“After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the president has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny,” [Attorney General Eric] Holder said in a statement.
“The president has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the president’s determination.”
(Last fall, I was very critical of Obama's willingness to defend DOMA in the courts.)
ADDED: Watch me — last October — criticize Obama for fighting against gay rights in the courts:
His brief Senate record, his health-care partisanship of 2009, his snickering amid audience applause after the “inadvertent” middle-fingering of Hillary Clinton, and his polarizing metaphorical speech (e.g., knives, guns, kicking ass, getting angry, getting in their face, hostage takers, trigger fingers, tearing up) all attest to that.
That Obama is a postracial mellifluent Chicago politician does not mean that he is not a Chicago politician. That he blasts the “fat cats,” the “stupidly” acting police, and the limb-lopping surgeons, or that his attorney general calls the American people “cowards,” is typical, not aberrant. For 2012, President Obama will have raised $1 billion in cash. He knows from 2008 (“cling to guns or religion,” “typical white person,” “gun to a knife fight”) that his own emotionalism and polarization both earn him cash and create the “them” against “us” (minorities, youth, gays, women) binaries that might draw attention away from an agenda that a majority simply does not want. Obama has always used polarizing politics, coupled with calls for bipartisanship, to great effect, and he surely — as we just saw again in October 2010 (“punish,” “backseat,” “enemies”) — cannot stop now....
Indeed, hours after President Obama’s calls for a new landscape of civility, Rep. Steven Cohen (D., Tenn.) was comparing Republican opponents of the health-care legislation to Nazis from the House floor, while Slate published a screed by Emily Bazelon on “Why I Loathe My Connecticut Senator,” with serial expressions of how she “loathed” and “despised” Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Ha! Emily Bazelon and I talk about the election, the gay rights cases, the gender card, what you can say about women, Christian fundamentalism and anti-gay harassment, and all the complexity that doesn't fit into your ideological templates. Feast your eyes and ears on 28 minutes of bullies and whores:
The enigma of Elena Kagan Will she be able to win over the court’s conservatives? The Supreme Court as “women’s work” Six Catholics, three Jews, zero Protestants Ann defends Kagan on military recruiting Predictions for the confirmation hearings
Bloggingheads, with Emily Bazelon, talking about a Supreme Court without a Protestant, why Obama should pick an out-and-proud liberal, the causal connection between bullies and suicide, and those terrible Tea Partiers.
I'm embedding this because I can't embed the diavlog that I did last week with Gottlieb herself. "Marry Him" is the book I was talking about back here, where I responded strongly to someone who said that books based on Atlantic magazine articles aren't worth much more than the original article. (Here's the original "Marry Him!" article.) And I said:
I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim. Or I take a look in the bookstore and put that thing right back on the pile. Unless I'm scheduled for a diavlog. In which case, I tough it out. Up to a point. Then I just scream. On my blog.
But you won't see when it's up, because it will never be up, because Gottlieb's side of the diavlog disappeared somehow. Technical difficulties, I'm told. All that work of skimming 300 pages and talking for 47 minutes.
The book is written in a breezy, chatty style, but I couldn't get a conversation rolling at all. When I asked questions based on what was in the book, she mostly said read the book, it's in the book, etc. etc. I was trying to get past the actual contents of the book and to understand her motivation for writing it. Did she really want to get married? Would she really settle for Mr. Good Enough? If so, why wasn't she married yet? Was she really giving women good advice?
Gottlieb relied heavily on social science surveys about how married people are happier, but married people are the people who got married. You can't say, then: The people who aren't married would be happier if they got married too. They are the people who couldn't find what they felt they wanted or couldn't find real love in their own hearts or inspire it in others or had a greater skepticism about the value of relationships or who put a lot of stock in personal freedom or any number of other things. It was irrational to extrapolate that marriage would make them happy too. Even assuming those surveys about who's happy are sound (or even say married women are happier than single women).
ADDED: Look, some NYT reporter spent an evening with Lori Gottlieb and got just about nothing interesting out of her. Here, you can see me in real time, trying to get Lori Gottlieb to talk about something less trivial than how tall or short people are. This is late in the conversation, and I am struggling to remain decently gracious:
AND: Let me give you 2 more of my clips. In this one, I'm trying to get at Gottlieb's complaint about feminism (and getting nowhere):
In this clip, I invite Gottlieb to talk about divorce.
