Prop 8?

Oh, naivety can also be bliss.

Barrowman was obviously using the time to side swipe the homophobes with a left-handed comment about the fundamentalist society (slowly becoming a minority) that goes so far as to forbid gay marriage, hell -- forbidding it at all in the not too distant past.

You can dip into Proust and find all sorts of observations about women and heterosexual sex but it means little in regards to his being gay. Capote explored the feminine mystique in depth writing "Breakfast At Tiffany's," was a close friend of Marilyn Monroe and wrote a hilarious and profound anecdote of one of their Big Apple outings. As usual, you're one of the vacant heterosexual men that still don't understand why women have gay friends because they relate on a plane you blokes can't possibly seem to get. Yeah, he did get into the kinky sadism associated with the sexual underworld of Paris. So what.

Proust's Way
BY PAUL REIDINGER
Thursday July 6, 2006

Although literary critics of the conventional school will tell you that Marcel Proust's greatest achievement was his mammoth novel Remembrance of Things Past, a credible case can be made for his dodging the dumdum bullet etched with "gay writer."

Proust was gay, certainly " the lifelong evidence of his passion for men amply flows through William C. Carter's new book, Proust in Love (Yale, $26) " and he also wrote about same-sexuality with something like candor: Remembrance is rich in homosexual couplings, described by Proust in near-graphic, though not graphic-graphic, detail. These small moments of self-restraint give us our clue. Proust may have been a literary genius and homo apologist, not to mention a relentless pursuer of lower-class young men and, as he aged, a haunter of boy brothels, but he was also mindful of such practical matters as hanging Remembrance with enough heterosexual window dressing to allay public misgivings as to what was actually going on in the novel's pages. Of course, a reading public that accepts as a woman a character named Albertine, even while the Baron de Charlus and M. Jupien (keeper of a boy brothel!) are noisily shtupping in the courtyard, is asking and maybe begging for the relief of unbearable suspicions.

End of article

The newest biography, although it's had pressed to find one that doesn't reveal his homosexuality, his many visits to gay brothels and a relationship with his chauffeur, even a storied long term relationship with a well-known concert pianist:

Marcel Proust: A Life
by Steve Weinstein
EDGE Editor-In-Chief
Wednesday Mar 4, 2009


Brevity is the soul of wit, but it also doesn’t hurt when you’re writing history or biography. Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet was stuffed with information, from grade-school records to police complaints. Some people (including myself) at the time complained that it was an example of the word processor (as we called "home computing" in those times), in which it’s easy to dump information into a book.

In stark contrast, Marcel Proust: a life is a model of concision. In only 165 smallish pages, White has produced a masterful biography-appreciation of this literary giant. The irony is that Proust himself wrote the longest novel in the World Canon.

Whether you call it by its original English translation, "Remembrance of Things Past" or the newer, more accurate (but, I think, less evocative) one, "In Search of Lost Time," "À la recherche du temps perdu" stands alone in world literature: a complex (to put it mildly!) interweaving of personal remembrances, family, lust and love and romance, politics, high society and lowlifes, and the texture of France at the turn of the century (with a world-weary nod in the "present time" to the horrors of the Great War).

It was also the first great novel widely read to deal honestly and openly with homosexuality, both gay male and lesbian. This is one of the reasons why White is such a perfect biographer. It also helps that he’s an unabashed Francophile, who spends much of every year in Paris.

I’ll leave to others to compare the style of such elaborate tomes as "Forgetting Elena" and "Caracole" to the "Recherche." But you don’t have to be a scholar of White’s life and method to see how he moved from the relatively spare style of "A Boy’s Own Story" to the more rococo "A Farewell Symphony."

Peeling away the onion layers of Proust’s life and how they are reflected in his supremely autobiographical novel, White reveals delicious detail after detail. Oscar Wilde ran away from the young man’s house because the furniture was so ugly. (Proust’s fabled aesthetic appreciation was very conservative; he never even acknowledged the Impressionists, let alone appreciate them.)

Take only one delightful personage who made her way into Proust’s life, Laure Hayman, a real-life courtesan who could have stepped right out of the pages of Colette, but was the model for Odette Swann. She was not only the lover of Proust’s father and uncle; she also bedded, at various times, of the pretenders to the French and Serbian thrones; the king of Greece; Prince Karl Egon von Fürstenberg (ancestor of the first husband of the clothing designer); a banker; and a handsome stud who worked at the British embassy.

