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.
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."
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”)