wife meets binary.

Life with me inevitably means conversations like this.

"How many bytes in a megabyte? A thousand?"
"1024 times 1024."
"Okay, wow, that is so random."
"It's not random. It's two to the tenth."
"Okay, bedtime now."

 She did know what she was in for, at least.

back to work, slackers

We had a lovely holiday season here at the Snugglehaus. On Christmas Eve we went to St. Gregory's to watch a family we're friends with be in the Christmas pageant. (The 3-year old was the best sheep ever.) Of course, since it's St. Gregory's, the pageant is different every year, there's a script and choreography and varied kinds of singing, and of course they alternate years with the different versions of Jesus' birth (Luke's and Matthew's). Then we were off to Dessert Night elsewhere in the city, and then we were cooked.

On Christmas we got the boy back around noonish, and opened presents. We spread his larger presents over the twelve days leading up to Christmas, which encourages actually playing with them as their opened. I got various nice useful things; Anna got a boatload of ukulele accessories from her family Secret Santa, and I got her a ukulele. I had hoped the ukulele would be a surprise, but she had said she wanted one, I'm the resident string instrument expert, and I'm kind of predictable in that this is exactly the sort of situation where I will buy her a present.

J got a full set of Star Wars Family Car Decals, so now our two back doors have adorable banthas on them.

The boy has been challenging at times recently, which I think is manifesting the half-year pattern: half a year of turbulence as he struggles to make a developmental leap, followed by half a year of cruising as he flexes new skills and cognitive abilities. He's been reliably on that cycle, and it's been a very smooth 6 months overall, so I suppose we're due. Given the level of sturm und drang we can already get at age 9, the teenage years are looking a little daunting. He's a loving, compassionate little human, and we'll figure it out.

At just about any tech job, the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year's is largely a loss. Half the company goes on vacation, which makes it hard for the remaining half to accomplish much; you have long deploy blackouts, not wanting to risk production outages during the holidays, which are customer-visible and also short-staffed (see above re: vacations). Years ago I stopped taking the holidays off, first because holiday travel is miserable, but second because workplaces become largely indifferent to whether and how long I show up in the office during that time, so it's not like I'm Bob Cratchit, toiling away while everyone else relaxes into the holidays. (Larger companies will often just shut the office entirely for the two weeks of Christmas to New Year's; nicer ones will do so without requiring you to take vacation days for it.)

Work has been unfortunate, if educational in a character-building sense, and that's probably all I should say about it for now.

We've added yet a few more stuffed animals to the household. We already had so many! But there's a specific kind of stuffed beaver that's a family institution, and Anna couldn't resist a pair of badgers from Ikea. I think we need a moratorium.

And, as always, being married is the easy part. Nice work, if you can get it. =)

surfacing!

Wednesday night I went to the local YMCA, which we joined a while back. It turns out that compared to an unlit, cold running route full of traffic lights, a treadmill is just fine.

I'm working a fair bit, trying to give work its due after a few months of non-work chaos. That's going well, although our system has been in meltdown for a few weeks. I feel like I should be able to fix it, but I actually can't, and it's hard to let go of that and go write code for the new and improved version, instead of trying to get the current version working. It's a terrible time for our team lead to be quitting: the boss thinks we can hire a replacement before the end of the year, which means I'll consider us lucky to find someone before March (he's often a little optimistic about hiring, and in general, hiring mostly stops during the holidays). My fellow SREs voiced my fears by pointing out that when the team lead leaves, one natural choice for at least an interim team lead would be the other senior engineer, which is...me. I hate meetings and I don't know anything about video, but hey, it could work.

Married life is going well in Week 5, its cold iron grip generously offset with snuggles and head-petting. Ain't nothing boring about it, that's for sure.