Such real-life models for Proust’s characters don’t diminish the "Recherche": rather, they help us understand Proust’s mindset and flesh them out. This is a good thing, because, as anyone who has plowed through the "Recherche" knows, it can be heavy slogging at times. I’ve done it twice, and let me tell you: It took more commitment than any other prose I’ve ever read, even Joyce.

For one thing, Proust’s sentences are elaborate to the point of byzantine. White comments that Proust is one writer who really would have benefited from word processing, and he’s probably right.

In a volume this small, there’s not much room for literary criticism or exegesis. I don’t agree with White’s complete appreciation for the "Recherche." For me, there’s no excuse for the long, languide, drawn-out passages of the pursuit and sexual enslavement of Albertine, the fictional female stand-in for Proust’s chauffeur, in the sub-books "The Captive" and "The Fugitive."

I also would have liked more detail about Proust’s life during and after World War I. I find it hard to believe that his quotidian existence wasn’t affected by Paris being so near and so affected by the Western Front. But this is a minor qualm.

As a half-Jew (raised a Catholic but always self-identifying with his beloved Jewish mother) and a gay man, Proust was a double outsider in the high society circles he adored. It’s interesting to contrast Proust with the contemporary writer that--in this way, at least--he has the most in common.

Unlike Proust, Truman Capote didn’t sequester himself in a cork-lined room. Instead, he drank his way through the salons and saloons of the Upper East Side and produced only a slim volume that exposed his friends’ shallow lives.

In contrast to the popular image of him as a secular monk, Proust never did in fact completely withdraw from society. He was a great correspondent and enjoyed daily meals at the Ritz.

He did, however, discipline himself enough so that he could spend hour upon hour reflecting and writing on his experiences and the interesting people and places he knew. Battling the terrible asthma that eventually killed him, he managed through sheer force of will to bring forth a book that continues to marvel. White’s little jewel box of a biography gives us an intimate glimpse of a man who was able to distill his experiences into literature.

End of article

Now you're going to tell me that Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess and E. M. Forster were not gay men. Pardon me while I LOL

Would it be that you recognized that brevity is the soul of wit but as you are often witless, it's no mystery.

What happens with a divorce -- another stupid question.

Why is that a stupid question?



I'm glad you informed me of that. I hadn't known I was going to say anything of the sort.

I never had Burgess pegged as a homosexual. Where is that said?

Can you not think of a wittier way of declaring me witless. These assertions are pathetic. All these writers you are familiar with and you can't do better than playground blurts.

Getting back to the topic, I think your post about the homosexual union ceremony constituted an attack on the sanctity of marriage by tainting the word with ridicule. It might be said to be a part of a deliberate revolution against the tastes and manners of our civilisation.

A heterosexual author wrote this -- yeah, right.

