For those who are convinced that our choice is between theocracy and progressivism, a small bit of history for you to consider:
On Wednesday, December 13 [1961], Slater King, who had been elected vice president of the newly formed Albany Movement, led 200 protestors to city hall. At the courthouse steps they stopped to pray for the students’ release. As SNCC had hoped, people were drawing on their own strengths, notably their passionate religious commitment, to rally under the civil rights banner. By the end of the march, Slater King and his 200 marchers were on their way to jail. Police Chief Laurie Pritchett arrested them for parading without a permit. “We can’t tolerate the NAACP or SNCC or any other nigger organization [taking] over this town with mass demonstrations,” Pritchett said in a news conference.
By mid-December, Chief Pritchett and his officers had arrested more than 500 demonstrators. Albany’s mayor, Asa Kelly, agreed to negotiate the possible integration of the bus and train stations as well as conditions for the release of the prisoners now packing city jails.
The Albany Movement had not anticipated so many arrests, especially of homemakers, cooks, maids, and laborers. Recognizing the need for outside help, movement president William Anderson decided to call an old college classmate in Atlanta – Martin Luther King, Jr. He asked the minister to come to Albany and speak at a movement rally.
That Friday night, the Shiloh Baptist Church overflowed with people who had come to hear Rev. King. Loudspeakers were set up outside for those who couldn’t get in. “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom,” they sang. “Martin Luther King says freedom-Let the white man say freedom.”
“Eyes On The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954 – 1965” p 168
Let me toss out an idea: the issue isn’t so much the content of the values; the issue is how they are framed within the context of the larger values held by many in America.
I believe that the progressive values I’m most interested in – environmental stewardship, equality, tolerance, a government standing up for the less powerful – can be framed within the values of community, family, home that I believe are central to many who voted against Kerry.
AL,
I don’t think you need to re-frame your values; red America is fine with equality, tolerance, etc. stated in exactly that way. You need to convince red America that the Democrats actually stand for those things.
A lot of rural folk seem themselves as the “less powerful,” and are resentful of big-city liberal types using government to attack them (eg, closing off wilderness land to recreation, ESA limitations on private land use, etc.). Lots of us hunters–guys who love the woods and want to see them preserved–would like a little “tolerance” from the granola left. Oh, and as long as you’re working on tolerance, try to show some respect for sincere Christian belief, too. Plenty of good, non-racist, non-homophobe conservatives who see PC media and government double standards (promoted as the very definition of virtue by urban Democrats) as an attack on equality. And of course environmental stewardship has been a specialty of small-town farmers and sportsmen for a century or so longer than the modern suburbanized environmental movement.
My problem with urban lefties isn’t the way they frame or market their professed values (Obama’s convention speech was great), it’s the fact that they appear to regard “values” as something to talk about rather than actually live.
In fairness, I don’t think you are actually guilty here, but there’s not a whit of doubt that lots of people with bigger megaphones than yours are.
Does this thread need to address the shift in religious influence, and in “values”? Two possible discussions:
1. The dominance today of evangelicals, and more generally, the idea that faith and Christianity are theirs. (My (ex?) denomination, the UCC, is starting “an ad campaign”:http://www.stillspeaking.com/ that stresses their nice values like inclusivity but don’t address this main issue). The main-line churches seem to have atrophied.
It didn’t help things for the Democrats that John Kerry acted like religion was something to be vaguely abashed about. And the genius of Karl Rove is that he recognized the evangelical phenomenon as far back as ’88 and harnessed it to the GOP.
2. The sense that “values” has come to stand — in common parlance — for sexual matters. Poverty, racial equality, labor rights, seem to have dropped out of that, which means that traditional Democratic themes are no longer in play.
BTW, I can’t help but note that no campaign and no religion, in the recent election, seems to have said much about Abu Ghraib. It seems to have gone unmentioned in the “presidential debates”:http://www.debates.org/ altogether. Probably should forget it — though it might have been significant if some major congregation or denomination had preached a damnation on it.
So are theocracy — or more to the point, religion — and progressivism two separate entities, as your title seems to imply, A.L.?
Could help shape this thread.
Now we are getting more to the point of what I posted earlier in “The Democratic Reformation”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/005843.php#c52 thread.
The “American Religious Identification Survey”:http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/aris.pdf published by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) deals with various religious aspects throughout the United States. The survey was taken back in ‘90’s and updated in 2001.