Hanukkah is coming! Have some cute Jewish boys singing excellent a cappella:


The best part for me is that the description says, "Feat. Big Bang Theory's Mayim Bialik!", when in fact those of us of a certain age remember that Mayim Bialik starred in her own TV series, Blossom. Like most of us, she's much hotter now at age 35 and not dressed in horrible early-90s clothing. Somewhere in there, she got a Ph.D. in neuroscience, which of course makes her even hotter.

No real rain yet! Someday, though.

just married

Anna and I got married on Saturday. So that's a thing. We're honeymooning, which means lots of eating and staring off into space and reading novels, and not so much with the brilliant coherent essay-writing.

At some point my friends pointed out that our anniversary is Guy Fawkes Day, that most twisted of British holidays, which we would never have heard of if not for Alan Moore's V For Vendetta (which you must go read right now, if you haven't). So that's entertaining.

The guest book didn't get put out, so we don't have an exact count, but it was about 170 people. It was a Zen Buddhist ceremony, which is funny because there are no Buddhist weddings outside the West: they're typically either civil matters, or handled by a more visceral local religion, like Shinto in Japan. This is part of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, though, so here, we have Zen weddings. Our teacher did the honors, I sang the Magnetic Fields' "Book of Love" as Anna came up the aisle, and we had a first dance (I hate dancing) just so ninjas could interrupt and attack us. Me, Anna, and J successfully fought them off. It was awesome. No video of the ninjas, I don't think, but there are some photos that I'll put up soon.

Our witnesses were both named Ann, so mine was the Best Ann and hers was the Ann of Honor.

Before the vows, Anna and I each had a chance to say something: Anna said many funny things about the unlikelihood of her ever getting married (e.g. during the toasts, the Ann of Honor said, "It's a cold day in hell, and somewhere, pigs are flying"). That warmed up the crowd for mine, where I started by saying that before I met her, my life was a friendless, meaningless void. With, what, 100 of my friends watching? Very silly.

The wedding gave me a lot to think about in how I and others perceive me. For one thing, I'm struck by how surprised people were. I guess I don't pay a whole lot of attention to how much and in what ways I'm a private person, or what I do or don't share with different people. Apparently, when Anna and I started dating, someone advised her to be cautious, because they hadn't seen anything that indicated I was interested in or particularly capable of returning deep emotional connection. That's pretty wacky, given the decades I've spent learning and experiencing those deep emotions. It's not like I'm hiding or anything; I guess I just haven't found a reason or useful way to bring my deep sentimentality into everyday conversation.

Later, a woman from our dojo said, "I didn't know you had it in you", meaning the comic timing of what I said during the ceremony. I responded gracefully, but I was taken aback, because honestly, I'm pretty funny and the timing of my delivery is usually excellent. I thought about my relationship with her over the years, and I realized that when I've made jokes, her response often indicates she doesn't quite know what to make of me, so I've toned everything down around her. Maybe I shouldn't? Hard to say.

I guess that kind of sharing is what I wanted for the wedding: to invite a bunch of people I know in all different kinds of ways, and bring everyone together for this one focal moment of standing up and showing ourselves. The two most common comments were "Amazing ceremony" and "Wow, you have incredible friends." That's pretty much what I wanted to hear.

Steve came all the way from Chile! And brought me a bottle of Mistral Nobel pisco, so I can share the, uh, "joy" of pisco with everyone here. (That's the good stuff, but when I was drinking it straight on ice so I could actually taste it, all the Chileans looked startled and repeatedly asked if I didn't want to mix it with some Coke or something. I like it, mostly, but it can be an acquired taste.)

J was part of the ceremony too, and I think it did something to cement for him the commitment of our little family: he's been looking forward to it for a long time, and I perceived a shift in our relationship afterward, where he seemed a bit more relaxed and I got a long, long hug goodbye when he went to school Monday morning.

The weirdest thing about getting married is that there was this huge crowd of 170 people, and now it's just us. It's so...quiet.

cold feet

I must take a moment to fret. Here's a true story.