Robert panted. ‘It will do you no harm, you will like it, you will see.’ And he gently undid the boy’s shirt and drew it over his crisply curled head, casting it to the floor, where it lay limp as the boy’s own body. ‘Ralph, Ralph,’ murmured Robert as he caressed the young warm flesh, running a hand ever and again over the thin but muscular arms with their delicate flue, the smoothness of the taut belly, the silkiness of the back, the delicate moving contours of the breast, where the tiny nipples had already begun to respond to the moist fervour of Robert’s kisses. It was while his mouth held his in passionate prolongation that Robert blindly tore at the buttons of the boy’s trousers. He whispered, ‘See, Ralph my darling, we must be the same, naked as the day when we were born, and rightly so since we are both at this moment being reborn. The whole world will seem to have changed, you will see, it is the beginning of a life for both of us.’ The world outside, the alien world of disgust and hate impinged in the clash of the Angelus bell, but, yes, it was the bell of the Annunciation, the Angel of the Lord, an impending miracle. His questing hand was aware of the boy’s own nascent excitement, the silken sheath about the iron of tumescence, and he smoothed with a shaking hand the royalty of the sceptre and the twinned orbs. Then: ‘It must be now,’ he gasped, ‘it is the moment, do not move, Ralph my love.’ Thus, newly locked in a kiss, Robert found the antrum amoris and eased his body up to engage it with his own palpitant rod, now grown and glorified to a mace of regal authority. The boy cried out, and it seemed not to Robert to be a cry of pain, rather a call or crow of acceptance. Encouraged, Robert gently eased his throbbing burden into the timid heat of the sacred fissure, soothing with gentle words, words of love, while the angelic bell pounded and pulsed without. And then the promise loomed, the declaration of the Angel of the Lord, and the rhythm of ancient drums pulsed in imperceptible gradations of acceleration under a choral utterance that was emitted from the silver throats of all the Angels of the Lord, filling the universe to the remotest crevices where lurked, like shy sea beasts, stars not yet named, galaxies uncharted. And then the madness followed, the drouth of a demented hoarseness of arcane and terrible incantations, the rasp of words ineffable, prayers to gods long thrust under earth or set to gather the dust of eons in caverns remote and hallowed only by mouths themselves long filled with dust, for the rancorous hordes or those who flaunted the banners of Galilee had smitten and broken and flattened the ancient empire of Faz and Khlaroth. And then, O miracle of miracles, the drought was overtaken by the bursting of the dam, by the flooding of the whole desiccated earth, and Robert’s voice rose like a trumpet in the ecstasy of his spending. A love nameless, unspeakable, spoke the name over and over again, ‘Ralph, Ralph my beloved,’ and the lips that were agape in a wordless prayer of gratitude now closed about the head and flower of the boy’s Aaronic baston, mouthed softly as about a grape to effect and yet delay its bursting, and Ralph writhed and groaned and the words were strange. ‘Solitam...Minotauro...pro caris corpus...’ Latin, the memory of some old lesson, of some ancient attempt at seduction in that Jesuit school library he had spoken of: the supposition flashed in Robert’s cooling brain. Then, with the speed of incontinent youth, Ralph gushed his burden out, sweet and acrid and copious, and Robert gulped greedily of the milk of love. Then they lay a space, wordless both, the thunder of their twin hearts subsiding, Robert’s head couched on the boy’s loins, Ralph’s right hand smoothing his lover’s wet and tangled hair.

-Anthony Burgess, "Earthly Powers"

He was taking the piss. Obviously.

He admitted to one of his biographers that he probably regretted not being homosexual but that is is the old argument that you aren't gay unless you act on it. Of course, there's little history on many admitted or outed gay authors, painters, composers, et al, of their sexual liaisons that describes the act. "Earthly Powers" and "The Wanting Seed" are full of such revealing scenes and are shelved in the library and book stores as gay literature, although anyone should recognize that Burgess certainly has a way with words in writing what any fundamentalist would classify as gay porno. Toomey, the main character in "Earthly Powers," has been "outed" as based on Somerset Maugham but the novel takes place on Malta where Burgess had moved and if one has read most of his books (he was the most prolific writer of the last century) those passages read like homosexual fantasies. It is only an opinion that he may or may not have had homosexual experiences -- he was, he admitted himself, an unattractive man and his first wife died of alcoholism, which always makes me wonder what someone's home life is like when one of the co-dependents drinks themselves to death.

I don't know any family that doesn't have multiple divorces and remarriages within their ranks, including going back into the past. If this fortifies this "sanctity of marriage" that everyone seems so touchy about, then I'm the Queen of England, not you.

Yes- but you did gratuitously label Mr Burgess as a homosexual and you can't squirm out of that.

No, I baited you to label them: "Now you're going to tell me that Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess and E. M. Forster were not gay men." I inserted Burgess because that could only be your opinion (as you were incorrect about Proust) and there are many as he had contradicted himself several times about the subject. Obviously, you already knew that Maugham and Forster were gay. It was enough of a common knowledge about Maugham that Burgess made him into Toomey, the main character of "Earthly Powers," and the character's schism with the Catholic Church in the novel parallels Burgess' becoming agnostic.

Sorry, but your defense of the sanctity of marriage is so weak, it's as diaphanous as the smoke from the end of the hundreds of fags Burgess smoked which finally killed him.

"The sanctity of marriage" is an oxymoron as it is portrayed by the wing-nuts who think that marriage should be preserved only between and man and a woman. They would have us believe that their own marriage will be threatened because other people will be allowed to marry. What hogwash! Why are they threatened by other people's divorce?

Why was I incorrect about Proust? I did not say he was not a homosexual. As far as I know the jury is out on the matter.

I gave my reasons for the sanctity of marriage in the Catholic vows. If you want it straight it is a device to save women's faces. We accept it because it is civilised.

The ceremonials you offered for a homosexual union were a joke to anyone who reads them carefully--as I did.

Do you not understand the "sewing circles" mystique and the point about the banality of proletarianising the matter?

