In case you’ve been hiding under a nipple disc, I’ll break the news to you: President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage today.

I, for one, am quite glad.

See, people (e.g. our dear President) keep on tossing around these phrases — “activist judges,” “activist courts,” “judicial activism.” The words don’t much mean anything; an “activist judge” is for all intents and purposes one whose judgment you disagree with. In this case, the charge of “judicial activism” is the last refuge of a group of zealots bent on imposing its dominance over a minority. The will of the majority is being subverted!!, they say. Four judges in Massachusetts, five judges on the Supreme Court, two judges in California are all defying the desires of the people!!

Fortunately for civil rights in America, judges don’t represent the people, they represent the law.

Am I the only one who’s never seen WatchBlog? It’s three political blogs side by side, one blog edited by a Democrat, one by a Republican, and one by an Independent. Who knows, maybe I haven’t heard about it because it isn’t any good, but it’s an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, the giant three-column wall of text is pretty unreadable to me.

Psych!!

I will not see “The Passion.” Sounds like a pretty awful time. But, to complete my trifecta of utterly trivial posts, I just wanted to say that if Mel Gibson truly wanted to immerse Christians in an understanding of what Jesus suffered through before death, he wouldn’t have made a movie, he’d have made a video game.

For anyone who wants a really pretty free font, or for anyone who doubts they exist, try Gentium. It was made as part of the Master of Arts for Typeface Design at the University of Reading, and is free. It prints as pretty as it reads on screen, and the entire point of it is to have full language support. (Via Ask MetaFilter.)

There’s no reason for me to link to this story, other than taking yet another opportunity to point out that Camille Paglia is Cruella deVille. She is the scourge of all womankind and should be eaten by grues.

Forget the hype. The movie is just annoying.

It’s one of those movies that makes you resent art-house cinema. It should have had a honking red “For Your Consideration” subtitle superimposed onto every other frame in loopy script. It had a predictable yet nonexistent plot. It featured a cast of 1-ply characters, played by actors who masterfully conveyed suggestions of intense inner lives that unfortunately did not exist. It was pretty. It was empty. It was boring. It was an art appreciation lesson thinly disguised as a film.

There were some great ideas in it. I believe Peter Webber, the director, really was fascinated by the painting, the period, Vermeer’s technique, etc. And if you’re going to steal from anyone, why not rip off Ingmar Bergman, as Webber does — a lot?

Still. Want my money back.

Minorities in the U.S. have been pitted against each other for ever since this place was colonized. Read Howard Zinn, he’ll preach it to you. Talk about how the Irish became white. Or how Jewish folks became white. There’s just a long tradition of one minority group, usually blacks, being set against another minority group, with the victor winning higher social regard, more rights, etc.

It’s happening again, and this time, it’s gays and blacks.

Read Franklin Foer’s article in The Atlantic Monthly about one of the chief architects of the anti-gay-marriage movement, an Irish-American who grew up in black churches and realizes the value of not allowing this fight to be painted as a simple oppressor-oppressed divide.

Key graf:

Daniels’s savvy was also evident in his launching of the FMA. He had made the case for his amendment to leading social conservatives, but he hadn’t tried to enlist them as his main allies, because of their polarizing language and stance. (“The traditional social-conservative movement harkens back to an era of white Protestant cultural hegemony,” he told me.) And because he knew that gay-rights activists would cast marriage as a civil right and evoke the African-American struggle, he had devised a strategy to pre-empt this line of argument: he chose African-Americans, including the Boston minister Ray Hammond and the civil-rights veteran Walter Fauntroy, to be his spokesmen.

It’s remarkable how brazen this guy is about it, though. Take a look at his Alliance for Marriage home page, a.k.a. “Happy Black Heterosexuals for Christ.” Click around for a while. Or, if you’re lazy, I’ll just link to every image besides the logo I can find on the website in the extended entry.

Read more…

I like what I’ve read of Dan Okrent, public editor of The New York Times.

I don’t like his picture.

I can’t really tell you why, he just looks worn-down, vaguely unhappy, insincere, trying too hard to look like a man of the people. I wonder if this is how everyone else sees Howard Dean?

Anyway, I know Robin disagrees with me, and I understand this post is worth nothing at all, but I’d felt I’d raise the point regardless, because the picture’s all up on the front page of NYT.c, harshing my buzz.

And while I’m bashing Dan Okrent (what else are ombudspeople for?), is it just me, or is he way self-obsessed and tortured about Dan Okrent and his role and his place in the universe? Every column’s filled with these asides, “Gentle reader, your concerns are half-right and half-wrong. It’s like this lesson I’ve learned from my mother, which I always kept in my head as I was editor of Time, ‘Dan,’ she once intoned, ‘you’re half-right and half-wrong.’ Do you see, Gentle Reader, how I am just like you? I am, in fact, one of you.” (Take this one, for example.) His latest column was an interview with himself. Dude, if you’re that hard up for the opportunity to navel-gaze, get a blog.

Oh, wait.

Heartbreaking Washington Post Magazine story about a South Asian-American poet who killed her 2-year-old son and herself.

AND: OK, I won’t just leave it at that. Why is it heartbreaking?

It’s steeped in her poetry. Paula Span, the author, pulls in these opaque fragments of poems, and they’re excellent. Early on, Span cites this devastating piece by the woman, called “Lullaby”:

I would not sing you to sleep.

I would press my lips to your ear

and hope the terror in my heart stirs you.

And you can’t help but see her writing that poem to her murdered son.

You can’t read a good poem by a dead author without missing what’s been lost, wondering what they were thinking, and lamenting that you can’t know. It’s just the same reading this. As with any article about a suicide, this one spends the whole time probing the question of why she did it, while always being upfront about the fact that we can never know. Reetika Varzani was foreign-born, and wrote between these two worlds — India and America. America, where her own father disappeared one day, and she later found he’d taken his own life.

But that’s just one seemingly significant piece in this huge puzzle portrait of a mind that you can almost feel beneath the text, as her words weave in and out. It’s not at all like reading “The Bell Jar,” I promise.

Yesterday, as San Francisco gay couples received marriage licenses from the city, Judge James Warren of the county Superior Court said something. That’s about all the newspaper headlines about the story can agree on.

What actually happened, as far as I can tell: Judge Warren was responding to a request from an anti-gay-marriage group asking him to make San Francisco “cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court.” He interpreted the semicolon in that sentence as an “or.” So he told the city either to cease and desist, or to defend its actions on March 29. He also said that the anti-marriage group will probably win its stay when that hearing is held. In other words, the city’s actions might eventually be determined to be illegal.

Depending on which headline you believe, the judge said the marriages were illegal, he said they were ok, he urged a halt on the marriages, he won’t halt the marriages, etc.

I think The Washington Post hits closest to the truth with their headline, “Judges Postpone Action on Same-Sex Marriage.” And I think SFGate.com carried the best story about the matter; theirs actually quoted the judge.