FMA, Politics, and Propriety

I was going to leave the Federal Marriage Amendment controversy alone, having already poked that hornets’ nest last summer. But the Washington Post pushed me into a response this evening, with one of the most deliberately blind, partisan editorials I’ve ever seen from their usually analytical and pragmatic (if left-wing) editorial board.

I actually agree with their introductory premise — that a ban on gay “marriages” doesn’t belong in the U.S. Constitution. At base, it’s a social/societal issue rather than a question of governmental structure; the only similar issue addressed in the Constitution is Prohibition — and we see how well that worked out. In an ideal world, it would be completely unnecessary.

But let’s be honest here. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, meant to do essentially the same thing as the FMA, is likely to be declared unconstitutional sooner or later. It seems on its face to violate the “full faith and credit” clause requiring states to accept “the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings” of every other state, and I’d bet the main reason it hasn’t been challenged yet is simply for lack of a sympathetic-enough test case.

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Blogules again?

Yes, a link dump is a cheap way of highlighting another date on that little calendar over to the left. I’m allowed to be cheap, though. So…

• New face #1 on the blogroll: Ben Wright, an Ottawan and Wake Forest alum who splits his stuff between Occasionally Wright for personal/political and The Net Files for sports (primarily hockey and ACC basketball). That seems like a reasonable solution to the whiplash I probably give some of you guys, careening from sports to travel to politics with nothing but <hr> tags for transitions.
• New face #2: Pete Holiday, Bama student and one of the evil geniuses behind Fanblogs.com. Welcome, guys.
• Yet another soccer book: Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, by Andrei S. Markovits and Steven Hellerman. This one is considerably more academic than the previous two I mentioned, but the reward matches the effort required to read it. Certainly every four years we get a spate of big-media columns pontificating about why soccer hasn’t made it here; Markovits, a naturalized American citizen and professor at Michigan, decided to take a more systematic, sociological approach to this question. The result is not only a comparison of the superficial, modern-day aspects of the game with popular American sports, but a historical analysis of how the “Big Three-and-a-Half” got to their dominant position in American society (and what that position really means) versus how soccer blew its chance(s). Some post-read Googling also led me to his recent Harvard presentation on European anti-Americanism, which is also definitely worth the effort to read.
• And continuing on the political beat, what does President Bush’s Harvard Business School MBA really mean? Thomas Lifson, who both studied and taught there, addresses it in the American Thinker, a new Web journal. It’s a very good breakdown not only of what the MBA itself means (hint: you can’t just buy it with a name and money), but of how the writer believes Bush has applied what he learned toward his mission as President.

For my opinion on the Marcus Vick situation, scoot on over to Fanblogs for my initial story and yesterday’s followup. In short: I’m disgusted.

A Word From Our Sponsor

And now for something completely different.

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(’80s singer guy: Real Men of Genius)

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So crack open an ice cold Bud Light, Mr. Control-Alt-Delete Inventor. And if the cash register locks up trying to check you out… well, you know what to do.

(Guy: Mr. Control-Alt-Delete In-ve-e-e-en-toooor)

Anheuser Busch, Redmond, Washington.

London/Dublin Day 9: St. James's Gate to Short Pump in 37 Hours (Part 2)

UPDATE: Visitors from Off Wing, click here. Thanks for visiting!

With my hotel located all of three minutes from Gatwick’s South Terminal, I could have slept in on Sunday morning before my noon flight back to the States, and started to readjust my body clock to Eastern Standard Time. Unfortunately, I was fully awake by 7:45 — or 2:45 AM EST. Whoops. So I showered, completed repacking, loaded my red Rover, and decided to do a little bit of controlled-environment cruising down the two-lane road behind my hotel, which ran parallel to the west side of the Gatwick perimeter fence. After about fifteen minutes of the game of “Chicken” the English call rural driving (old bus skills served me well again, using the passenger-side mirror to keep that side’s tires just barely on the blacktop’s edge), my desire for adventure was sated, and I pointed the car back toward LGW.

• Point 1: The road approach to Gatwick South Terminal sucks almost as much as the road approach to Heathrow. The train station is the primary means of access for good reason.
• Point 2: If you follow the signs to the Europcar rental-car dropoff, but you wind up in a small, ugly parking lot almost nestled underneath the terminal access-road bridge with very few signs, you’re actually right where you need to be.
• Point 3: Parking an RHD car between two other cars, particularly in a typically-narrow English parking space, is scary.
• Point 4: If you, as an American, ask the rental-company attendants if you can just leave the car at the end of the lane and not try to turn into a parking space, your accent will betray your national origin to them. Given that knowledge, they’d much rather let you do so (and park the car themselves) than fill out the paperwork involved when yet another bloody Yank clips the corners of two other vehicles trying to park. For once, being perceived as a stupid American is to your advantage; use it.

Car dumped, I made my way to the American Airlines desk, where I used my newly-acquired Gold frequent flyer status to blow past the 60 people in the coach line and step into the business- and first-class check-in line. After a short Orange Terror Alert interrogation, I got boarding passes, checked my bag while most other passengers were still in line (MAJOR tactical error — read on), did the metal-detector routine, and returned to Gatwick Mall for McDonald’s and an hour or so of vegetating before proceeding to the gate.

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London/Dublin Day 8: St. James's Gate to Short Pump in 37 Hours (Part 1)

It never quite feels right to complain about my European adventures around friends who haven’t had the chance to go yet — the word “spoiled” comes to mind. Still, I don’t know whether it was the short length of each winter day at that latitude (less than seven hours of sun, with sunset around 3:45 PM), the security incident Tuesday night, or what, but something about this trip had me ready to wind it up by mid-day Thursday. I was ready to return to a room all to myself, city navigation that didn’t require checking a map and guessing the street’s new name on each block, and newspapers with lots of pretty pictures and zero intellectual challenge (well, maybe not that). In short, I was Europed out.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the trip; I did, as I hope this series has conveyed. But by Saturday morning, my readiness to return home, combined with my normal anticipation for the start of any roadairtrip, made the day-long wait for my 5:40 PM first flight seem far too long. There wasn’t much that could be done about that, though, so I locked my bags up at the Brewery Hostel (Gwen’s family having taken a train trip that would bring them — and the apartment key — back late in the evening) and trudged off for a final round of sightseeing.

My mindset appears to have influenced my perception of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because the notes I punched into my iBook at lunch just read “pretty good as such things go.” One point of interest is that parts of the main organ there can be traced back to, again, Handel and The Messiah — though it’s been restored and renovated multiple times, it is still the same instrument that he played in rehearsals for the premiere.

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