The lack of coverage of the Gosnell trial is a GOOD thing for pro-life advocates.  Pro-choice folk, except for the most extreme, aren't under any kind of impression that abortion is good, clean, or nice.  I'll tell you right now that the argument will be:

a) Gosnell was in no-way representative of actual abortion providers;

b) The infanticides performed by Gosnell were actual murders rather than abortions;

c) The only reason women were desperate enough to put up with Gosnell's insane practice was because pro-life advocates have harassed legitimate, medically competent, un-racist providers out of practice by picketing, suing, legislating against, and killing them (yes, you'll hear more mention of George Tiller "who killed fully-grown adults" than of Kermit Gosnell "who was dispatching lumps of barely-sentient tissue")

d) The public will, most probably, fall in line with this argument, because it fits in too neatly with the prevailing political orthodoxy -- that Republicans are puritanical, hyper-religious, outdated, and irrational, especially on questions of sexual morality -- and because the public tends to think of abortion as a medical procedure first and foremost, and what Gosnell did was not medically sound.

Children don't baffle liberals, they just don't view them in the same way. 

Human procreation is now so well regulated by chemicals, industrial polycarbonates (thanks, Bill Gates!), and in the last resort, abortion, that in the ideal scenario, no sexual relationship - heterosexual or homosexual - is inherently fertile.  

The default assumption is that all decisions to reproduce are premeditated and planned for.  That is the ultimate goal of the liberal approach to sex and family, and it is, in the abstract, a laudatory one.  It's a recipe for happy children brought up in happy families with the werewithal, resources, and ability to care for them.  It's an end to teenage pregnancy, a severe reduction in broken homes and baby-mamas/baby-daddies, and a massive boost to the living standards of children nation-wide.  Fundamentally, relationships have been severed from child-bearing as such -- children are to be incorporated into the relationship at such a time as the relationship is deemed suitable.  Childbirth isn't viewed as all that different from adoption.

This is why SSM advocates can't understand the "biology" argument, and in fact see it as laughable or creepily sex-obsessed.

Edward Luttwak; The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire  - Fantastic.  Have read it before, will read it again.  Great work of scholarship.

Niall Ferguson; The War of the World - Pretty good as a detailed overview of the horrible cruelty on display during first half of the century; the descriptions of WWII are highly specific and bone-chilling.  Less detailed regarding the post-war world and has a tendency to descend into generality.

Patrick Rothfuss; The Name of the Wind - Utterly addictive.  Amazing fantasy novel.  Some of the best descriptions of music I've ever read.

Watts Riots.  The Rodney King fiasco.  Redlining.   Dog-whistling over gangs.  And that's just LA.  Oakland has its own sordid history.  Californians weren't kind to the "Okies" during the Depression, got hysterical over the Japanese during the second War, and has had a very confused relationship with Hispanics for over 40 years. Heck, this state invented the "Bradley Effect."

Look, the state is a paradise of racial harmony compared to some places.  But there have been problems that we have struggled with.  They're getting much, much better.  But that history is there.

Reagan was governor 40 years ago.  Nixon lost the governorship.   John Yoo gets headlines for being picketed (sorry, Professor...for what it's worth I'd love to take a class or 50 from you).  Prop 13 was the creation of the (at the time) cutting edge political technique of the mass mailer, and Prop. 187 is the reason the California GOP is dead.  Prop 209 passed because, whether we like to admit it or not, California has struggled with some rather nasty racist impulses.

The culture and ethos and demography of the state is deeply, deeply blue, with a couple dirty secrets.

I could not agree more.  It's ridiculous that the whole Prop 8 question could be punted on a technicality that violates the spirit of not only Prop 8, but the initiative process itself.  If the court has any guts they'll just take a stance.  Better a "bad" decision than a spineless weasel.

As a parenthetical I always thought it was rather ludicrous that California -- land of Hollywood and San Francisco, La Raza and Gavin Newsome, UC Berkeley and Grass Valley -- would pass such an unambiguously un-Liberal initiative.  Prop 8 was never viewed by the dominant political and intellectual culture of the state as anything but a regressive abomination.  And, though I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that it hurt advocates of traditional marriage more than it helped.  The fact that the state government is unwilling to defend it, as is majority public opinion within the state, is, unfairly or not, giving the public impression that no-one at all is willing to back the anti-SSM side of the debate. 