At first blush there are some 208 million Americans that identify themselves with some religious affiliation. The majority being of Catholic and Protestant faith. The “2000 Census”:http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa122800a.htm puts the total population of the US at 281,421,906.
The “Voter Turnout”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/03/voter.turnout.ap/ for the 2004 election is reported as being 114.9 million with a total of 117.8 million being closer if you count provisional and absentee ballots. Given the numbers it seems to me that blaming the evangelicals is nothing more than hot air. Barking up the tree of religious motivated judges also seems futile if you take the numbers into consideration. Judges may claim not to have religious beliefs but somehow the statistics certainly lean to a totally different conclusion. Now I’m not saying the statistics are gospel and neither is the survey. Taking these numbers with a grain of salt I do tend to wonder why people would lie to the extent that the numbers would be overly inflated.
I’m also at a loss as to why the Democratic party and the MSM continue to blame the evangelicals as the root problem of progressiveness. I’ve heard the same claim over and over on all the political talk shows that aired today. Kerry lost because the evangelicals are evil and stand in the way of progressiveness. What’s more they believe if the evangelicals hadn’t showed up at the polls Kerry would have won according to Eleanor Cliff. Given the 2001 data if evangelicals hadn’t showed up there would be roughly 29.5 million votes for two candidates. Given the total population of the US 29.5 million isn’t a very impressive number.
Bob Harmon offered up this “link”:http://www.pollingreport.com/civil.htm concerning America’s views on the issue of gay marriages versus civil unions. Of particular note are the final two questions. Democrats overwhelmingly favor gay marriage 40% over civil unions 27%. What’s more impressive is the percentage of those that oppose a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and woman 48%. If as Bob stated in a previous post that Gays and Lesbians will settle for nothing less then it stands to reason that the Democratic party should drop their pandering to these groups. Really it isn’t that hard to say NO to marriage but YES to civil unions. Sure the groups would be highly upset if they don’t get what they want but then again do you buy the baby a toy every time the baby cries? If as democrats believe that this is truly the issue that caused the Kerry loss it seems to me they would have denounced the blatant civil disobedience of the law displayed by several states. They didn’t do this simply because they were pandering for a vote. The Republicans denounced the civil disobedience without even thinking twice about it. Why is that?
PS – Sorry for the double post you can delete this post in the Democratic Reformation thread.
USMC,
The problem is not that “gays and lesbians” will settle for nothing less than marriage, the “gays and lesbians” you cite — see “my post”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/005843.php on that subject. The problem is (1) self-appointed leaders in any community setting agendas, (2) both parties taking them as emblematic, and (3) everyone else assuming that this is what’s driving the discussion. We have a phrase for such spokesmonsters — it’s “media sluts” — and it fits.
I don’t blame the evangelicals: I believe they have in fact captured the religious discourse from both the main-line churches and the MSM. Karl Rove knew a good organizing locus when he saw one.
Civil unions may very well be the best way to show the mainstream that the formation of legal households won’t bring Western civilization down. Indeed, if a same-sex household represents the very part of Western society that Osama bin Laden opposes, then it’s worth supporting. And, more important, passing an amendment against same-sex marriage won’t solve the problem haunting most people: the failures of so many marriages.
As to the “blatant civil disobedience,” that was mainly in California and Oregon. Massachusetts came to it as the result of court issues having much to do with the Commonwealth’s own laws. California — at least in Gavin Newsom’s San Francisco, which I witnessed happening day after day last February on my walks to law school there — had more to do with a populist mayor’s own runaway impulse. Nobody figured in Nov. 2003, when he defeated a Green Party challenger, that he’d run loose like this, or, more to the point, that it would capture the media on a slow news week.
The Democratic Party’s problem is that it has caucuses with self-appointed community leaders, the lesbian/gay community not the only one, whom the Party hasn’t asked to follow through on the real delivery: votes. If 23% of the gay vote went for Bush, then the Democratic Party’s problem is failure to demand results from its apparatchiks.
BTW, California is a state with a GOP governor who is quite comfortable with gay marriage, and a civil-unions system that goes into operation on Jan. 1 with full participation in community-property, probate, and family law. If that succeeds, while conventional marriages continue to fail at a 50-50 rate, the rest of the country would do well to think of what is _really_ breaking families down. Burning a witch never cures the underlying problem, and the marriage amendment won’t.