"Hey, I see the container for French basil. Do we have a container for California basil?"
"I...might have thought it was redundant?"
"What? They're completely different. Here, smell."
"Um...okay."
"See? Completely different."
"Uh-huh."
"California basil is drier. The French has this citrus accent."
"Uh-huh."

I mean...what?

Is marriage really advisable under these circumstances? To someone who can't tell the difference between French and California basil? I am distressed.

Excuse me, I think I have the vapors.

maybe you can help me out

I had this conversation on Facebook back on April 8th:

Dear women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people: You know the Republican Party despises you, right? As in, doesn't respect you enough to tell you so to your face? As in, it will always, always, always end up screwing you over by working to take away your rights and any public services that might help you, for the benefit of industry and oligarchs, even if they told you they wouldn't?

One way in which I've found the Tea Party to be a breath of fresh air is that they've at least been pretty up-front about their hatred. That carries its own very serious problems and brings out the worst in voters, but it has the feel of suppressed urges being laid out on the table for everyone to have to acknowledge.

A friend responded:

I don't buy that the Republican Party "despises" non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people. What I do buy is that the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party has drastically different expectations of how society should be structured, and that those expectations are not being met in the same way they were, say, 75 years ago. Their frame has virtually no overlap with the average liberal frame, such that their fighting/talking points come across as jibberish to a non-ultra-conservative, or in this case that they "despise" those groups.

Me:

That's a very generous, not to say politically correct, way of looking at it. That's useful for understanding how conservatives see themselves, but it strikes me as being of the same school as the media's "We'll report both sides, and who are we to judge?". I admit I'm making a value judgement, and "despise" is a strong word, when maybe "fear and disdain" would suffice. When the "frame" from 75 years ago, which they're trying to enact today, says that blacks and Latinos should have difficulty voting, or that women shouldn't have to be paid an equal wage, or that blue-collar (hence lower-income) workers shouldn't be protected from workplace hazards...is that treating those people as full and equal human beings? The Republican Party, as a governing entity, constantly says through actions and often through words, "I don't consider you a full member of society because of your race/gender/sexuality/income. You do not deserve the full protections and rights that others do." If devaluing someone's humanity isn't despising them, then I'm not sure what is.

It's an interesting question, and really at the core of the divisions in American society, and our mainstream culture's painful addiction to what Paul Krugman calls the "cult of balance":

Think about what's happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating -- offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent -- because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

Krugman once said that if one political party declared the Earth was flat, the headlines would read "Views Differ On Shape Of Earth". It really is that ludicrous.

We're so far from being willing to declare that even the most basic things are wrong (even factually, not just morally or ethically) and not just a difference of opinion that I'm starting to think that with the current media environment we could never even have managed desegregation.

Yet, nothing is simple. Same-sex marriage is alive and valid in six states plus D.C, which was unthinkable just a decade ago.

What do you think? I'm pretty harsh on the Republican Party (and by extension, its supporters) because I find its actions despicable. What's another way to look at it? How else do I interpret things?

maybe you can help me out

I had this conversation on Facebook back on April 8th:

Dear women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people: You know the Republican Party despises you, right? As in, doesn't respect you enough to tell you so to your face? As in, it will always, always, always end up screwing you over by working to take away your rights and any public services that might help you, for the benefit of industry and oligarchs, even if they told you they wouldn't?

One way in which I've found the Tea Party to be a breath of fresh air is that they've at least been pretty up-front about their hatred. That carries its own very serious problems and brings out the worst in voters, but it has the feel of suppressed urges being laid out on the table for everyone to have to acknowledge.

A friend responded:

I don't buy that the Republican Party "despises" non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people. What I do buy is that the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party has drastically different expectations of how society should be structured, and that those expectations are not being met in the same way they were, say, 75 years ago. Their frame has virtually no overlap with the average liberal frame, such that their fighting/talking points come across as jibberish to a non-ultra-conservative, or in this case that they "despise" those groups.

