweet It’s been an incoherent day, one that never gave me the opportunity for contemplation and writing.  Instead, I’ve been bopping here and there, and dealing with one thing and another.  Nevertheless, I have been tracking the news, so I thought I’d just write up a mish-mash of thoughts about current issues and events. Gaza [...]

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Tweet I think I’m processing history wrong, and I need your help filling in the gaps. As you know, Obama invited Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration (a much better choice, I might add, than Wright would have been).  Some in the gay community, however, are very upset, feeling that Warren’s [...]

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Tweet The New York Times today has a headline story that a group of conservative Episcopalian bishops is breaking away from the mainstream church because of objections to the church’s stand on gay marriage: Conservatives disaffected from the Episcopal Church are expected to declare on Wednesday that they are founding their own rival Anglican province [...]

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Tweet A few months ago, the California Supreme Court overruled the will of the California voters and announced that gay marriage was a fundamental right.  The voters responded by changing the California Constitution to state that, in California, marriage is between one man and one woman.  As you know, if it were up to me, [...]

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Tweet It’s time to end the post mortem and get moving, the only problem being that “getting moving” is proving to be as rancorous amongst conservatives as was the political cycle itself.  One of the schisms I’m seeing in my own blog is between pro-Life and pro- (or, at least, not anti-) abortion types.  That [...]

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Tweet Yesterday, my dear, sweet European mother confided to me that she was pleased Obama won, because he speaks so much better than Bush.  This jived completely with a bumpersticker I just saw:  “At last, complete sentences will come from the White House” (or something like that).  I was struck again by the faith the [...]

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Tweet This is the second in my series of marriage posts.  My first draft, which was a failure, tried to trace the history of marriage, something that’s much better done by better informed people.  What I realized from that valiant, although pointless and time-wasting effort, is that what I’m really interested in is a religion’s [...]

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Tweet (This is the first in what I hope will be a series of very civil essays examining marriage.  Suek got me started with this idea based on a comment she wrote saying that, well, we need to figure out what marriage is all about.  Planned future essays will involve separating the religious aspect of [...]

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Tweet Gay marriage has a warm, fuzzy feeling. Those who support it ask, who can be hurt by granting to gay couples the same rights we give to straight couples? As you know, while I have no trouble with same sex relationships between consenting adults, and favor granting civil benefits to gay couples, I do [...]

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Tweet Marriage is not, and never has been, a personal right.  In Western society, it operates at two levels.  First, it functions at a religious level.  This is a deeply personal level, because in every religion, marriage is, or is equivalent to, a sacrament.  In America, you have the Constitutional right to be married in [...]

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Tweet Dennis Prager has a good column discussing what will be, in his view, the ramifications of the California Supreme Court decision creating a new right out of thin air.  One of the points he makes is that, in the future, to avoid charges of discrimination, homosexual relationships will have to be promoted equally with [...]

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Tweet Cliff Thier talks about the far-reaching implications of the Court’s (and the government’s) “fundamental rights” language. The WSJ’s editors take on the election ramifications of the decision — a bit of unexpected, and undeserved, good luck for Republicans in a terribly managed campaign season. As was to be expected, National Review quickly put together [...]

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Tweet California joins Massachusetts. I’ll be interested to read the decision when I get the chance. As for me, let me reiterate my usual point. I am not categorically opposed to gay marriage. However, I think we’re rushing too fast to change human relationships that have been fixed across all human cultures for thousands of [...]

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Tweet I found the juxtaposition of this story and this story, both from today’s Chronicle, amusing.

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Tweet There’s fact, and there’s speculation. From the fact that he found some documents indicating that medieval men would enter into a formal contract to share bed, board and income, a “scholar” has extrapolated this into supporting the conclusion that the medieval world supported gay relationships: For example, he found legal contracts from late medieval [...]

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Tweet There’s been a lot of news lately about how the Left embraces radical Islam, on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (or, at least, my useful tool). You can see this sordid embrace at work in Daniel Pipe’s debate with London Mayor Ken Livingston, and you can see it [...]

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Tweet I think traditional marriage, which often includes children, is the glue that holds a stable society together. Married couples, especially those with or planning to have children, have an enormous incentive to hold jobs, save money, create safe communities, look to the future politically, and to crave non-revolutionary continuity when it comes to social [...]

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Tweet Here’s today’s Opinion Journal on Gerry Studds’ death, and it says everything I want about Democrats, Foley, Studds, PC reporting — you name it: Links and Studds “Former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, the first openly gay person elected to Congress, died early Saturday at Boston Medical Center, several days after he collapsed while walking [...]

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Tweet Whenever I do a gay marriage post, I feel like prefacing it by saying “some of my best friends are gay.”  In fact, that statement is no longer true.  I didn’t turn on my friends, but I did settle down to marriage with children in the suburbs.  In this community there are no gays, [...]

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Tweet The latest news from the South on gay marriage: The state Supreme Court reinstated Georgia’s constitutional ban on gay marriage Thursday, just hours after New York’s highest court upheld that state’s gay-marriage ban. The Georgia Supreme Court, reversing a lower court judge’s ruling, decided unanimously that the ban did not violate the state’s single- [...]

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Tweet I was very surprised this morning to read about a judge who held (correctly) I think, that gay marriage is not a matter for judges, but for the people’s representatives (who, unlike judges and European politicians, are actually beholden to their constituents): New York’s highest court ruled Thursday that gay marriage is not allowed [...]

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