Armed Liberal: “I believe that the progressive values I’m most interested in – environmental stewardship, equality, tolerance, a government standing up for the less powerful – can be framed within the values of community, family, home that I believe are central to many who voted against Kerry.”
Is “God” a value?
It seems so to me.
People with different religions voted for Bush. What they often had in common was that they practiced their religion, whatever it was. People who identified in different ways voted for Kerry, and what they often had in common was that they either had no religion or they did not practice their nominal religion or adhere faithfully to its teachings.
There was a choice there, and both sides understood it. It’s not so mysterious. Kerry the war hero was the “stealth” candidate for people who never wanted America to invade countries in the Middle East and who want to get out (with or without democracy in Iraq); and in the same way Kerry the choirboy was the “stealth” candidate for people who feel threatened and offended by religion and understandably want religion beaten.
In practice, I think George W. Bush is pretty much for believers of any type other than Islamist fanatics, and John F. Kerry and the kinds of people most eager to support him are against believers. I am not concerned that George W. Bush, or America under his leadership, would strive to delegitimise religion and punish believers, regardless of whether they were of his denomination, evangelical, Christian or idol-worshipping. (He is not the “evangelical” candidate, that misstates and underrates his appeal.) I see the kinds of people that support John F. Kerry demonstrating intolerance to religion all the time. They feel religion (other than Islam?) is intolerant to them, so “retaliate first” I guess.
Both men were talking in code all the time on religion and religious issues. George W. Bush was saying: “I’m one of you. I’m on your side. I can’t argue this stuff publicly, but I know all the secret passwords. Trust me.” John F. Kerry was saying: “I’ve got all the religious credentials, and I know all the manoeuvres to defeat religion. Don’t worry, I’m one of you. I won’t let those fanatics win a trick.”
Though both candidates were talking in code, neither was lying. George W. Bush has been a promise-keeper. John F. Kerry has a perfect record with his own constituency on issues that his nominal religion regards as vital. His true allegiance couldn’t have been clearer if he’d been nominally Jewish and determined to appoint judges who would compel all Jews to eat pork. Either way, if you cared about one side or other of this fight, you had no reason to doubt your champion.
This isn’t a misunderstanding about some attractive vague phrase or another, or about framing packages of attractive words in context A or context B to make them look more appealing. It’s a clash between armies that are not confused about their leaders or what they stand for.
The victorious army of John F. Kerry would have ridden over the necks of the defeated. He made that clear.
Arlen Specter, in warning George W. Bush that he would block any judicial nominees that he deemed too conservative (from a pro-choice point of view) provoked the same sort of emotional reaction that post-Civil War pro-slavery Southerners did when they proposed to go on oppressing the Negro as though the Union had not won the war.
This is an intense and real struggle about clearly opposed values.
The debate taking place about “moral values” is missing a few key points and glossing over several flaws.
Harmon gets very close to the problem when he states “The problem is (1) self-appointed leaders in any community setting agendas”.
I am a liberal and a Christian. I voted for Bush in support of his progressive foreign policy reforms, but the biggest political struggle I face is with appointed judges not only setting the agenda but imposing it on entire communities. Gay Marriage may be the hot topic nationally, but there are a number of more significant local issues where a judge has imposed new legislation upon our communities.
I don’t think I have a problem with gays being licensed to marry, but I’d like to be included in the discussion. I’d also like any approval to follow the Constitutional democratic process. State legislatures have been determining the conditions under which they will license a marriage for more than a hundred years. For example, not every state will permit first cousins to marry, and minimum age requirements range from 16 to 19 years of age. This is at least some evidence that the democratically elected government of the people is quite capable of addressing sensible social questions.
I don’t view this as so much an issue of “Gay Marriage”. I see it more as an issue of democracy.
_I believe that the progressive values I’m most interested in – environmental stewardship, equality, tolerance, a government standing up for the less powerful – can be framed within the values of community, family, home that I believe are central to many who voted against Kerry._
I think that’s true, up to a point. That point is a *consistent* application of those principles. A few examples —
Tolerance is putting up with that you disagree with or dislike and _could_ suppress; check the dictionary. It is *_not_* affirmation. It is not cultural relatavism or a refusal to discriminate (in the sense of discern).
