And Hair Will Grow on your Palms

Why the arguments against same-sex marriage make no sense anymore.

What coherent justifications for anti-gay policies could possibly exist in a post-Lawrence landscape?

The answer, it turns out, is that there are none—none, at least, that aren’t driven by animus. A review of the failed attempts here is instructive. At various points, conservatives argued that every child deserves a mom and a dad; that gay people simply make inferior parents; that marriage isn’t marriage without penile-vaginal penetration; that legalizing gay marriage would lower birth rates; and, best of all, that somehow, allowing gay people to get married would cause more straight people to have children out of wedlock.

Are you snickering? So were the judges who had the pleasure of hearing these arguments spelled out in court.

Slate, via News From ME.

In Memoriam

• Margot Adler, journalist and writer (also the founder of WBAI's Hour of the Wolf, for which I used to get myself conscious at 5 AM and switch on the radio.  I met her a few times).
• James Shigeta, actor.
• Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase.

Having Learned Nothing from Jaws...

A clip from The Strain, via Spocko's Brain (and no, that was not intentional).

The Ongoing

Power may be in inverse relation to empathy.

Not a surprise.  Feminist Philosophers, via I think one of the links at Wiscon38Fail (it hasn't gotten a proper Fail Name yet, and I do not want to use the "accused"'s name as the Fail Name).

Heads'-Up/Uh-Oh!

Ebola patient on the loose.  This is not a good time to visit West Africa.

Strange Juxtapositions

(Is the Dread Dormammu running HYDRA?  It would explain so much.)

• Vagabond Scholar on the ongoing adversarial relationship of civility and bullshit.

  For example, maybe you sincerely believes that someone calling Dick Cheney a "war criminal" is distasteful, because, uh… he hasn't been formally convicted as such. Or it sounds harsh. Okay, but you should be more outraged by what Cheney actually did, his role in constructing a a torture program and his dishonesty in selling a war of choice. Don't agree with all of that? Fine. But the defining feature of civility trolls, the smarm patrol, the bullshitters, is that they're trying to shut honest discussion down. They don't want to investigate. They don't want accountability (not for their team, anyway). For example, there's a reason torture apologists steadfastly ignore all the accounts and mountains of data proving their claims false. Pick another issue if you like; the same dynamics often play out.

• Paul Krugman discusses why conservatives are upset about California.  (AlterNet's Janet Allon, on Mr. Krugman's column.)
• Remember the psychological profiles of conservatives ten years ago that caused some hoo-hah?  More evidence.

  The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

  (From Mother Jones, via AlterNet.)
  

The Irony Patrol

• Terrorist Plots R Us, or the FBI is Out There.  Via Comrade Misfit.  Entrapment does not make law enforcement look good, y'know; it's a cheesy TV scriptwriter kludge when a proper plot is in  Writers'-Block-Land.
• "George Harrison memorial tree killed by beetles."  Without an "a."

In Memoriam

James Garner, actor.

Sometimes Twitter's Succinctness is the Point

The LOLGOP Twitter account makes an observation.  (Via wouldyoueva on Live Journal, who retweeted a different observation.)

Nauseating

Nauseating.  (I can't even type it.  It's akin to poisoning children.)

This Is the Sort of Slime the Supreme Court Unleashed

To paraphrase Southern Beale:  "Yes, Georgia law enforcement people!  Do tell me how getting-out-the-vote efforts and absentee ballots constitute voter fraud when performed by African-Americans!  I'm all ears."

Via Fred Clark (Slacktivist).

In Memoriam

• Charlie Haden, jazz musician
• Lorin Maazel, conductor and prodigy
• Nadine Gordimer, novelist
• Tommy Ramone, last of The Ramones

The Footie

Apparently, conservatives fear, loathe, and disapprove of soccer. Cerberus (Sadly, No!) takes one down. Profanely, of course.

You see, young people don’t seem to have the same dumbass nativist hangups as the Klan-wannabes who seem to have our country in a death-lock, so thus are less likely to abandon a totally awesome sport the whole world plays simply because it isn’t an American exclusive that feeds into our notions of American Exceptionalism. And that’s bad, because that means they’ll be less likely to support bombing random brown people and self-defeating nonsense justified only by a strange idea that America is “different” and thus not bound by the laws of time and space.

And I'm pretty sure there's some incorrectness in there.

[partial crosspost]  See also link here.

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