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1. It's a non-event now. Unlike California or Maine, which whipped up anger and frustration and horror after stripping marriage from us, winning produces a nice warm glow. As an aside,I kind of think the anger and hate on the other side are maybe politically motivated, because once their side lost - they stopped. When our side lost on this we were hurt, crushed and felt as if we were thought of as less than others. It was a refutation of us as people. Passing gay marriage is a confirmation that we want to be part society - so less anger is generated on the other side. Only really angry people don't want to let others join society.
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2. For the first time, I feel happy to be a New Yorker. Just like after Prop 8, for the first time, I was embarrassed to be a Californian. (But I'll always be an Angelino!).
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3. It is kind of funny (okay - make that hilarious) to see the the conservative press fight within itself, and point out the hypocrisy of Cardinal Dolan at the same time. Witness below...
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Potemra made mocking reference in his Stonewall story to Archbishop Timothy Dolan's glib invocation of North Korea in an anti-gay marriage blog post earlier this month. That set off Kathryn Jean Lopez, the fragile, abortion-hating, anti-sex former editor of the National Review Online, whom I generally tend to imagine scribbling "Mrs. Kathryn Ratzinger" in her Lisa Frank journals.
Do not be so quick to dismiss the North Korea comparison, Mike. We are witnessing tyranny today that is fostered by a false sense of freedom, a tyranny that faux tolerance ferments.More Monday.
Tyranny! North Korean-style!
Jason Lee Steorts, the managing editor of the National Review, then decimated K-Lo's (and the archbishop's) non-argument in a devastatingly sarcastic post that went up about 45 minutes later:
So it is your view, Kathryn, that the action of democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the citizens of the State of New York, is tyrannical in a way that justifies comparison to North Korea, a state in which an absolute ruler has burned people alive in a stadium. Okay. But now I want a new word for what "tyranny" used to mean.I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim.It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.
There follow four separate updates in which Steorts apologizes for his tone but continues to criticize Lopez for defending a claim that he finds "absurd and offensive to North Koreans":
It will be good to find out whether Kathryn thinks the procedure of enactment is tyrannical, the substance, or both. I hope, in offering an exegesis of the context of the Dolan quote, she will say what she understands by "dictate," and how the process of enactment constituted dictatorial tyranny of a kind specifically similar to the North Korean or Chinese (as opposed to, say, the Canadian), and how what has happened here is that the state has presumed omnipotence in a North Korean or Chinese fashion rather than the people’s having wickedly done this through their elected representatives, through whom they may also change their minds — a process not commonly witnessed, I do believe, in North Korea or China. All this if the point is that the procedure of enactment is tyrannical. If the substance, I suppose she can just mention the famous North Korean and Chinese tendency to redefine civil marriage as New York has done, and we will grant its deviance from her understanding of natural law, and the equivalence of this with tyranny, without requiring her here to defend all that.
All of this is terribly entertaining -- like watching Mom and Dad fight, if you didn't like your parents, and one of them was kind of dumb. (emphasis mine - Scott)