Equality–genuine equality–of _opportunity_ not equality of outcome or results. Diversity of options plus freedom of choice will definitely lead to unequal results.
I have also long supported as a purpose of government to protect the weak against the predations of the strong. The _weakest_ member of our society is a baby in the womb. Don’t talk to me about the others until you’re willing to defend the weakest.
What I notice the most in that list, however, is the utter lack of interest in freedom, security, defence, heritage, or the deep history and values that have made America special.
To get where you want to go, Democrats must repudiate moral relativism, post-modernism, and the pathological tendency to repudiate both American exceptionalism and the great heritage of Western–meaning European, Judaeo-Christian, and Graeco-Roman–civilisation.
I agree with Carl Fenley, I would not have cared a whit about so-called “same sex marriage” has the proponents acted honorably and attempted to get their preferences legislated democratically by persuading their fellow citizens to change the definition of “civil marriage.” Instead they ran to the courts to try to shove it down our throats.
Unfortunately for them, this isn’t Canada and the electorate has democratic remedies available to them for when the courts decide to overstep their boundaries. Last Tuesday in eleven States, they chose to exercise those remedies.
The worst thing right now that could happen for proponents of changing the definition of civil marriage would be for the courts to strike down DOMA and leave open the very real possibility of a Massachusetts court redefining marriage for the entire country. Should that happen, a lot of people who might otherwise oppose an FMA (as being redundant or unnecessary while DOMA was the law of the land) would be emboldened to support it. In which case we could have a constitutional amendment that embodies the preferences of the overwhelming majority of citizens during an election year and 2004 would look like a picnic for the Democrats.
A little perspective here. Massachusetts is one state of 50, and although their court rulings might be interesting they’re not binding law in the other 49 nor in the Federal courts unless those courts take them up — and even then there’s appellate challenges. And a Supreme Court that W. will be picking.
Also, imposing an amendment of this sort will ride over two basic Constitutional principles: equal protection under the law, and states’ rights. You really want to make a bonfire of them?
Oh, and this: as conservatives have told me over and over, “this is a republic, not a democracy.” The Founding Fathers anticipated that a democratic majority — particularly a sectarian one — could be as tyrannical as a despot; see “The Federalist No. 51”:http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed51.htm. And, to check that, an independent judiciary had to uphold rule of law even if the People in Congress assembled did not; see “The Federalist No. 78”:http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed78.htm.
You want to mock that?
The questions I still have, unanswered, is
(1) whether civil unions can be made to work, or if conservatives’ intent is to forbid any means of holding property in common, bequeathing it, being able to visit in hospitals and make medical decisions and hold powers of attorney?
(2) whether you’re willing to ride over state by state attempts to find some alternatives?
If the answer is no, then maybe WoC should revive an idea Joe K. had, about a manifesto. Not “marriage” — obviously the white lace and promises is best left as it is — but whether there can be alternatives if there’s anybody of good will, on either side, to consider them.
Yes? or no?
_whether civil unions can be made to work, or if conservatives’ intent is to forbid any means of holding property in common, bequeathing it, being able to visit in hospitals and make medical decisions and hold powers of attorney?_
I can’t speak for all conservatives, but those to whom I have mentioned this approach–even some other evangelical christians– have responded favorably.
Let’s take sex away from civil unions entirely. As a legal arangement it makes a lot of sense … for a child living with an aged widowed parent … for a parent caring for a disabled adult child … for two elderly siblings living together … for a couple of old army buddies, one of whom is disabled. And so on.
The biggest risk, which must be addressed on the front end, is what happens to inheritance if a partner dies without a will. In marriage, half typically passes to the spouse and the other half is divided amongst the deceased’s closest kin. This is especially tricky when incompetent people are involved.
If we take it out of the realm of homosexual “rights,” and treat it as a sensitive and functional response to a number of unusual situations–and keep it fully under state jurisdiction–I think most opposition would evaporate as long as the broadening is genuine and not merely a gesture.
Bart, It may be workable, especially as a synthesis of contract, family, community-property, probate, insurance and civil law. These households exist, and the fact that Lawrence v. Texas meant they were no longer criminal sort of requires some logical next step. Equal protection under the law means nothing if it’s the right to skulk about in gay bars and that’s all.
I suppose California’s “AB205”:http://www.ceb.com/info/ab205.htm, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, might provide one model.