That about baiting me was after-the-event bullshit. Pathetic.

Pope Spendius XXX enjoys chasing his own tail around and around like a drunk puppy dog. Vows outside the Catholic church are at the desire of what a heterosexual couple wants in their wedding, not what the Poops (sic) prescribe. He's so worried about what other people do. I'd think if he is speaking to people at the pub in the same manner he writes here, he should fear getting bollixed in the nose, if it hasn't already happened. I somehow think he's not that stupid but I could be wrong.

He'll never address the divorce rate of heterosexuals, those who remain single and are still having sex with multiple partners, and those who marry multiple times (all who are sometimes members of the Catholic church). The Catholic church has very poor leadership of its members about marriage, especially gay marriage, but they seemed to have done a good job in not discouraging young boys and girls from having sex with their priest mentors, let alone the priests abstaining themselves.

Isn't "sanctity" an ideal? Since when are we going to drop the ideal because most people can't live up to it?

You're arguments are fatuous LW. Degenerate too.

And I don't think members of the Catholic church are married multiple times. Not to my knowledge.

What % of Catholic priests are guilty of such betrayals and how many of those who are American?

Has media been whispering in your ear as Isherwood described?

Prop 8 opponents not waiting for Supreme Court
Gay rights groups considering 2010 ballot initiative

Nicole C. Brambila • The Desert Sun • April 21, 2009


Gay rights groups are not waiting around on the California Supreme Court to see if justices reinstate same-sex marriage.
Advertisement

A coalition of state gay rights groups plan to begin in-depth political polling to gauge public sentiment and to strategize about a possible ballot initiative as early as next year.

“We’re waiting for the California Supreme Court to come back on the decision regarding Prop 8,” said Pamela Brown, policy director for Marriage Equality USA. “All of our organizations believe strongly that they should overturn Prop 8.

“While we’re hoping for the best, we also think we should set up a plan.”

The 30-plus gay rights groups " which include the Southern Christian Leadership Council of Greater Los Angeles, the Courage Campaign, Equality California and the Jordan/Rustin Coalition " hope to have the polling finished by late June.

Although no estimated costs were available, organizers said they believed a second ballot fight would cost at least as much as the first, $30 million or more.

In the wake of the ban’s passage, organizers blamed lackluster fundraising, misleading opinion polls and media coverage of a lesbian wedding used to scare voters into believing their children would be taught about gay relationships for the surprise defeat.

This campaign, gay right advocates said, would be different.

“It’s a bottom up approach not a top down approach,” said Rick Jacobs, founder and chair of the Courage Campaign.

“I don’t think you can make it any different.”

Neither the election nor legal challenges over Proposition 8, however, has changed the majority of Californians’ minds about same-sex marriage since November.

Among likely voters, 45 percent favor same-sex marriage and 49 percent are opposed, according to a March Public Policy Institute of California poll.

Since Proposition 8 passed, Vermont, Iowa and Connecticut have joined Massachusetts in extending marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Marriage equality and gay civil rights resonate with many in the Palm Springs area, which has one of the largest gay populations per capita in the United States.

Last year the state’s high court ruled a 2000 law banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional setting off a rush to the alter with more than 4,000 gay and lesbian couples marrying " the about 1,200 in the Coachella Valley along.

Voters, however, approved Proposition 8, overturning the Supreme Court decision with a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and woman.

The court is considering legal challenges to Proposition 8 and should have a decision in the matter by early June.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

States' same-sex marriage laws set precedent
Recent rulings in favor of legalizing same-sex marriages may influence California's Proposition 8
Rachel Draznin-Nagy

In the past few weeks, both Iowa and Vermont legalized same-sex marriage in moves that may impact California's efforts to do the same.

The state legislature in Vermont was the first to legalize same-sex marriage within the legislative system when they overturned a veto from the governor.

Ken Nagy, a civil rights lawyer, explained that voters could amend the constitution in Vermont the same way they did in California with Proposition 8.

Prop. 8 is an initiative that was on the November 2008 ballot that amended the state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. It passed by about 52 percent.

Same-sex rights activists brought a new case before the court and held oral arguments on Mar. 5 in San Francisco. While this case does not deal with the legalization of same-sex marriage, although a decision in the plaintiff's favor would strike down Prop. 8. The case deals with the rights of the voters.

