Glenna's Blog

Gay activism’s newest front is social security benefits. Protesters and politicians are rallying in Hollywood because gay people can’t inherit their partner’s social security benefits when they die.

First: why do married people get to inherit each other’s social security benefits?

Second: this is why the gay rights movement sucks. They have located the absolute least compelling, most arcane aspect of anti-gay discrimination and are marching around bitching about it. This is worse than when they said adoption policy hurt their feelings.

This issue affects almost no one. Take all the gay people in America. Cut out the ones who aren’t “married” to someone of the same sex. Cut the remainder in half, because they will die before their partners do. Cut that number in half, because half of surviving spouses get bigger benefits than their spouses anyway. There: social security survivors benefits affect less than one quarter of gay people, a puny crowd to begin with, and that’s assuming social security even exists by the time most of us are old.

On top of that, the issue is not even emotional. It’s about money. Crass! These people might as well be Tea Partiers complaining about taxes.

Like I’ve said before, we’ve got to stop parading whiny grown ups and start exploiting children. It wouldn’t hurt to actually help gay kids too, for example by making schools teach gay history the same way they teach about other minority groups. And we should ask Obama to put a lesbian in the vacant Supreme Court seat. (Okay, I am not going to rally for that. But people who like to rally should!)

There is a new book out that blames World War I on the idiocy and cloisteredness of Europe’s monarchs. When I saw that the WSJ had reviewed it, I thought, “har har, I bet the reviewer was offended by its criticism of conservative authority figures.” I was correct.

The reviewer scorns the “popular mythology” that an arms race made war in Europe inevitable “unless power could be wrested in time from the crowned heads who so ill-deserved it.” His alternative arguments are not compelling. For example, he believes that “it was not the fact of an arms race that produced World War I but rather Germany’s unwillingness to rest until it had won that race.” Don’t all races involve contestants who are unwilling to rest?

Anyway, I can’t complain about newspapers having political biases. That’s normal. But do they have to be so formulaic about it? I can’t predict Gossip Girl plot twists; I should not be able to guess how random reviewers will feel about history books I haven’t read.

A few months ago Whole Foods’ CEO wrote an op-ed about how to improve America’s healthcare. He said that instead of the government subsidizing coverage, it should ”revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation” to the uninsured.

Now he has an even more innovative idea: deeper employee discounts (up to 10 points extra) for workers with low BMI’s.

The stated goal of saving money on health insurance plans can’t be true. It assumes there are a significant number of employees who:

1. are fat

and

2. do not want to lose weight

and

3. would want to lose weight if it meant saving $5 per week on groceries.

Whole Foods’ real motivation is to get fat employees to quit, or not apply in the first place, without drawing charges of discrimination. The plan embarrasses fat people by making them use a different-colored discount card and signals to them that they’ll never be promoted.

Savor this moment. Think about where you are so that you can tell your children one day. Because legal history is being made. Just like judicial activism defined the baby boomers’ constitutional vision, judicial transparency will define ours. And it’s all thanks to huffy op-eds that were published this weekend.

The anti-gay side in Perry v. Schwarzenegger didn’t want the trial webcast and the gay side did. The Supreme Court sided with the anti-gays, so now liberal journalists are refuting its argument. And instead of dissecting the logic of the ruling, they’re lashing out against the entire concept of shrouded judging.

The Atlantic: “why can’t the American people watch what our biggest and most important judges do at work?” Slate: “the Supreme Court’s decision to stay the broadcast […] betrays a deep ambivalence about the same humble American voter whose very rights the court purports to be defending.” LA Times: “If matters of social change are going to be debated in the courts, we all should get to view the process — and, through our reactions, to participate in it.”

Just last week the “cameras in the courts” movement was a populist idea that the populace didn’t care about. Stuck. But because the Supreme Court’s recent anti-camera ruling just happened to hurt Team Liberal, now the Liberals are pro-camera. Judicial transparency has found a constituency which blogs.

Brown v. Board was about racial equality but sparked a war over “judicial activism.” The gay marriage case looks similar: a cultural issue inspiring pundits to pay attention to a totally different legal theory issue. I’m psyched. The conservative justices probably ruled against the cameras because they are grossed out by gays. Now they’ll have to defend judicial elitism—their lifestyle, the cornerstone of their identity!—nonstop for the rest of their lives.

To help myself feel open-minded, I often read right wing cultural criticism. Unfortunately I perceive most of it as insane, which throws my open-mindedness into question. But in the past few days I’ve found two rational right wing essays:

How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool shows that we vilify adult-teenager sex much more now than we did even ten years ago, and pegs the trend to anti-clericalism.

Average Janes damns the mainstream fem blogs (Slate’s XX Factor and Salon’s Broadsheet) while keeping hope alive for fem blogging in general.

“Men have written great prose about fast cars. They have turned boxing, which is pretty dumb, into a metaphor for the human condition. It’s a stretch to take baseball as seriously as some writers do, and yet Bart Giamatti pulled it off beautifully. Why shouldn’t we give the same credit to women’s more mindless pursuits—even fashion and celebrity gossip?”

