Are you not loyal to your pride?

Are you not on the blogwatch side?

The Center for the Future of Russia has a blog tracking anti-liberal developments in that beleaguered country. Via Cacciaguida.

Forager23: If I ran film grad school… “The movies shown will include canonical classics, pure period pieces, forgotten gems, as well as the occasional piece of utter crap, just to keep our students guessing.”

Inappropriate Response: On same-sex marriage. Over the weekend, assuming my archives return, I’m going to organize my previous posts on this subject so that you all can at least have a fighting chance of making sense of my tangled comments.

Polytropos: Football. I empathize. I don’t get it, personally. “All that aside, I still enjoyed myself, though I have grown envious of foote-ball fans. Clearly they possess a special, extra compartment in their brain devoted to storing foote-ball trivia and statistics. I assume this must be the case because if I had to retain the amount of lore they are able to draw upon at a moment’s notice, it would quickly edge out other important data such as the complete lyrics to ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It,’ the fact that Thundarr the Barbarian’s sidekicks are named Ariel and Ookla, and how to brush my teeth.”

The Chaldean Bishop of Baghdad thinks things are going as well as could be expected, says media is distorting the picture. Via Hit & Run.

Which superhero are you? I’m either Nightcrawler, which is pretty darn cool, or the Hulk, which is less so. Ah well, you won’t like me when I blogwatch…. Via Neilalien.

An interview with Grant Morrison in which he says several things about the X-Men that strike me as accurate. Also, pretty pictures. Via Big Sunny D.

BROKEN RECORD (ME, NOT HIM): Unqualified Offerings on me on same-sex marriage. I guess I just find it odd that a hardcore libertarian like UO (that’s not an insult! seriously!) is defending SSM rather than simply saying marriage should be just another contract. I mean, unless we are starring in “Willard,” we all have intense personal relationships. Why do these relationships suddenly become the state’s business when we start sleeping together? Why do we need/seek/prefer state sanction and status for sexual relationships when we wouldn’t need/seek/prefer it for other intense personal relationships?

EDITED TO ADD: Maybe another way to put this is, Before you figure out “why same-sex marriage?” you need to figure out, “why marriage?”

I think it is much easier to answer that question for male-female sexual relationships than for any other kind. Others may differ; but I do think that’s the essential question for those who start from a libertarian perspective.

And I think I answered the “persistence of gender roles” thing here. Yeah, UO is absolutely right, you gotta get up real early to thwart children’s desire for gender. The only question is, Who will give them the models of gendered action–you, or MTV?

EDITED: I do realize I didn’t address most of Jim’s specific points. I’ll probably do that sometime this weekend. But I kind of wanted to swoop back for a moment and get the wide-lens view.

GROWL. Apparently my apartment building is conducting an all-day fire alarm test, with very. loud. alarms. at random intervals throughout the day. So I’m going to the library. More later.

In the meantime, Camassia has a good post up on gender and bullying, and there’s a lot of debate about fidelity and relationship models at MarriageDebate.com (with one long post from me). I’ll pitch in more there later, either today or tomorrow.

Off to escape the klaxon of doom.

TOMORROW, when I can think again (I hope), I’ll post: comics reviews; final reply re same-sex marriage (I promise it will be short!); Poetry Wednesday; finally, the next episode of “What You Can Do for Your Country” (it’s already written but I’m too tired to type it in–yes, I am lazier than roadkill); and whatever else crosses my palm with silver and asks me to tell its fortune.

ARGH! Want to do one more Amp/SSM-related post, on equality & the purposes of marriage, but can’t think of best way to do it now. Stay tuned.

MY RELIGION AND OTHER THINGS YOU DON’T NEED TO SHARE TO AGREE WITH ME ABOUT MARRIAGE: Look, I’m Catholic. My religion says guys shouldn’t boff guys and girls shouldn’t boff girls. Obviously, that affects my view of same-sex marriage.

But I do not think you need to share my faith or my moral assessment of homosexual acts in order to agree with me about SSM. If I thought that, I wouldn’t bother making secular arguments on this blog! I don’t make arguments I don’t agree with. So if I’m not talkin’ God in a moral/ethical/political argument, you can take it that I don’t think I need to.

So first of all, I think the non-Catechism-related arguments I make here (specifically here, here, here, here*) are valid. But also, I know or have read the work of several people (like Professor Paul Nathanson) who do not believe that homosexual acts are immoral, but oppose same-sex marriage. Several of my (atheist, agnostic, Deist, but definitely not Christian) close friends fall into this category. If they did it, you can too!

*LINKS COMING AS SOON AS MY ARCHIVES ARE FIXED… SORRY.

RECONCILING THE SEEMINGLY DISPARATE: More Ampersand and gender. He misconstrues my somewhat ironic suggestion that “marriage is how we reconcile the opposite sexes.”

Amp writes, “I’m very sorry to hear that Eve, who is (I think) unmarried, has no close male friends nor any good relationships with any male relatives, and exists in a state of permanent war with all men. …

“The point is, if I search for friends based on my interior life — my enjoyment of science fiction, or my commitment to feminism — I’m far more likely to find people I share things in common with. According to the rabbi, I should just look for an all-male group and I’ll automatically be among my peers — but in reality, men aren’t all the same, and we don’t all have the same interests.

“…The basic point is, do you think that men and women are individuals, with individual traits (some of which are gender-typed, some of which are not), or robots whose every trait and interest are determined by their genitals?”

See now, unsurprisingly, I don’t think this rather strenuous over-reading and over-dichotomizing is “the basic point” at all. There are two huge problems here (yes, I know, this is another numbered list–when I’m sleep-deprived I fall back on these annoying blog tricks):

1) Wild dichotomizing! It’s runnin’ rampant! Head for the hills!

I mean, surely we can all imagine something that is neither, “Men and women have exactly the same interests, pressures, and needs, because We Are All Individuals–there are no men and no women, only People,” nor, “I-am-robot-female-take-me-to-your-kitchen.” In fact, Amp concedes as much in his reference to “gender-typed” traits. Why can’t he accept that these are precisely the kind of traits that people who talk about “reconciling” the sexes are addressing?

(And yes, “opposite sexes” is itself a fairly obvious bit of overstatement. I was trying to signal my dislike of the true-but-bland term “gender complementarity,” but in case anyone is wondering, I do not think men are from Mars and women are from Venus or whatever. Hence the title for this post, from Helen Cresswell’s hilarious kids’ book Absolute Zero–“reconciling the seemingly disparate.”)

Oh! Actually I think I may see the problem: Possibly Amp was focusing on “opposite” (the part of that phrase that is least accurate!) and I was focusing on “reconciling”?

2) So what are those gender-typed traits? What are those differing interests, needs, pressures, etc.?

I think it’s telling that Amp talked about how he would find friends, since friendship is precisely not what I’m discussing here. (Well, OK, I don’t know what the rabbi he cites is talking about, but I do know what I was talking about.)

We’re talking about marriage, and therefore we’re talking about sex. And in heterosexual relationships, yes, the sexes do need to be reconciled. The risks they take are very different. The possibility of pregnancy (including the fact that women have a shorter reproductive life than men) is only one reason for these sharply differing risks.

One of the reasons I didn’t write this post yesterday–besides the inzombia thing–was that I didn’t think I could be non-bitchy about it after a much longer than usual session of follow-up calls for the pregnancy center. Do my calls for me, then we’ll talk about how men and women in sexual relationships don’t need any structures to reconcile their differing risks, needs, desires, and interests. (Was that non-bitchy? Maybe a little bitchy?)

I hope that clarifies my stance. Now, back to my permanent war with all men. Be afraid… be very afraid.