The plaintiffs - same-sex rights activists - argued that voters do not have the right to take away civil liberties from a minority group. They are arguing that Prop. 8, which affected non-heterosexual couples, was not valid.

Nagy said he believes that Vermont will not take such measures due to its predominantly liberal population.

In Iowa, the State Supreme Court ruled Apr. 3 that limiting marriage to unions between men and women violates the state's constitution and said the matter could not be overturned by public vote.

Legal experts say that the Iowa court decision does not directly affect California, but could affect the California Supreme Court's ruling on Prop. 8.

The Iowa court decision indirectly addressed the Prop. 8 case, according to Tara Borelli, an attorney for Lambda Legal, a national organization that advocates for same-sex marriage and civil rights for the gay and lesbian communites.

She said the language of the decision "included in their analysis Prop. 8-relevant themes, although the Iowa decision concerned primarily a different issue than Prop. 8." Iowa's concern was legalizing same-sex marriage.

"Prop. 8 questions how the structure of government is set up," she explained, adding that the Iowa court ruled that the courts should decide on issues that are too divisive for the voters, which includes same-sex marriage.

Nagy, however, questions the long-term wisdom of restricting voter's rights.

"You are limiting the people's ability to form its own laws," he said. "Although I disagree with the content of what they're doing, I support the process." Borelli said that the California court is not forced to consider the Iowa decision as they write their analysis of Prop. 8. However, "What the court can do is look to the Iowa decision as persuasive authority," she said.

State courts usually consider, if not necessarily honor, the decisions by other state courts.

Should California rule in favor of Prop. 8, same-sex marriage would be constitutionally banned in the state of California. Undoing such a constitutional amendment is very difficult, lawyers agree.

If Prop. 8 is deemed valid, the legislative branch would be constitutionally banned from passing a same-sex marriage bill.

Because courts cannot hear the same case twice, no California court could hear a new same-sex marriage case if it concerns the same issues as Prop. 8.

Borelli said that her organization is prepared to take action should Prop. 8 pass. The organization's only option would be to write a new proposition that would overturn Prop. 8 if voters pass it.

Because courts usually announce their decision within 90 days of their arguments, the California Supreme Court should announce their ruling on Prop. 8 by June 2009.

Borelli is hopeful that same-sex marriage will soon be legal. Legalizing it in Vermont and Iowa, as well as proposed legalization in New Hampshire, New York and Washington, D.C., "show[s] that time is on the side of fairness and equal opportunity," she said.

From the NYT:
On Politics
Signs G.O.P. Is Rethinking Stance on Gay Marriage

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: April 28, 2009

WASHINGTON " It was only five years ago that opposition to gay marriage was so strong that Republicans explicitly turned to the issue as a way to energize conservative voters. Yet today, as the party contemplates the task of rebuilding itself, some Republicans say the issue of gay marriage may be turning into more of a hindrance than a help.

The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

The fact that a run of states have legalized gay marriage in recent months " either by court decision or by legislative action " with little backlash is only one indication of how public attitudes about this subject appear to be changing.

More significant is evidence in polls of a widening divide on the issue by age, suggesting to many Republicans that the potency of the gay-marriage question is on the decline. It simply does not appear to have the resonance with younger voters that it does with older ones.

Consider this: In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, released on Monday, 31 percent of respondents over the age of 40 said they supported gay marriage. By contrast, 57 percent under age 40 said they supported it, a 26-point difference. Among the older respondents, 35 percent said they opposed any legal recognition of same-sex couples, be it marriage or civil unions. Among the younger crowd, just 19 percent held that view.

Steve Schmidt, who was the senior strategist to Senator John McCain of Arizona during his presidential campaign, said in a speech and an interview that Republicans were in danger of losing these younger voters unless the party comes to appreciate how issues like gay marriage resonate, or do not resonate, with them.

“Republicans should re-examine the extent to which we are being defined by positions on issues that I don’t believe are among our core values, and that put us at odds with what I expect will become, over time, if not a consensus view, then the view of a substantial majority of voters,” he said in a speech.

This does not mean, Republicans said, that most Americans are suddenly embracing the idea of same-sex couples going to the chapel. It is more that, for a lot of these Americans, gay marriage is not something they spend a lot of time worrying about, or even thinking about.

For younger respondents, this shift may in part be cultural: the result of coming of age in an era when openly gay people have become increasingly common in popular entertainment and in public life, not to mention in their own families or social circles. Familiarity in this case breeds relative comfort, or perhaps just lack of interest.