Me:

That's a very generous, not to say politically correct, way of looking at it. That's useful for understanding how conservatives see themselves, but it strikes me as being of the same school as the media's "We'll report both sides, and who are we to judge?". I admit I'm making a value judgement, and "despise" is a strong word, when maybe "fear and disdain" would suffice. When the "frame" from 75 years ago, which they're trying to enact today, says that blacks and Latinos should have difficulty voting, or that women shouldn't have to be paid an equal wage, or that blue-collar (hence lower-income) workers shouldn't be protected from workplace hazards...is that treating those people as full and equal human beings? The Republican Party, as a governing entity, constantly says through actions and often through words, "I don't consider you a full member of society because of your race/gender/sexuality/income. You do not deserve the full protections and rights that others do." If devaluing someone's humanity isn't despising them, then I'm not sure what is.

It's an interesting question, and really at the core of the divisions in American society, and our mainstream culture's painful addiction to what Paul Krugman calls the "cult of balance":

Think about what's happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating -- offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent -- because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

Krugman once said that if one political party declared the Earth was flat, the headlines would read "Views Differ On Shape Of Earth". It really is that ludicrous.

We're so far from being willing to declare that even the most basic things are wrong (even factually, not just morally or ethically) and not just a difference of opinion that I'm starting to think that with the current media environment we could never even have managed desegregation.

Yet, nothing is simple. Same-sex marriage is alive and valid in six states plus D.C, which was unthinkable just a decade ago.

What do you think? I'm pretty harsh on the Republican Party (and by extension, its supporters) because I find its actions despicable. What's another way to look at it? How else do I interpret things?

phew. hi.

Hi! I have a blog! I also have a billion other things, like work and Zen retreats, and holy crap I asked Anna to marry me and now I guess we should get married to avoid it being all awkward. My little brother the farmer was very nice and found a week they could come that didn't mean us getting married in the dead of winter, so now we just need 3 other entities to have the same day free seven months from now and we'll be good to go.

Our Zen teacher will do the honors. I asked her a couple years ago what she does for weddings, and she said it's up to the couple, as long as they say the Ten Precepts (to each other or the audience or both, I don't know). We have no idea what we're doing. In our different ways, neither of us has any idea what we might wear, and we need to talk to people who actually know things, about, um, yannow. Clothes, and stuff.

Speaking of Zen things, we just got back from our sangha's semi-annual retreat down in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Boulder Creek. This was my first retreat since October 2009, and while I've been sitting, all that time, sitting all day (in 35-minute periods with various breaks) is a different thing. Mostly it requires acceptance, in the broad sense that we struggle to explain. Yes, your knees are going to hurt, your back might hurt, anything else might hurt. Sesshin isn't something we do because it's fun; we do it because it's helpful to our practice, whose ultimate purpose is to end our and everyone else's suffering. We spend a lot of our time refusing to accept the realities of life, fighting our minds, often in very subtle ways. Usually I adjust pretty quickly, but it took about a day of sitting before I finally gave up and accepted that my body hurt. Then, of course, it hurt a whole lot less.

It was good, and important, to slow down for a bit, after this month of going full-tilt at work. I wasn't enjoying it, but I could have used another 5 days (the traditional full length for sesshin): I feel like two days barely makes a dent in the tension I built up over my time in Chile.

Then again, someone once asked the teacher Blanche Hartman what happens when we do zazen meditation. She said, "You can't possibly know."

I did get a bit closer to seeing all that tension and defensiveness. We can't let anything go if we can't find it. So I'm finally unwinding, maybe. We'll see. I probably won't narrate the process, because really, who cares?

One other notable thing, which I'll have to mull over and probably write about, was to see again the dissonance between how I see myself (withdrawn, lazy, disconnected) and how others see me, at least in the sangha (kind, helpful, listening). At some point I have to give some weight to everyone else's view of me. Because that's not terrifying or anything.

