We've always defended traditional marriage from Eastasia.

Opponents of marriage equality used to like to say that marriage equality had never passed a popular vote in the United States. After this past Tuesday's election results, people remarked that those opponents had lost that talking point. In another forum, I responded that the opponents would quietly slip that talking point into the nearest memory hole and find another one.

The same week, an anti-marriage-equality pastor, the Rev. Derrick McCoy, associate pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, said of Maryland's Question 6,

Although people do not agree with same-sex marriage, they were deluged with ads about equality, which does not truthfully represent redefining marriage.

So here's the new talking point: Yes, Maryland's voters approved it, but they were hoodwinked. No, you may not ask how Rev. McCoy knows so much about others' inner lives or what "truthfully represent[s]" Question 6 if not equality.

An argument I think advocates of marriage equality should stress (2)

As I noted earlier,

we should decide the scope of secular marriage under secular principles rather than any particular church's interpretation of Scripture. This argument must be a strong one, since whenever I bring it up, the 'phobes immediately change the subject.

Now, it appears that the Second Circuit agrees with me. From the opinion:

But law (federal or state) is not concerned with holy matrimony. Government deals with marriage as a civil status--however fundamental--and New York has elected to extend that status to same-sex couples. A state may enforce and dissolve a couple’s marriage, but it cannot sanctify or bless it. For that, the pair must go next door.

Today's vocabulary word: interpret

interpret, v.t. to ignore; to rewrite from scratch

My cafeteria Catholicism is better than your cafeteria Catholicism.

Supporters of Biden take Ryan to task, and vice versa, for picking and choosing which teachings of the Catholic Church to follow, while ignoring the fact that both they and their favored veep candidate do the same. In both cases, cafeteria Catholics criticize someone for, well, being one of them. Both sides also seem to think that when it comes to those Catholic teachings that they want to see written into secular law, the establishment clause somehow does not apply.

Meet the new philosophy, same as the old philosophy.

The recent exchange regarding the dreaded book logic got me thinking about a Biblical-literalist church of which I had once been a member. At that church, the pastor and deacons encouraged us to go beyond head knowledge to heart knowledge and were even fond of saying — and I quote verbatim — "Don't reason." The religious right and the politically correct left refuse to recognize any commonality, even when it's that glaringly obvious, and thereby confirm what I said here.

LGBT politics and libertarianism: Where is the love?

People often comment that libertarianism seems like a natural fit for LGBT people and express an inability to understand why more LGBT people do not see it that way. A recent study on the moral psychology of libertarians (press release here; full study here) sheds light on the disconnect. According to one finding in the study,

In combination with low levels of emotional reactivity, the highly rational nature of libertarians may lead them to a logical, rather than emotional, system of morality....

* * *

[W]e found strong support for our second prediction, that libertarians will rely upon emotion less – and reason more – than will either liberals or conservatives.

That is not exactly a good match for the hyperemotional approach to politics that characterizes the LGBT orthodoxy. If, as often thought, gay men tend to be especially emotionally expressive, and lesbians tend to be even more so, such emotionality sets up an inherent tension with a reason-based political philosophy.

Paris who?

It appears that a previous decade's famous-for-being-famous said something stupid that revealed her to be a moralizing hypocrite. In other breaking news, water is wet, and ice is cold. These stories and others, tonight at 11:00.