Archive for June 1, 2009

Don’t Let Dick Cheney Fool You: Parsing his Remarks on Gay Marriage

By now, many of you will have heard that, apparently, for some reason, Dick Cheney is suddenly in favor of gay marriage:

I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don’t support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis… But I don’t have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that.

This doesn’t make him “to the left” of Obama. By his own language, he’s against a federal statute extending marital benefits to gay couples, which Obama supports. Don’t let Cheney trick you into thinking he’s outflanked the President.

Also, don’t forget the Bush legacy: for eight years, Cheney’s President used gay marriage as a wedge issue to divide the nation, and scare recalcitrant voters into his waiting grasp. If Cheney does support gay marriage – as he’s intimated to us before – then he clearly has never cared enough to do anything about it.

In Comparing PUMA Reactions to Sarah Palin and Sonia Sotomayor, the Expected Hypocrisy Emerges

For some time now, the PUMAs – those female Hillary supporters who let their bitterness, hate, and (yes!) racism trump reason during last year’s presidential election – have been free to simultaneously pursue their twin goals of (1) boosting women politicians, without regard to their qualifications, and (2) trashing Barack Obama. Hitherto, these goals have never been in conflict, and in fact they’ve dovetailed nicely. Hence the PUMAs’ bizarre defense of Sarah Palin as the new Hillary, apparently blind to her contempt for Secretary Clinton, and everything she stands for.

All of that changed with President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. With their stated goal of backing any woman no-matter-what finally at cross purposes with their blind hatred of the President, it was an open question which impulse would carry the day.

Well, not really.

Unsurprisingly, the PUMAs have thrown their own gender, and their essentialist logic, straight under the bus, leaping to attack the Judge for her unclear record on abortion rights. As we’ve reported, this shouldn’t be a concern: both Obama and Sotomayor have used almost every legal code word in the book to indicate their twin support for the right to choose. But more importantly, it’s hilariously hypocritical. Sarah Palin, PUMA darling, is on the record opposing abortion in almost all cases:

I am pro-life. With the exception of a doctor’s determination that the mother’s life would end if the pregnancy continued. I believe that no matter what mistakes we make as a society, we cannot condone ending another life.

During the general election, this didn’t worry them in the slightest. Are we to expect that Judge Sotomayor’s relative silence on the issue is somehow more damning than an open and obvious hostility to the Roe right? No: the only thing they care about in Sotomayor’s nomination is that it comes to them with President Obama’s signature. And the only thing they ever cared about with Governor Palin is that she wasn’t Obama.

If we ever doubted it, it’s clear now: PUMAs are just ignorant, single-issue (“NOBAMA!”) partisan hacks. Good riddance. It’s going to be a pleasure when our steadingly increasing traffic finally eclipses their plummeting share.

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Notae benia: Towards the end of her post, Riverdaugher notes, “I haven’t read everything and I don’t claim to understand all of it anyway.” On this, and this alone, we should take her at her word. In her “article,” she pushes more than the usual legal falsehoods. Below, a short list:

• There is no case titled Webster v. Casey; Riverdaugher conflates Webster v. Reproductive Health Svcs. & the landmark casey, Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Contrary to her narrative, Webster was joined by both Kennedy and O’Connor, and in relevant part limited only state funding for non-therapeutic abortion.
• Her reference to Kennedy having to be convinced by O’Connor to save Roe probably refers to his legendary, secret switch from the anti- to pro-choice position in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which circumscribed certain elements of the choice right while simultaneously crafting novel justifications for upholding it’s remnant. Kennedy’s distaste for late-term abortion is no secret. However, he has twice flatly refused to overrule Roe, even if his opinions have gutted parts of it. As the author of the Casey compromise, there’s no reason to think he’d ever vote to destroy the right to choose in either the first or second trimester.
• Accordingly, her assertion that Roe is doomed (“Oh, right, they already have 5 votes to overturn Roe.”), is flatly wrong. Ditto the implication that, since Roe is a jurisprudential lame duck, pro-choice women don’t need a Democratic president. Let’s be clear on this point: if this seat was McCain’s to fill, as Riverdaughter and her ilk so desperately wanted, Roe would be presumptively dead. Her nemesis’ election is the only reason the right to choose will survive until 2012.

I’d add a line calling on Riverdaughter to correct her blatant falsehoods, or at least display a shred of journalistic integrity, somehow. But what’s the point?