Ampersand is reading…

• I’ve been meaning to link to this interesting article from Nervy Girl Magazine for a while, about women’s and men’s razors.
  On the “Experience Venus” page, I learned about how Venus can give me “oh-so-touchable legs.” And I got the inside scoop on some features special to the Venus system, including the super-simple blade-change function—“No fiddling. No mistakes. Blade-changing made simple. Click. That’s it. Just open the refill and click on the handle. You couldn’t do it upside down if you tried. Phew.”

  Phew indeed. The MACH3 site’s version? “Open cartridge architecture makes rinsing and cleaning the MACH3Turbo blades easier than ever; the single-point docking system … makes it virtually impossible for consumers to accidentally load a cartridge upside down.” Architecture? Docking system? Thank goodness they didn’t try those 50-cent words on the girlies.

  Via Jenn Manley Lee, who has additional thoughts you should read.

• Body and Soul guest poster Donald Johnson has an excellent post discussing the sanctions in Iraq (remember the sanctions? You know, when the US needlessly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians? It was reported in the European papers), and what they tell us about “How Centrists Think.” There’s some good material in the comments section, too.
• A really impressive twenty-questions type game. It’s also interesting to see what it gets wrong – for instance, it didn’t know that elephants can swim.
• If you’re any sort of comic book geek, you should know who Julius Schwartz is – that is, who he was. He passed away earlier this week. I’d say “sadly, he passed away” but really – how sad is it when someone passes away from a seemingly long, accomplished and happy life? We should all do so well. Read Marc Evanier’s remembrance, even if you have no idea who Julius Schwartz was.
• The Leiter Report notes that, according to a wide range of statistics, the USA isn’t actually the only worthwhile place in the world to live.
• Eugene Volokh looks at the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment (actually an anti-marriage amendment, if you think about it) and finds that it’s quite possible it would outlaw not only same-sex marriage, but also state-level civil union and domestic partnership laws.
• See a man wrestle a hippo with his bare hands! A lot of folks have linked to this Decembrist post which attempts to grapple with the scale of the dishonesty of the Bush budget.
• Ms Musings responds to the latest batch of nonsense from the swell gals of the IWF. The IWF’s conclusion: every single policy that the GOP favors is in women’s best interests. It must be mysterious to them that women tend to vote for the Democrats…
• Womens Enews reports on how important even a part-time, low-paying job can be for securing a degree of empowerment for women in South Africa.
• Who are the left? John Quiggin’s initial post on this wasn’t that great, but the update and concession are terrific.
• Joel Rogers in The Nation argues the progressive case for Edwards. I have to admit, if it’s a choice between Edwards and Kerry, I don’t see why Kerry – who, on TV, strongly resembles Lurch on tranquilizers – is seen as more “electable.”
• The New York Times examines how the religious right settled on fighting gay marriage as their best fundraising hope of the moment.
• Ain’t-It-Cool-News reports on the most important news story of all (look for February 10th):
  Buzz inside certain Los Angeles law firms suggests that talent contracts are being hammered out, and they’re timed around a May start for an upcoming Universal feature about a starship captain, a space hooker, a mysterious preacher and a pair of fugitives named Tam. The bad news: under the scenario discussed, “Firefly: The Movie” wouldn’t hit multiplexes until late 2005.

  And then, I hope, a TV series… Via FireflyMovie.com and Kip.

• He may be conservative, but Andrew Sullivan on gay marriage rocks. Here, he’s discussing the Massachusetts Court’s recent rejection of “civil unions” as an alternative to gay marriage.
  The Justices in the majority mercilessly home in on the central meaning behind so-called “civil unions” – the only defense of them is that they are a device to maintain exclusion, especially when they are substantively identical to civil marriage. In that sense – same thing, different department – they’re a text-book case of “separate but equal.” If you’re going to give gay couples the same rights as straight couples, why are you calling it something different? If both can drink the same water, why a different water fountain? The only answer can be: to keep the stigma in place. But stigma as such surely has no role under a constitution that affirms equal rights for all citizens. It’s not the court’s role to rule otherwise. The only judicial activism in this case would have been if the Court had decided that, in spite of the state constitution, the public’s own discomfort with a minority would be justification for maintaining that minority’s second class status.

  And more:

  I don’t believe courts should never do anything but rubber-stamp majority decisions. I think the argument for equal marriage rights is so constitutionally strong it will take a federal constitutional amendment to deny gays their rights. I suspect the religious right agrees. So we now have to see if the general public finds gay couples such a threat to their life that they will write discrimination against them in the Constitution. I have to hope and pray they won’t. But I cannot be dismayed when courts include gay people as equal citizens in this republic. That’s their job. And it’s their constitutional duty.
• In addition to Andrew Sullivan, the go-to-blogger for pro-same-sex marriage arguments is Gabriel Rosenberg. (Hope I spelled that right – his name doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere on his blog.) This week, check out his posts arguing that polygamy and incest are easily distinguished from same-sex marriage, and also his response to Mr. Kurtz.
  …One reason many SSM advocates, myself included, are so adamant about the rights of same-sex couples to marry is that in this country many same-sex couples are adopting and raising children. We feel marriage would help protect those families in the same way they help protect families headed by opposite-sex parents. It is the people that strive to deny these families the protection of marriage that are saying that marriage isn’t important for parenting.

  Many links via MarriageDebate.org, which is a great blog for folks following the SSM debate.

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