Don't ask

That Pentagon policy of "don't ask, don't tell" from the 90s is still in force. By itself, not such a problem, but the military is still discharging servicemen who are "outed" somehow, sometimes through their own inadvertence.

The policy isn't just silly, but since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, actually harmful. Gay service members with critical skills are being discharged when they're needed most. In some cases, the Defense Department rehires them as civilians. But still -

Here's Deroy Murdock in the Boston Herald explaining what's wrong with this policy. The Pentagon has released a new report on this subject. There's no real excuse for this. If serving in a conservative Muslim country means gay soldiers can't be open about it, the solution is a little discretion. Female soldiers have to observe some rules along these lines as well.

Murdock is right: it's a Clinton-era relic, like Monica's kneepads and other talismans of 90s frivolity. "Don't ask, don't tell" can't be defended.

Before there was gay marriage ...

... there was Rudolph and his shiny red nose.*

I'm supposed to start commenting on ... politics ... I guess ... ugh. Right now, the primary voters are in their final swoons. The Ron Paul silliness seems to have peaked but not disappeared - yet (via Megan McArdle's must-read blog). The Obama swoon hasn't maxed out yet. But pretty soon, they're gonna have to get serious and settle down with Responsible Girls and Fellas, so let them have their final weeks of free love. We'll wait til we're married. But read the always-sensible advice from Peggy Noonan too.

Happy new year!
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* It's scary what you can find on Wikipedia - some people, it seems, have far too much free time on their hands :)

Mahmoud, we hardly knew ye

He stayed too long, but not long enough really ....

SNL does it again, this time with Andy Samberg's love-note music video to Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the video was yanked from the Web because of a copyright clearance snafu.

Ahmadinejad spoke in September at the United Nations and at Columbia University in New York in person and at the National Press Club in Washington DC by teleconference. See these summaries here and here.

Columbia, like so many universities these days, disgraced itself. Or maybe, it was a superb opportunity to let the students and New Yorkers off campus to show up the ridiculous administrators and faculty. The students and New Yorkers acquitted themselves well.

Not enough Said, I guess. For a wackily surreal sidebar on Ahmadinejad's visit and more evidence of the decline of American universities under the reign of political correctness, check this out. Anti-colonialism apparently now includes beating up gay men. I guess none of these bozos have ever read any medieval Arabic or Persian love poetry.

Is it just me, or is something completely off the rails here?

Which leads to the final comment, from funny man Andy Borowitz.

POSTSCRIPT: It's not all bad news from the Middle East. Some Israeli doctors are examining Iraqi children in Jordan for heart conditions that can be treated at the Wolfson Medical Center in Israel. See here.

Gay marriage: A better way

I just read this very interesting article in USNews on the change in tactics supporters of gay marriage are pursuing as they face strong opposition to court-mandated changes to marriage law. Marriage and parenthood are humanity's oldest institutions and tend to be very conservative in their evolution, so the opposition to such change isn't surprising. Binah is not gay, so this posting is friendly and free advice from an outsider.

There are two essential flaws in how supporters have pushed gay marriage, one in political method and the other in conception and language. The first is the more obvious one. By using the courts to change existing marriage laws, activists have created another type of widely-resented judicial activism, commonly and correctly viewed as another case of judges overstepping their bounds of office. The best response to this mistake has been to get gay marriage institutionalized through state legislatures, which is certainly superior in every way.

But there's another problem, and that's the gay activists' use of concepts and language illegitimately borrowed from the civil rights movement and its long pre-history stretching back to abolitionism. This is the discrimination/equality lens. But that's not the way the large majority of Americans (including most Democrats) view this issue, which is why they're overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage. They view it as a dichotomy between tolerated private behavior versus a legally-endorsed public institution. That's how most people can tolerate gays and gay sexual behavior, have gay friends, and yet not want gay marriage.

My advice: gay marriage activists should pursue this issue in state legislatures, make the case for the legally-recognized public institution, and drop the court-based civil-rights approach. This approach will be slower at first and take more work. But it will stick in the long run, because it will build broad public support and sympathy and remove (in most people's minds, anyway) any sense of threat to heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage.

LATER: Economist Thomas Sowell points out the dishonesty in the use of terms like "ban" on gay marriage -- when has gay marriage ever been recognized to begin with? Was it recognized before, then "banned" somewhere? This is more of the illegitimate civil-rights-style language that just confuses the issue and turns off most people. Attempts by the media to promote this language just turn off people even more. Sowell's argument also reflects the dichotomy I pointed out: toleration of private behavior is one thing, public-legal recognition quite another.