(1) whether civil unions can be made to work, or if conservatives’ intent is to forbid any means of holding property in common, bequeathing it, being able to visit in hospitals and make medical decisions and hold powers of attorney?
Mechanisms to provide these rights already exist independent of marriage or civil unions. Actually, I’m not aware of any benefits accruing to a married couple that cannot be effectively simulated with the proper documents except for the broken mechanism of employer-paid insurance. Anyone know of others?
The main benefit of marriage is that these rights and privileges are assumed to exist.
The logical problem many same-sex marriage proponents face is that they don’t want the same rights for everyone. They want to join the privileged class of married couples and leave more platonic relationships out in the cold.
As I’ve said on other venues, two single mother’s pooling their household shouldn’t have to have sex or act like they do to receive the benefits of a common household. And they shouldn’t have to hire a team of lawyers to do it either.
Thorston,
“I would not have cared a whit about so-called “same sex marriage” has the proponents acted honorably and attempted to get their preferences legislated democratically by persuading their fellow citizens to change the definition of “civil marriage.” Instead they ran to the courts to try to shove it down our throats.”
The proponents who push for civil unions legislation are not necessarily the ones who wanted to take it to the courts. It only takes one person to file a lawsuit. The people who don’t file lawsuits are innocent of this charge. Why blame them for something that someone else did?
Bob Harmon wrote:
It hinges on whether one believes that the federal courts will rule that States are required to recognize civil marriages performed in another States as such in their own State (an issue that is murky at best). Considering the number of non-Californians that flocked to San Francisco and non-Massachusetts citizens that have traveled to Massachusetts, it seems that proponents of redefining civil marriage think they will.
Except of course it does neither. The powers reserved for the State’s (erroneously referred to as “State’s rights”) are generally defined as anything not reserved for the federal government or forbidden to the States via the federal constitution. Amending said constitution is perfectly consistent with that particularly since it requires the approval of those States. Secondly, we are not required to redefine “civil marriage” to accommodate the preferences of every individual or group of individuals that may want some other type of arrangement and as such it is not an “equal protection” issue.
Translation: if civil marriage remains defined as between “one man and one woman” rather than defined on the whim of any and every group that thinks it should be redefined as something else, we’re all a bunch of tyrannical despots. Got it.
No, just those who throw around terms like “tyrannical despots” in lieu of making an actual argument. Or when they do, they throw around specious arguments like:
Right because as we all know, single people are not able to hold property in common, draft wills, write a power of attorney, or a health care proxy.
Except of course no one has proposed to do any such thing.
I’m not aware of any benefits accruing to a married couple that cannot be effectively simulated with the proper documents except for the broken mechanism of employer-paid insurance. Anyone know of others?
The right to sue in tort for injuries or death suffered by a spouse.
Just a comment. There is no question of equal opportunity when it comes to marriage. A homosexual has to satisfy the same conditions to obtain a marriage license as a heterosexual; no more, no less. So, it would appear that some gay activists are not attempting to obtain equal protection, but court appointed special priviledges. Can “first cousins”:http://www.cuddleinternational.org/laws/law-index.html sue to subvert the laws of states requiring greater degrees of separation? Can a couple sue to subvert state law setting minimum age requirements at 18 or 21 in the case of Mississippi? Should a single judge, or a three judge panel, legislate such consequential social decisions without the legislature?
“(1) whether civil unions can be made to work, or if conservatives’ intent is to forbid any means of holding property in common, bequeathing it, being able to visit in hospitals and make medical decisions and hold powers of attorney?”
As a Christian, I’m not yet prepared to say whether I would or would not support “Gay Marriage”, but I have no problem with civil unions as long as it was not restricted to homosexuals, but open to all two-adult households.
By the way, this is another reason the liberal in me kind of likes President Bush. He has repeatedly spoken in favor of civil unions at the state level.
I don’t really understand what is being asked in point #2.
To the posters immediately above, I’d answer by saying that various versions of last year’s FMA included the phrase “or the incidents thereof,” which looked like something more than simply defining marriage as between a man and a woman. If it did include civil unions or domestic partnerships it would invalidate California’s laws and a host of registries or employee-benefits programs in a number of local and state governments.
That certainly would qualify as overriding state and local governments.