Tomorrow: back to work.

the kid's side of the story

J and I haven't had any conversation about the wedding yet. We still don't talk a whole lot even when I'm around: I make a point of hanging out with him some in the mornings while Anna makes breakfast, but he's 6 and not much for sitting around chatting. I was around for an awesome conversation about him being a bit jealous of me: he has a lot of insight into his feelings, and he's good at articulating them.

Anna told him we're getting married, though. J said:

1. Make sure it's on a Daddy day so he didn't have to come, and
2. Make sure we don't tell anyone so it can just be a secret.

Anna suspected that maybe his mental image of weddings wasn't quite accurate, and there turned out to be two concerns:

• He saw how many pictures were taken at a friend's wedding last year, and for the past while he's had this insane oh-my-god-they're-stealing-my-soul horror of having his picture taken. I tried taking his picture once, and he screamed and ran away and it took a few minutes to calm him down.
• He's afraid the food might be yucky (this has come up again).

I anticipate plain grilled cheese on the reception menu. In exchange for a promise that there only has to be one photo, of the three of us, he's willing to come to the wedding now. So that's nice.

Meanwhile, this afternoon he apparently decided to play Private Wedding--there's that "private" thing again, though the thing that got him on board was explaining that the wedding is a public ceremony to stand up and tell everyone we're a family--with a stuffed bear standing in for me, Mister Potus the platypus officiating, and the full population of other stuffed animals as the Audience. Everyone had a lovely time, although it seems likely we'll have to do it again with me present: Anna says with the stuffed bear instead of me, it just wasn't the same.

mawwiage.

As of Saturday night, Anna and I are engaged. We're aiming for October.

I decided sometime last year. I bought the ring in December, and it seemed like it was finally about time for us both, so I brought it with us to San Francisco last night, and asked her in the middle of the freezing cold dark windy rainstorm under the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts. Specifically, behind one of the columns, on account of the freezing cold wind.

It's an almond-wood ring because she doesn't really like metal rings, and it says "Say Yes" on the inside, which she did, and I hope she says yes every day, for a long time.

the new normal

A few weeks ago I finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which is an excellent book (if a little meandering). Among other things, its detailed description of growing up in the 60s and 70s gives me flashbacks to being a kid in the 80s.

I'd hate to oversimplify that time. Our memory lies, and nostalgia lurks in dark corners like a dormant virus, waiting to corrupt our experience of the present. I do think it was a less chaotic, freewheeling time, though, at least in retrospect. (Our view was just limited for how far things could go, sort of like we thought conservatism had reached its apogee of evil stupidity under Bush II, until we saw what came after.) We had reference points; not healthy or productive ones, but we knew where we stood, or thought we did, which made us feel almost as good. Our enemies and adversaries were easily-identified nation-states (remember when Libya mattered?). The order of the old world hadn't yet completely disintegrated. The nation was still arguing about Vietnam, a festival of recrimination we would continue until President Obama's election in 2008.

(Finally, no one cared what a candidate had done during the war, because mostly he was being a little kid in Indonesia.)

We had structure, we had defined roles and categories. Those are reassuring things; much like what we provide for/force upon children. The structure of the world limited and blinkered us as much as it supported. Like any culture, if you didn't fit the provided roles and categories, you were going to have trouble.

When I was a kid, if you had an earring in your right ear instead of your left, it meant you were gay. As for the kind of bizarre feminization implied at the time by having earrings in both ears...better not to speak of it. But that was it, that was the signal. I don't know if it was real or not, but in our childhood culture, it's not something anyone wanted to risk. (It could well have been real. Gay men have had to use such covert signals for centuries, to survive.) When I pierced my (left) ear in 1991, it wasn't exactly cutting edge, but it was also not universally accepted. Piercing the right ear in 1996 or so felt slightly edgy, probably the closest I've ever come to that hip state of social rebellion.

