Sunday Spin Cycle

Sunday once again, and that means cleaning up the messes that don’t clean up after themselves.

This is Weak (with George Snuffleupagus) amazingly gave me cause to agree with Barney Frank. In defending Obama’s non-statement on gay marriage, Barney said that marriage should be a states’ rights issue. Unfortunately, I suspect that Barney’s love of the tenth amendment is a matter of convenience. He pointed at the introduction by Republicans in the 2000s of a proposed federal marriage amendment as if to say, “they started it.” But the gay community has been looking for opportunity to make a run around the legislative process since the Civil Rights era by putting the matter before the Supreme Court as a 14th Amendment. Sorry, Barney. No sale.

Frank was a double-whammy today, as he was also brought on to talk about the economy and the role of the Dodd-Frank legislation. He instead, in a typically childish display, chose to shout down Marsha Blackburn and accuse her of interrupting him until the segment ran out.

DeFace the Nation put Clay Aiken on their gay marriage panel. That really should be enough said. Also on the panel was Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick who made the president’s flip-flop on the issue about Mitt Romney. Taking Romney’s 1994 statement that he would be “better than Ted (Kennedy) for gay rights,” he inferred a flip-flop on by Romney on same-sex marriage. The problem there is that Romney never made any statements regarding same-sex marriage. Marriage was not assumed to be part of “defending gay rights” in 1994. Rather, at that time the issue surrounded things like workplace discrimination and the role of civil unions.

Faux News Sunday Why is it that I am learning almost a week after the story broke that the terror attack against a US airliner foiled by a CIA double-agent was an unauthorized leak worthy of investigation? Oh yeah, because the media has been obsessed about gay-marriage and bullying in the 1960s all week. Kudos to Fox for keeping an eye on the ball. Now can you stop obsessing over the possible VP nominations? We’ll all find out together and none of us really has a say in the matter.

Meet the DePressed may have inadvertently called attention to a hand tipped by the White House. Though the subject went unexplored, the end-of-show roundtable momentarily wondered why the White House has been so public since last weekend about its ire toward Joe Biden for his gay marriage comments that ultimately dominated the week in news. The panel didn’t take the musing anywhere, but I’m wondering if, in addition to making the president right with the Hollywood crowd just in time for a big fundraiser, the administration is also using the flap to lay down planks for reassigning the VP position?

Language Spin All the Sunday shows combined give me cause to respond to two phrases that have been driving me nuts all week long.

The first is “evolved views,” referring to the way Obama and various other political figures have changed their positions on issues, namely gay-marriage. It’s easy to see this is a thinly-veiled euphemism for “flip-flop,” which would be the term of choice when referring to a Republican. That more than one panelist on more than one show tried to contrast Obama’s views with Mitt Romney’s by calling the latter’s “devolved” only confirms this. It’s a stupid maneuver to pull out this turn-of-phrase when the chief slur against the presumed Republican presidential nominee is “flip-flopper.” At the very least, it calls attention to the media double-standard that is already being picked up on by more and more people.

The other phrase which has ground my gears for far longer than a week is “the right side of history.” I could write an entire entry and more on just this expression alone (and perhaps I will). In brief, I can’t stand this phrase because it sums up everything that is backwards about liberal thinking. Rather than regarding history as a past formed and set, the left thinks of history as a future to be molded into a shape of their pleasing. It’s such a backwards view that most liberals probably don’t even know they hold it, but it comes out in the words they use and the things they do all the time. This phrase just brings it close enough to the surface to easily point out. And, of course, all of that comes before I even consider how arrogantly presumptive the idea is.

Finally, I wanted to share my thoughts on how the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to same-sex marriage. I argue that equal protection is not only guaranteed, but also already in place. A gay man has just as much right to marry a woman as straight man does, and a lesbian can marry a man just like a straight woman. At the same time, heterosexuals are bared from marrying someone of the same sex just as gays are. From that standpoint, sexual-orientation doesn’t even come into play; everyone already receives the same treatment. Sure, it’s a cynical point of view, but I like to think it makes a lot more sense than most of the other cynical defenses and objections being thrown around on both sides.

ADDENDUM:  In reviewing my article, I see I forgot an item I meant to include. It now escapes me which show it came from (and it could have easily been more than one) but one of the panels looking at Mitt Romney's alleged high school bullying incident came up with the idea that, if nothing else, Romney has missed an opportunity to bring anti-bullying into his presidential platform. This is an attempt to spin the story down as it has become clear that the public finds digging clear back into Mitt's high school days to be bad form. It's even looking possible that the whole thing was a fabrication. This is none too different that what was done to Herman Cain: when the allegations against him didn't hold up, they changed the story to, "well, he didn't respond well enough. And that's just as bad."