The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by LizardBreath:

Glen:

You're right -- "promoting equality", "equality of opportunity" -- either one is much better than my formulation. But still, that's our vision (or it's mine, and the reason I vote Democratic is that seems like my best hope of getting there) and it's a strong, persuasive one, and one that the right can't run against. They can say that we're lying about wanting equality, but they can't say that equality is a bad thing.

(I think the "Harrison Bergeron" critique isn't all that persuasive -- there's a difference between equality of opportunity and equality of results.)

Works for me, but I suspect that the "morals" crowd sees strucural inequality as an integral part of their system of morality - subservient wives, minorities who know their place, etc.

You're right about some of them, I dearly hope you're wrong about most of them, but even if you're right about what they believe, they can't possibly say it. This is an area where we have the rhetorical advantage: no one can campaign in opposition to equality.

All the blogs I read are talking about variants of this issue: that the Republicans win by having clear themes, and that Democrats lose because we come across as disagreeing with them, rather than as pushing our own agenda.

I always thought that we did have a clear, overarching moral vision: Reduce Inequality.

It applies to economic issues, racial issues, gender issues; it works on foreign policy -- we should have intervened in Rwanda to reduce the inequality between those who can count on the protection of the law and those who can't. While it doesn't depend on a religious basis, it's compatible with the beliefs of those religious people who are or might be on our side. Isn't this the kind of message we should be pushing?

I can't tell, even looking at the phrase in question, whether the situation at hand is a case of "the meaning is obvious to everyone involved, but the judge is being a stickler for correctness," or whether it's more like "if the judge acted on it as written, it would be a much broader order than is legally reasonable."

As a practicing litigator, this looks to me as if the judge is pulling a stunt to indicate his sympathy with the gay marriage proponents. The normal thing for a judge to do, if the semicolon were important, would be to handwrite in the correction and sign the order.

I'm on the same side as the judge, and I like the stunt, but it isn't normal concern for correctness or even hyper-pickiness; it looks to me as if he's doing something genuinely unusual to display his personal position on gay marriage without actually disobeying the governing state law.

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