If Obama doesn’t fight against every American lesbian’s quest for health insurance, swing state voters will think this photo is real.

Karen Golinski works as a lawyer for the 9th Circuit. After HR told her she couldn’t add her wife to her insurance, Alex Kozinski—the circuit’s chief judge—cleared up the rule and ordered HR to process her form. It was just an internal administrative snafu, not a contested law suit, so HR had no problem executing Kozinski’s order. But then Barack Obama intercepted the lesbian insurance form, running it in for a touchdown!

Seriously. The Obama administration, acting through the Office of Personnel Management, forbade Blue Cross Blue Shield from insuring Golinski’s wife. Now Kozinski has ordered Obama to back off, framing the issue in terms of separation of powers, which is the judicial style of calling someone Hitler.

Obama’s coming off not only as mean but as stupid. Of all the lesbians in America, he picks on one who works as a lawyer and whose name rhymes with the judge deciding the case?

Anyway, I think I speak for all law school graduates when I say it is AWESOME to watch the judiciary and executive square off. Law v. Order isn’t on every day. Usually when the president shirks judges, he pretends he’s not, for example by getting John Yoo to write up a weaselly legal memo. And even when he’s obviously contradicting what a judge ordered, the judge doesn’t get to sass him right back. He has to wait for someone to sue about it, then the case makes its way up… This is different because Kozinski is operating as an administrator—a boss standing up for his employees—but because he’s also a judge he has the power to say what the law is.

Unfortunately for married lesbians, Kozinski’s only power is to say what the law is. The executive is the one who actually tells people what to do. If Obama is serious about keeping his anti-gay marriage record spotless (it seems like he is) then he can just scrounge up a technical reason why Kozinski doesn’t have authority here. Golinksi will then have to file a law suit, taking forever, wasting money, etc.

Lately I keep hearing people throw around the term “fact check” in a smug way. Jon Stewart “fact checked” Sean Hannity; Justice Kennedy was within his rights to “fact check” a high school newspaper story. Apparently the term “fact checking” is a sacred cow—that’s why people are tempted to use it incorrectly, as in both those instances. They sound ridiculous to me, because I know fact checking doesn’t matter.

(Disclosure: I worked as a pro bono fact checker for four months and did not enjoy it.)

There are two types of people who influence policy in this country. The first group is experts. Experts get their info by reading academic articles and researching their own. They rely less on newspapers to form policy; when they do, they check up on the data themselves.

The second group of people who influences policy is idiots. Idiots write handwritten letters to their Senators and idiots boycott and protest. And idiots believe what they want to believe. No matter how many facts a fact checker checks, idiots will misunderstand all of them.

The remainder of the population, including you and me, has zero influence over policy. For us, newspapers are entertainment. A serious form of entertainment, certainly; more cerebral than playing pinball, graver than watching Glee. But still, entertainment. We feel more satisfied—more entertained—if we believe the newspapers we read are factual. But if they’re not perfectly factual, either we’ll never know, we’ll let it slide, or we’ll switch to another form of entertainment.

The New York Times could tell us that Goldman Sachs pays Osama bin Laden’s medical bills, unemployment just fell to 4% thanks to a benevolent Wal-Mart hiring drive, and Barack Obama had an abortion. It wouldn’t matter.

RI’s republican governor vetoed 25 bills today. In so doing he:

• prevented long term domestic partners from arranging each other’s funerals
• protected school officials’ right to surveil students via GPS
• blocked the formation of a Green Jobs Task Force
• kept prisoners in jail who’d been acquitted of the probation violation that landed them there
• defended his power to fill a vacated senate seat himself instead of putting it up for election
• maintained the foreclosure process’s ease and swiftness

Meanwhile, New York’s democratic governor failed to persuade the democrat-controlled senate to vote on his signature issue, gay marriage. The virility gap between democrats and republicans yawns.

Typical phrasing by the Times:

Democrats control 59 seats, meaning they need at least one Republican to join them if they are to proceed without employing a procedural shortcut that could cause havoc in the Senate.

A more precise version would be:

Democrats control enough seats to pass the bill. However, the Republicans may block it by persuading Democrats to support their ideas instead, or by employing a procedural tactic that would cause havoc in the Senate.

Reporters don’t put it that way because they correctly assume:

• Republicans don’t have ideas.
• Democrats don’t have spines.

Am I going to Hell?

It’s common knowledge that pro-war propaganda weaseled into the New York Times and the Washington Post in early 2003, but did you realize it also tainted NBC workplace dramas? I’ve been watching the West Wing episodes from that period—mid-season 4—and it’s all about how goshdarnit we got to put our foot down about “freedom from tyranny.” Some lines:

“A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for!”

“Frederick the Great told his generals, to defend everything is to defend nothing… I don’t know what that means.”

“Congratulations folks, we got ourselves a doctrine!”

It would be superclever if five episodes later all the characters start saying stuff like “remember how glib we were about war before we had any experience with it?” and then two or three of them commit suicide. But I know that’s probably not going to happen, because The West Wing won a best drama Emmy for that season.