The other reason, members of both parties said, is that the argument over gay marriage seems beside the point at a time when the country is facing a severe economic crisis, remains on edge for another domestic terrorist attack and has just inaugurated its first black president.

“Right now, people are not concerned about issues like gay marriage because they are concerned about the economy,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York, told reporters in Albany after meeting with Republican members of the state Senate, who are opposing legislation to legalize gay marriage.

Mr. Giuliani explained that he opposed gay marriage " while supporting civil unions " but that he did not think it made much sense for Republicans to be harping on the issue if the party had any serious interest in returning to power.

“The Republican party does best organizing itself around economic issues and issues of national security,” said Mr. Giuliani, 64, who ran for president last year and is now thinking about running for governor of New York.

The difference in attitudes among age groups has been noted by Republicans at a time when party leaders are engaged in discussion about what policies and messages can best help them regain some of the power they have lost to Democrats. Some conservative leaders said that unless something happened to reverse the trend, it would simply be a matter of time " perhaps as many as 10 years, perhaps as few as 3 " before opposition to gay marriage would get traction in only a few parts of the country.

In this latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 42 percent of all respondents said they supported gay marriage, compared with 22 percent in March 2004. By contrast, 18 percent of Republicans supported gay marriage, while 49 percent said they opposed any kind of recognition of gay unions. The electorate at large seems to be moving while Republican base voters are not, a challenge to any Republican seeing to win his or her party’s nomination in 2012.

“It’s a problem,” said Mr. Schmidt said in an interview.

This was reflected in a recent conversation with Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor of Minnesota, a social conservative who opposes gay marriage and is considering a run for president.

Asked if he thought, given recent events, that Republicans were making a political mistake in emphasizing gay issues, Mr. Pawlenty, who is 48, responded: “I think it’s an important issue for our conservative voters.” But he notably did not dwell on the subject.

Before joining Mr. McCain’s ill-fated campaign, Mr. Schmidt was known in Republican circles for arguing that the party needed to move away from social issues to be successful; he managed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for governor in California.

“The Republican Party is shrinking,” he said. “One of the reasons it is shrinking is because there are large demographics in this country that view the party as intolerant or not relevant to them. Politics is about addition.”

For Republicans, the complications of this issue could very well focus on the very first state on the nominating calendar in 2012, Iowa. The courts there overturned a law banning gay marriage earlier this month, and social conservatives " who are a strong force in Republican politics in Iowa " are already organizing to try to amend the state Constitution to restore the ban.

Should developments continue apace, Republican candidates for president are going to be pressed to support that effort, and to spend time talking about an issue that could undercut their appeal to more centrist voters in a general election.

Will that matter? As Mr. Schmidt noted, the winner of the Iowa Republican caucus is hardly assured of becoming the party’s nominee; Mr. McCain lost there in 2008. Still, he said it would be difficult for any Republican candidate to win his party’s nomination in 2012 without opposing gay marriage.

“I think it’s likely that all our candidates will be against gay marriage,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But the point is this: There should be a de-emphasis on this issue. This is not the most important issue facing the country. In states where this has been made legal, there has been a collective yawn from the citizenry in a lot of these states. The party should focus on disagreeing with the president on the axis of issues that we agree on

Does that mean they're willing to forego their religious' beliefs for politics? I used to think it was one and the same. LOL

One does have to bear in mind that idea T.S.Eliot offered. The idea that to go against accepted conventions is an exercise of the will. Whatever act is realised, and there are some bonnie babes in the record of which I will not speak, is not for its own sake but to prove that the conscious will can overcome the forces set against it. A sort of petulance.

The pleasures to be found in the victory of the conscious will over the authority of the traditions and manners of society are preferable to any other kind of pleasure for certain temperments. In a society where the will is of supreme value, as in societies which allow advertising on TV which, of course, encourages the rampant will, such temperments are bound to be more common and more acceptable.

I suppose conservatives, in lieu of daring to come out against advertising on TV as they benefit from it, are simply accepting the social forces that have been unleashed. Their best bet is to lie low and wait for the liberal agenda to screw up as it cannot avoid doing once it gets the bit between its teeth.

It's political compromising and gay conservative writers like Andrew Sullivan pointing out that they are losing more than they are gaining denying gay marriage. When they each looked down at their foot and saw the bullet wound, they realized they can't walk on one leg.