Could you tell what the other end of the conversation was like? At first, Gottlieb didn't understand what I was saying. She thought I said that she'd already written something called "Divorce Him." (I wonder if "good listener" is one of the factors we should toss out in our search for Mr. Good Enough.) When she got my question, which was whether she would also advise married women to divorce men who had stopped being good enough, she was clear that the answer was yes. She said "You're not dead" very sarcastically. The idea that marriage is a permanent commitment seemed not to be ping-ponging around anywhere in her head. You stay with that man to the extent that he serves your interests.
Why did Scott Brown win? Health care bill: too extreme/not extreme enough Brown’s keys to victory: sexiness and a pickup truck As wives become the breadwinners, what happens to sex? Ann’s husband chimes in on powerful women finding mates Retroactive matchmaking: Elizabeth Edwards and Todd Palin
My response to the commenter at Bloggingheads who said, "I must admit, when I saw the headline, 'Ann and Emily remember their bad-girl days,' I got my hopes up."
We had to start over. The first 12 seconds of Take 2:
And in the high-speed do-over, we gave only 1 minute and 38 seconds to our bad-girl days:
As for the long version, it died along with my computer, and I'm not really sure what I divulged. It certainly was not, as one dorky commenter at Bloggingheads guessed, that I "drank a lot of alcohol in college." My response to that libel:
Really? Drinking was not at all the practice of the day in my little corner of the University of Michigan, known as East Quad. We mocked squares elsewhere on campus who drank and went to football games and the sort of thing you kids today might think of as wild. We thought of you as "straights."
***
I disclaim responsibility for anything I'm writing here as I'm recovering from toe surgery and — legally! — high on opiates.
Let's agree that something disturbing happened to that 18-year-old woman at Hofstra. Something she feels awful about. Any good, right-thinking feminist, and any good girlfriend, would encourage her to talk to a counselor about her story. The problem is that by going to the police and then recanting, she fit into a new story that backfires on her and on feminism in an ugly way. She becomes the false accuser, and the boys, like the Duke boys, become the victims. In these moments of recantation, all we can talk about is how wrong she was. And then we lose the conversation that happens at a level beneath the law: about how these late-night moments in a random bathroom that everyone regrets can stop before they start. I'm not sure how you do that. But I wish this was where we'd go, now that we know that whatever happened to this girl, it wasn't the legal definition of rape.
Most of the terrible things people do to each other are not crimes. And we also do a lot of terrible — and often sexual — things to ourselves. I think, on the whole, women would be better off if they stepped up to the adult work of taking responsibility for themselves. The men in this incident were awful too, but ladies, say no to awful men. Don't let men define what good sex is. And certainly don't let them act out their idea of good sex and then decide that you wanted something nicer.
Here I am on a May, 4, 2009 Bloggingheads with Emily Bazelon, raising the question question of religious diveristy in the wake of the Souter retirement. (This recorded on May, 4, 2009 , before Obama had nominated Sotormayor.)
Now, Justice Stevens is the only Justice who was raised in the Protestant tradition. The other 2 Justices are Jewish. I anticipate that there will be little discussion of this, but I find it hard to believe that Obama will not see the lack of diversity as a problem and choose a Protestant.
On the day Obama took office, 242 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. In his May speech, the president outlined five strategies the administration would use to deal with them: criminal trials, revamped military tribunals, transfers to other countries, releases and continued detention.
Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide, and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court.
Administration officials said the cases of about half of the remaining 229 detainees have been reviewed for prosecution or release. Two officials involved in a Justice Department review of possible prosecutions said the administration is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The other half of the cases, the officials said, present the greatest difficulty because these detainees cannot be prosecuted in federal court or military commissions. In many cases the evidence against them is classified, has been provided by foreign intelligence services or has been tainted by the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques.
Be like Bush. But blame Bush. The magic formula.
Or is it necessary to add the showy fillip of closing Guantanamo?
Under one White House draft that was being discussed this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system....
But some senior Democrats see long-term detention as tantamount to reestablishing the Guantanamo system on U.S. soil. "I think this could be a very big mistake, because of how such a system could be perceived throughout the world," Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) told Holder.
See? It's not even different enough to count for anything. And — presto — the foundation is laid for keeping Guantanamo open.
"... Does the next justice have to be a woman?... The sex offender case that may trip up a frontrunner ... Ann to Obama: Appoint a strong liberal!... Is Obama trying to wriggle out of closing Gitmo?... Emily announces Double X, a women’s site that’s for men, too."
