Family and Society: February 2006 Archives

2 from NRO

|

I've had these links bookmarked for a while, but am trying to clean house, so here they are, posted with relaively little comment.

Cathy Seipp sort of bugs me (all pro-choice "conservatives" do, I guess), but she's pretty good at exposing journalistic lunacies. Read this and contemplate the fact that much of what is commonly called "news" is written by such narcissists.

The "Cathy Seipp anecdote," as I heard it became known in-house, seems to have been ruined for the Times by Cathy Seipp having the gall to use it in a Cathy Seipp column first; their story was evidently supposed to run about three weeks ago and so far has not. Johnston hadn't been one of the reporters working on the piece, nor, as far as I know, did he have anything to do with it.

But apparently his status as a press critic — Johnston has written for Columbia Journalism Review, and is a frequent crank on the Romenesko letters page — obligated him to weigh in. So he felt moved to lecture me via e-mail (subject line: "Gosh, Catherine"), press-critic-to-press-critic, that my scooping his paper by using an incident that had happened to me, in my own column, was "not honorable."

As a press critic myself, Johnston told me, I should have known this. Also, I'd better not tell anyone about his unsolicited opinion. That was a secret.

Stanley Kurtz is rock-solid on marriage. He had a good column a few weeks ago whose money quote is the subtitle: "If everything is marriage, then nothing is."

Canada, you don’t know the half of it. In mid-January, Canada was rocked by news that a Justice Department study had called for the decriminalization and regulation of polygamy. Actually, two government studies recommended decriminalizing polygamy. (Only one has been reported on.) And even that is only part of the story. Canadians, let me be brutally frank. You are being played for a bunch of fools by your legal-political elite. Your elites mumble a confusing jargon to your face to keep you from understanding what they really have in mind.

LANGUAGE EXAM
Let’s try a little test. Translate the following phrases into English:

1) Canada needs to move “beyond conjugality.”

2) Canada needs to “reconsider the continuing legal privileging of marriage and other conjugal relationships.”

3) Once gay marriage is legalized, Canada will be able to “consider whether the legal privileges and burdens now assigned to marriage and other conjugal relationships can be justified.”
4) Canada needs to question “whether conjugality is an appropriate marker for determining legal rights and obligations.”

[Answers: The English translation of #1,# 2, and #4 is: “Canada should abolish marriage.” The translation of #3 is: “Once we legalize gay marriage, we can move on to the task of abolishing marriage itself.”]

This argument was very publicly made to Canadians in 2001, when the Law Commission of Canada published its report, “Beyond Conjugality.” But nobody got it. Everyone noticed that a government commission had backed same-sex marriage. But few recognized, grasped, or could bring themselves to take seriously, the central thrust of Beyond Conjugality: that after the legalization of same-sex marriage, Canadian marriage itself ought to be abolished. (For more on this, see my article “Beyond Gay Marriage”)

Read the rest.

Bookmark and Share

Pages

Mama-Lu's Etsy Shop

About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Family and Society category from February 2006.

Family and Society: January 2006 is the previous archive.

Family and Society: March 2006 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.