Can you imagine that kind of coded distinction from today's 10-year olds, born in 2000? They're far more likely to say "you're gay if you primarily like dating the same gender as you." It's not a thing for them. And it's not just us over-educated latte-sipping poofs in the coastal cities. This Slate article about Constance McMillen, the Mississippi high school senior who filed suit to be able to bring her girlfriend to the prom, contains this gem of a paragraph:

And Constance herself is the kind of young woman a state entirely mired in bigotry can't produce. Though she doesn't belong to a church, McMillen describes herself as an "open-minded Christian" and a strong believer in monogamy, which she expresses in a distinctly evangelical way. "Actually, I have a promise ring from my girlfriend, and I'm pretty sure that within the next year she's going to propose. Of course, we wouldn't get married until she's 18." One male student once asked McMillen's girlfriend, "How can you be redneck and gay at the same time?" which seems tantamount to proof that the woman in front of him had that figured out. McMillen would like to live in Los Angeles when she gets older, but that is due in part to many, many hours spent watching The L Word. Her girlfriend says she doesn't want to come because she can't hunt there.

Between that and a black President, no wonder the American right has completely lost its mind. Every month brings more evidence that the old world is passing away, the world of obvious enemies, and women and minorities who "knew their place." By 2050 if not before, we'll technically all be minorities. (Though probably not women. Not even in San Francisco.)

Ever since I was a kid, I have listened incredulously to my mom's stories of "dorm mothers" at all-female Smith College in the 60s, older women who watched over the students and enforced curfews and behavior. Decades before going to college, I absorbed that such a thing was absurd and impossible in my time. It only seemed more absurd when I went to college and visited Smith several times. In the 90s, at least, Smith had a circle-the-wagons mentality about men, a protectiveness of women for each other, as if the culture was dominated by 1500 of your ex-girlfriends, but only the ones who were still mad at you. Who needs dorm mothers when every girl has a posse of bodyguards (many of whom were bigger than me)?

Just as dorm mothers sound impossibly quaint to me, so must the earring-as-gay-identifier sound quaint to today's young people. It sounds quaint to me. The numbers agree: here's a breakdown of approval of gay marriage by state and age (click image for original website).

The red dots are people aged 18-29, and the blue dots are people over 65. It's a perfect correlation, with no exceptions: the older you are, the less likely you are to approve of gay marriage. So, it's a done deal: as my subculture started saying as America considered choosing its first post-Vietnam President, we're waiting for some people to die so life can move on. It's a harsh way to put it, but it's true. And yes, we'll still say that when we're old, even if we're the ones in the way.

There's no guarantee we won't backslide. We often think of history as inevitable, because we look at what happened, and we think. "Look! The past only happened in one way! And here's why! It had to have been that way." We're fantastically wrong: just like we don't know what will happen in the coming year or two, neither did anybody 50 or 100 or 3000 years ago. History is full of unrealized paths. Just because conservatives have eased up on hating gays in favor of hating immigrants and Muslims doesn't mean it won't come around again.

But the demographics look pretty awesome.

marriage in Chile

I don't read or watch the news here: lack of interest leads to being too lazy to work through the language. So I haven't followed the miners' story at all, except for headlines, occasional bits in English, or Chileans asking me if I've seen the latest thing about the miners. As you may or may not know, the entire country has been watching and sharing every detail of the experience, and it's been a big focal point of national unity. When the first miner was scheduled to be pulled out, at midnight on a weekday, people set alarms and got up to watch. And continued watching for hours. And then went to work in the morning.

One thing I did catch was this juicy tidbit: apparently one of the miners was greeted at the surface by his mistress, rather than his wife. And then I heard a rumor there was a third woman looking to visit him at the hospital.

There are inevitable North Americanisms in the reportage about this--things that just wouldn't occur to you unless you spent some time digging into Chilean culture.

The first thing is that male infidelity here seems to be near-universal, and pretty much expected as part of the machismo complex. Every time I go to hang out with my friend Karen, Oscar and Ximena wink and promise not to tell Anna. And they're only sort of joking.

