MsGuy

Eastern? I don't think you can get much more Judeo-Christian than the Southern Presbyterian iteration of Calvinism. I wish I could hang around long enough to see how all the strange stuff going on now works out, but that's more a matter of regret than of fear. Once you realize that post life is the same as pre-life, you don't have to expend much of your time you have to live worrying over it ending. Don't blame our cultural fixation on eternal life on the Isrealites. Until the Persians overran them, they focused on the here and now. God didn't save you from death so much as famine, disease and the nastier neighbors (unless of course you pissed him off.)

Birth and dealth are one. Fear the time after no more than the time before.

Perfect!

But they can't get married in California. link

Cuba just accepted a U.S. offer to resume direct talks on a variety of issues such as immigration, mail service and drug interdiction. TY's trip to Havana gets closer, one baby step at a time.

I saw part of one episode. Unfortunately nobody took their clothes off. I seemed kinda dull with everyone fully clothed.

"By fighting for marriage equality, we are fighting for equality period. All the arguments we have to make and hearts we have to move in order to win marriage equality carry over to every other aspect of gay and lesbian life, relating to how we raise families, and where we live and work." That is as spot on a statement of the importance of the fight for marriage equality as I have ever read. Have you considered merging this with your other posts on Prop. 8 and rewriting them as an article for one of the gay magazines? You've been saying things here that deserve a wider forum.

Since my first response seems to have disappeared into hyperspace, I'll try again. One hour already? Apparently it's taking me even longer than I thought to post a link. I'm learning all this web stuff purely by trial & error and the method I cooked up to post a link is the most ass backward thing imaginable. Would two hours be O.K.?

T.Y., is there some technical reason the expiration time on the edit button is so much shorter here than it is on Daddy's board? Is it a matter of policy? It would be useful if the edit time window stayed open for an hour or so. For instance, when I found some info on Sotomayor just now, I had intended to drop the link into my last post on her thread by way of an edit rather than clutter up the thread with a new post just for it. That's happened a couple of times. Not important, it's more of an aesthetic thing than anything else.

A link to the Wall Street Journal's first take on Sotomayor's record. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338260937756559.html

Guys, right now there's not enough information available to make even a cursory judgment about Sotomayor. Hold off a day or two and this will all be a lot clearer. I'm not saying that there won't be a lot to consider about Obama's 1st Supreme Court nominee, just that what we have now is too fragmentary to support a useful discussion. I'm jumping up & down to find out more myself, but if it ain't there it ain't there. By this time tomorrow night everybody from Huffington to Hannity will be posting info as fast as they can type.

Here's a fair article on the Federal lawsuit, with some pro & con discussion. I think it skimps a little on the dangers of seeking Federal relief right now. Note the ACLU and several gay legal groups oppose this suit. http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/27/sam...ref=mpstoryview

Although Romer v. Evans, the 1996 anti-gay amendment case, maps over to the California situation almost point by point, I hope the question of gay marriage doesn't reach the U.S. Supreme Court until at least one of the conservative justices has been replaced. There is way too much riding on this one to bet the farm on one decision. An adverse ruling could freeze the law for a generation and simultaneously cripple state and local efforts. Why take that risk when we can win this state by state? There's all the difference in the world between losing in a state court and losing in SCOTUS. The NAACP's 35 year long legal campaign that led to Brown v. Board of Education was the result of a concious decision by its legal arm to avoid directly challenging Plessy v. Ferguson until the necessary legal and social/political groundwork had been done. Let's not fuck this up by trying to short circuit the process. Wouldn't we be better off to wait until 15 or 20 states have acted before asking SCOTUS to make a final decision? P.S. Steven: Who knew anybody still read Saul Alinsky?

Wednesday night through Saturday? I'd wager that AdamSmith has topped up the envelope with a dime or two of his own.

Steven's reaction to Prop. 8 is everything this old gray headed gay could ask for. Our culture war with the religious right isn't about gay marriage or military service or any other particular issue. It's about normalizing gay participation in America's civic forum on an equal basis with straights. We will not and can not win that war in the law courts. We can and will win by changing the preconceptions of our fellow citizens in the court of public opinion. I'm not trying to make some clever verbal argument when I say that the Prop. 8 campaign was a phyrric victory for social conservatives. Think not? Who could have predicted even 10 years ago that in 2008 gays would fight the bigots to a virtual tie in a public referendum on gay marriage in the most populus state in the union. What did the conservatives get out of Prop. 8? They got a temporary ban on gay marriages in California at the price of demonstrating the fragility of their hold on the electorate and giving gays an ideal platform to carry a massive educational campaign to the public on gay rights. And what does the future hold for them? They face an ongoing grassroots campaign that they already know that they can't win, that in the end they can only lose. In public the bigots are putting a brave face on their situation, but their leadership is neither stupid nor naive. They know that they pulled all the stops on the Prop. 8 campaign and won by a margin of 52 to 48. Switch one voter in forty and Prop. 8 would have been defeated. Their leaders also know that the ongoing public debate on gay marriage only serves to erode their power to define gays as less than full citizens generally. We all owe Steven and all the guys like him our thanks and our support.

I concede to Caeron's superior vision. Everybody gets a weekend with Andre. Just for the sake of clarity, does everybody get a separate weekend or do we all pile on together?

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Well, the reductio of Lucky's argument is that I, not Lucky, should get the weekend with Andre because I haven't posted any reviews at all. I guess I can live with that.

IMO this thread is itself an example of MER at its best. Twelve posts worth of reasoned conversation and not a single sharp stick poked into anyone's eye. However we did manage to hijack OZ's thread.

Steven, maybe there's something going on behind the scenes I'm not aware of but I honestly don't recognise this site in your post. Aren't your points directed mostly at difficulties you have with the other site? As to the policy on photos, it's easy say a law is unenforced when it's not your butt that's on the line. I would guestimate that a first class law firm would demand a retainer north of $50,000 to accept this kind of case, more if an AG were involved. If the current CL hoopla has taugh us anything, it's that you never can tell when an ambitious local DA or state AG is going to crawl out from under some rock and bite you in the ass. The type of pictures you are asking for would add little of value to MER but would look just lovely if presented to a jury. No point in putting nails and a prefab cross in the hands of the centurions. P.S. Our posts crossed in the mail. You already answered my question.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-05-20-voa75.cfm A bit more information on this development.

The Fed. Dist. Ct. entered a TRO against McMaster enjoining him from pursuing any criminal action against CL or its staff. The AG issued a statement claiming a moral victory in that he got CL to take the matter seriously. Surely the S.C. GOP can find a better clown than this to run for governor.

TY, your point about exhausting the will to resist is well taken. For all its revenue potential, CL is run like a Mom & Pop with very thin management. McMaster alone probably has more attorneys on his staff than CL has employees. Buckmaster is a programmer by trade and surely has other things he would rather be doing than getting into a pissing contest with the attorney general of every backwater state in the U.S. Caeron, that all this hoorah by the AGs makes no sense is irrelevant. An anti-vice crusade is usually more about the crusader than the vice. Lookin, yeah, it is kinda cool to see Newman and Buckmaster working as much for the fun of building the site as for the big buck payoff. I suspect that that the owners of this site aren't entirely motivated by money either.

Never been outside the continental U.S. Durham, N.C., my first adventure in living outside the State of Mississippi, brought on a severe case of culture shock. Rome would probably put me in hospital. Sad but true.

After a meeting in which the Civil Rights leadership had pleaded with LBJ to introduce the legislation that broke the back of segregation, the President is supposed to have told them to "get out there and force me do the right thing." Good advice for anyone seeking social change.