The Language Barrier

Don't mind me, I'm just: amused
Hey, that sounds like: Unida -- Slaylina

Fox News did a joking mockup of what the Lincoln-Douglas debates might look like today that evidently was more of a joke than intended. Evidently the folks at Fox imagine that Lincoln's opponent in the 1858 race for U.S. Senate was not Stephen A. Douglas, but rather abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass.

On the plus side, at least the folks at Fox realized that Lincoln wasn't running against Kirk Douglas.

Don't mind me, I'm just: moody

A lot of humor does come from where you stand as much as something's inherent ridiculousness. It's not inherently ridiculous to a conservative to believe that forbidding gays from getting married is somehow morally different from forbidding blacks to marry whites, and that allowing the latter is just common sense that only a bigot would disagree with, while allowing the former is cultural dynamite that threatens the very fabric of society.

To a liberal, and an growing number of moderates, it is. Not just the incoherence of the position, but the fact that such people will stand there and say with a straight face that they know they sound like George Wallace standing in a schoolhouse door and screaming "Segregation forever!" but you see, this issue is different.

For me the moment where the ridiculousness of that particular "conservative" position crystallized was when William Bennett, architect of so many bad ideas in the name of "protecting family values" on the Republican side, told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that he knew his side of the gay marriage argument was already lost. That it was inevitable that gays would be allowed to marry. He knew his position was too profoundly unjust and obviously discriminatory to survive in modern-day America, and yet he felt compelled to argue it, in all its disingenuous and alarmist incoherence anyway.

To me, a liberal, that's pretty funny. And also a little sad.

What is marriage? [It is] a social institution of bonds, ties and sacrifices. Not a simple contract ordained to the individual's "self-fulfilment". Gays are to be tolerated of course. But this hasn't anything to do with marriage. It's precisely the insistence on nonsenses like "gay marriage" that's giving so much space to freaks like Coulter.

The difference between liberals and conservatives, luispc, is that liberals do not recognize a sole franchise of conservatives to declare what marriage is and is not, when it comes to the law.

It's precisely the insistence on the primacy of socio-religious symbology rather than a commonsense, practical emphasis on human rights and dignity that make it so easy for conservatives to wind up in the exact same position they were in fifty years ago -- strenuously arguing that different biology morally entitles one to different access to the privileges of citizenship.

Don't mind me, I'm just: disgusted
Hey, that sounds like: Queens Of The Stone Age -- Song For The Deaf

neph_politics

Handing Zarqawi's remains directly to his relatives would yield a predictably undesirable result: a public funeral that could very well serve to burnish--rather than extinguish--the arch-terrorist's legend. Sending his body to the Amman government instead--a much more likely scenario--would almost certainly lead to the same unfortunate outcome.

The case for burying Zarqawi's body in an unmarked grave is, first and foremost, strategic: For one thing, it is imperative that America do everything in its power to stunt the growth of Zarqawi's mystique and hinder his exaltation; for another, doing so would spare our allies in the Jordanian government a major headache (and indeed, Jordanian officials have made clear that they do not want the corpse). But at a moral level, it is also worth pointing out that such a burial would leave Zarqawi no worse off than plenty of his victims. After all, the bodies of many of those he bombed and beheaded were never found.