The women, for their part, tend to pretend cheating isn't ubiquitous among Chilean men, until their partner's cheating is in their face, at which point they feel really, really hurt; often the relationship ends, and if they form new relationships with other men, they continue to pretend cheating isn't ubiquitous.

The second thing is that no one gets divorced here. Divorce was only legalized in 2004, so for all these decades, people have been separating and remaining married, while moving on to find new partners and often start new families. I'd say about half the Chileans I've met who have ever been married are currently separated, whether or not they've got new partners. I finally asked one of the English teachers about this:

"Well, first of all, it's very expensive. There's paperwork, and you have to have witnesses, who say that this person did this thing--"

"Oh! You don't have no-fault divorce."

I explained no-fault divorce for him; he laughed when I got to the phrase "legal fiction," talking about how before no-fault divorce, someone in the marriage had to be abusive or adulterous in order to get a divorce, rather than the system just accepting the reality that relationships fall apart. You still have to do this to get an annulment from the Catholic Church: everyone gets together and lies and finds a reason the marriage was never valid to begin with. (Sheila Rauch Kennedy wrote a book about refusing to do this; her case is also discussed by Garry Wills in Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit.)

The expensive paperwork and lack of no-fault divorce is probably enough to deter most people, but the English teacher had a further explanation, chuckling:

"You know, the real thing is, not getting divorced keeps us from having to be married again."

more details on my Prop 8 questions

Shannon Minter, the actual lawyer they got to answer people's Prop 8 trial questions, responded in more detail to the stuff I asked, about the previous case law around gay marriage that all went unmentioned in Judge Walker's decision. His response to my question directly:

It is true there are a bunch of older state cases upholding marriage bans-as well as a handful of more recent ones (sadly, the New York Court of Appeals, the Maryland Court of Appeals, and the Washington Supreme Court). But Judge Walker is not bound by any state court decisions. There are very few federal cases considering the validity of marriage bans-and virtually none decided by the federal courts of appeal. In a nutshell, Judge Walker had to decide the questions presented to him without relying on an binding precedent that is directly on point, because there isn't any. He did the right thing by presenting his reasoning about the legal issues presented. It would not have served any purpose for him to spell out why he disagreed with the reasoning in other cases that were not binding on him in the first place.

So, there it is. Here's his response to someone else on a similar topic:

I think Baker v Nelson is a real red herring being waved around by the other side in a desperate attempt to recover some lost media ground after Judge Walker's amazing decision! In 1971, the MN Supreme Court upheld MN's marriage ban. The gay couple who brought the case asked SCOTUS to review the decision. At that time, the Supreme Court HAD to take any case that presented a federal constitutional question. In 1972, the Supreme Court denied the case on the ground that it did not present a substantial federal question. But a heck of a lot has changed since then! in 1972, the supreme court had not yet held that laws that discriminate against women were subject to a heightened level of review. The court had not struck down Colorado's anti-gay ballot initiative in Romer, or held that individuals have a protected right to be in a same-sex relationship in Lawrence. So much has changed that any precedential value that Baker v. Nelson has, is exceedingly small. And in any case, the question presented by the Prop 8 case is a new one not considered in Baker: can the people of a state first permit a group to enjoy a fundamental right, and then take that right away based on a bare desire to send the message that the group is inferior?

All righty, then.

(UPDATE: More stuff relevant to my questions, in this response to an anti-equality op-ed by Edwin Meese.)

ouch, he's gonna hate that

On page 63 of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Walker is quoting things in the Finding of Fact to show that the government's interest in supporting marriage is not reliant on procreation. Like this:

"If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is 'no legitimate state interest' for purposes of proscribing that conduct...what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising 'the liberty protected by the Constitution'? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry."

That, of course, is Justice Antonin "Homosexual Agenda" Scalia, dissenting in Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 ruling which decriminalized all private sex between consenting adults.

Talk about unintended consequences. The original premise alongside Scalia's statement of fact is that gay marriage is too absurd and horrible to contemplate. Now that context has changed, but the statement of fact remains and is still true. Oops.