Virginia went one better by “passing a law”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36314-2004Jun12.html invalidating any kind of “marriages, civil unions or domestic partnership contracts between same-sex couples (HB 751).” That could invalidate wills, medical directives, powers of attorney, child custody and property arrangements, joint bank accounts — we won’t know till the first set of relatives sues in probate to break someone’s will on the basis of this law. It sure as hell will interfere with businesses’ employee-benefits plans.
That is one answer to point #1.
As for point #2, it goes to the other issue: do you really want a vaguely worded Federal amendment that would override states’ attempts to create civil unions, and gov’t and private employers’ benefit plans? Because unless George Bush draws his FMA very narrowly this is what we could see — or at the least, something that will keep lawyers fully employed for the next 20 years.
Even the “National Review”:http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/editors200403040830.asp has had its doubts: “The reference to “legal incidents” has confused many observers and led to disagreement about the amendment’s impact on civil unions. The opponents of the amendment have made good use of this ambiguity.” They seem to have doubts about point #2.
So, yes or no? Do you want to throw out civil unions as well? Or let states find something other than marriage?
*FMA:* _Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the *legal incidents thereof* be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups._
Clearly, the amendment is unambiguously referring to legal incidents of marital status. Civil unions do not confer marital status.
No, I do not want to see a Federal Amendment. I think that is unnecessary. However, when court “challenges”:http://news.google.com/news?q=federal%20lawsuit%20DOMA&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=wn to voter-approved state legislation is extended to the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, it is perceived as an act of aggression and state legislatures will take defensive actions.
Carl Fernley, “the legal incidents thereof” is a phrase that would have a thousand law professors dancing on the head of a pin.
But I’m cool with state legislatures doing their own variants. California has a civil unions law that may serve as a model, Virginia has a law that makes businesses think seriously about going offshore, or at least to Maryland, but that is how the federalism principle works. And “marriage different than legal arrangements” is George W’s own phrasing.
And to be blunt about it, if marriage means the wreckage that family-law attorneys see daily, if it means Britney Spears’ 54-hour marriage, if it means Courtney Love presiding over Las Vegas marriages — yeah, it happened — then maybe sensible people need to provide new guards for their future security. The unions may suggest this, and we may preserve marriage in its current form only to find it petrified.
Some afterthoughts:
First, the state-to-state issue is going to take considerable time to sort itself out. The Full Faith and Credit clause, far as I can determine, wasn’t at issue in Loving et ux v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1, 1967) overruling bans on interracial marriages, which was decided on 14th Amendment grounds — racial discrimination — that wouldn’t be directly on point in this controversy. I haven’t been able to find any cases where FF&C successfully overruled a state interracial-marriage ban.
What may come up, piecemeal, are challenges based on the Contracts Clause or perhaps the Privileges & Immunities Clause (Art. IV, § 2), but even those are remote. So people shouldn’t be worried that Massachusetts’ precedent is somehow portable: it isn’t. And San Francisco was a case of a populist mayor far exceeding existing California state law, which got “short shrift”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/12/SAMESEX12.TMP once it got to state courts.
Oh, and on Thorley’s comment about “despots” being some kind of red-herring argument, I might point out that it was in the context of the Federalist No. 51, and the tyranny Madison had in mind was King George III. For those who haven’t looked at the Federalist “No. 51”:http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed51.htm hyperlink, one money quote is, “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.” Royal oppression — despotism — was still a fresh memory then.
I still recommend people read “No. 51”:http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed51.htm and “No. 78”:http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed78.htm.
To A.L., a footnote. Although andrewsullivan.com is labeling “this analysis from Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2109275/ as “conventional wisdom,” it does suggest that any analysis of the Democratic Party needs to address the national-security gap. Same-sex marriage may be to the electorate what Ham and Eggs and the Townsend Plan were to California politics — i.e., a passing flap. (To the rest, those were social-engineering issues ca. the 1934 California gubernatorial election that seem to have been subsumed by the New Deal and WWII.)
Bob, I’ve felt that the D’s have to have some kind of national security plan other than waiting for the U.N. troops to show up. (I know, there was more to Kerry’s defense policies than this, but it’s a good sound bite).
We’ve got to get Dukakis out of the tank, somehow.
I’m in Texas (waiting to come home), and flew out with a committed Texas Democrat, dissecting the election. Simply put, we both agreed that we need to select as a nominee someone who could plausibly own a F-150 pickup truck.
A.L.