A small number of links Amp has read

As usual, I had built up a huge list of links over the weekend. Then I accidentally closed the window that had all the links. Whooops.

Anyhow, here’s the links I’ve been reading – well – this morning.

• This letter from reader Matt Taylor, to the generally anti-gay-marriage FamilyScholars.org (one of the three bloggers, Tom Sylvester, has said he favors same-sex marriage, but he hasn’t written any major posts presenting his pro-SSM views), showed an interesting touch of doubt.
  I agree that the SF mayor is on the wrong side of the law; the recently passed CA ballot proposition on marriage is unambiguous. The mayor may lose his job over this, and that’s probably what should happen to preserve the rule of law. On the surface, it looks like yet another elitist government official ignoring the people’s will, much as the MA justices did in Goodridge. Mayor Newsom has even been compared to former AL Chief Justice Ray Moore (ugh!), the guy who wouldn’t move the Ten Commandments monument.

  But beneath the legal wrangling, in the realm of human relations that underlies the formalities of government, something seems very different. Seeing people line up for hours, even days to get married, hearing that drivers honk their horns in support as they pass SF City Hall, and musicians spontaneously serenade the couples as they wait in line, it has such a different feel than the activist-led events we’ve seen so far in the SSM controversy. The mood reminds me a little bit of the late-80’s revolutions in Eastern Europe; OK, on a much, much smaller scale …gay marriage isn’t the Berlin Wall for crying out loud.

  That’s I guess what bothers me so much. What’s transpiring now looks, smells and feels like liberation from an oppressor; here are ordinary people, long denied the freedom to go about the business of their lives, and celebrating now that they are finally free to do so. It’s kind of a scary thought; if the people of San Francisco are oppressed, at least on this one question, then their oppressors are the people of the rest of California, and the rest of the US. People aren’t supposed to be oppressed in a democracy, are they?

  The more people see SSM as a human issue, the more our side will win.

• Anderw Sullivan quotes an evangelical Christian reader, on why evangelicals tend to be so much more anti-gay than they are anti-other (alleged) sins.
  … few pastors have the guts to stand up and say “I struggle with the temptation to view pornography” or similar things. But we all do. When is the last time you heard a preacher expound on “but if any of you thinks lustfully about another woman, he has committed adultery in his heart”? (Me, in 34 years of going to church every week: never. Occasionally at a Christian conference or retreat for men, a gutsy speaker will address this.)

  But on homosexuality, of course, the church is righteously indignant. I have come to believe that this is so because for the vast majority of heterosexual Christians, homosexuality is the one sin that they are certain they will never commit. Murderous thoughts, adulterous hearts, sure. But never homosexuality. And that is why they point fingers.

• Good article in Slate about the history of Arab feminism, with a particular emphasis of the trouble with importing ideas – or appearing to import ideas – from the West. Link via Diotima.
• An interesting online debate about feminism and hiring nannies. Barbara Ehrenreich totally rocks. (Via Crooked Timber)
  When an immigrant, usually Third World, nanny moves in with the family (as a resident or just a day worker), her very presence teaches the kids an ugly lesson: that there are tasks that are somehow “below” mommy and daddy, but appropriate to darker-skinned people with broken English. Caitlin, for example—who took the odd and astoundingly privileged course of staying home with the nanny—reports that this personage washes the sheets and generally cleans up after the kids go through a bout of stomach flu. You think the kids don’t notice that mommy is available for reading stories but only nanny deals with actual diapers and shit-stained sheets? You think this division of labor doesn’t make a lasting imprint on them?

  Suppose I could have afforded a nanny and a maid when my kids were little; I still wouldn’t have hired them because I didn’t want my kids growing up with the world’s class and racial hierarchies stamped on their emerging little world views. The African-American poet Audre Lorde, for example, wrote of encountering a little white girl in the supermarket, who pointed at Lorde’s child and exclaimed, “Look, mommy, a baby maid!” I didn’t want this for my kids.

• Flowers for Al and Don is your chance to donate a few dollars (or a lot of dollars) to having flowers delivered to couples waiting on line to get married in San Francisco. Very cool.
• Two hilarious newspaper articles from The Volokh Conspiracy. First, “The brown-skinned kid who showed up at the Nazi rally wearing a WHITE POWER tee shirt.” The kid, it seems, was being entirely sincere – he just wanted to support White Power.
  The skinheads looked at him incredulously, and not without a degree of sympathy. It was obvious that he actually thought he belonged there, amongst white power kinfolk. “Well, you haven’t broken any of the festival’s rules,” began another skinhead, employing the sort of “I hate to break it to you” tone of voice of a father explaining to his 5-year-old son why a bed sheet tied around his neck doesn’t mean he can fly. “The thing is, you’re not white.”

  Second, the Oxford engineering student who pretended to be an economist, delivering a series of lectures on global economics at an economics conference in BeJing. (He shares a name with a genuine expert, a professor in New York).

• A very interesting article by Larry Kramer in The Boston Review, arguing that the people – not the courts – should be the final interpreter of what the Constitution means. I don’t agree – I’m one of those horrible elitists that Kramer criticizes for not trusting in the people’s good will – but it’s an interesting article.
• Potvaliant – meaning “having the courage given by drink” – is indeed, as Will Baude says, a neat word.

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