Republicans would have been slaughtered with a Gingrich/Santorum ticket.  Instead of forcing the Obama campaign to run a consistently negative campaign, fending off a challenge on the one issue where the President was vulnerable - the economy's miserable state - the GOP's selection of Gingrich and Santorum would have enabled the Democrats to go on autopilot and turn just about every aspect of the campaign over to the internet's wannabe Jon Stewarts and Steven Colberts. 

Romney/Ryan's economic credentials had to be attacked.  Gingrich/Santorum's main strengths - megalomania and social conservatism, respectively - would just have been mocked.  Mockery is the one political weapon more potent than the attack.

I don't think that SSM isn't an issue worth fighting over.  Of course it's worth fighting over.  It's an important issue, and all important issues should be litigated in the culture before any important change is made.  I just don't think that the current state of the debate is sustainable, and think that responses like Sen. Portman's are rational in the face of changing demographics (the ABC poll is fairly convincing on that score). 

When I say that the LGBTQ community "has the political whip hand" I mean that a supermajority of the American populace supports them, and that large parts of their coalition view that issue as a litmus test for political sanity.  The fact that the numbers have changed so drastically since 2004 - support for SSM among Republicans has doubled, among Evangelicals it quadrupled, among "conservatives" it tripled - goes to show that your side of the argument isn't just losing, it is disappearing.  It's not my business to tell anti-SSM activists how to go forward, but in the interests of the continued success of the party I feel compelled to say that the status quo is not an option.

I can't state this any more clearly: the current political situation favors SSM advocates, and will continue to do so if current trends continue.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/03/poll-tracks-dramatic-rise-in-support-for-gay-marriage/

Current anti-SSM strategies are not working, and are harming the GOP as a whole among young voters and minorities, who identify SSM as a Civil Rights issue, rather than a religious or values issue.  Sure, both sides are making partisan points.  But it does no good to turn to the majority and shout: "You're being partisan!  No fair!"   The inevitable response has been and is going to be: "No, we're just being rational.  You're being bigoted."  If that state of affairs is alright with you, by all means carry on spitting into the wind and attempting to explain why opposition to the one single issue that the LGBTQ community, which has the political whip hand, has defined as a litmus issue on acceptance or hatred of LGBTQ individuals, is in fact recognition of your love for the LGBTQ community and recognition of the deepest human truths.  Good luck.  I won't be joining you.

Any number of things are possible.  Of course.  But the fact remains, the burden of action here is on us.  There exists a state of affairs where the LGBTQ community believes that those who don't support SSM hate them.  This exists, and was the point of my earlier comment.  Now we have to decide what to do about it.  We can attempt to convince the LGBTQ community that though we disagree on policy, we don't hate them.  This has not worked.  So we're presented with a fait accompli.  Either we hold our ground and earn their emnity, and the emnity of those who support their cause, or we "succumb to emotional blackmail" and compromise because that's what life in a democracy demands.  It's all well and good to hold to abstract principle until life gets in the way.

Well, the definition itself wouldn't, because it's just an idea, and is a product of the minds that brought it into being.  If the idea were to be enforced...that would require a law, because we know from human history that people have not consistently conformed to that standard without being either coerced or cajoled. 

It's a very good standard.  I have no objections to it.  I just don't think that it, or any other set of rules, is inherent to the human condition.

In theory, the "materialism particle" would be that biochemical combination which corresponds to the the particular thought pattern we label "materialism."  So far as I know, we don't have that much knowledge about the brain yet, but that may well have more to do with the limits of current technology than any philosophical point.

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"But the difference between the neurons and the feelings, the material and the mental, is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind."

Really?  If we can replicate a state of matter that, in each subject, causes an identical feeling, can't we then say that the state of matter and the feeling are one and the same?

"Most" states.  Not all, but most.  The fact that there were any that didn't proves the point; even the most basic tenets of morality are not ahistorical.

Rationality, like foolishness and incompetence, aren't static concepts.  They require norms and, yes, laws to define them.

The definition of "fool" and "incompetent" have to be defined, and are so by societal practice.  Now, for certain categories of behavior -- murder, theft, rape, etc. -- there has been broad consensus for a very long time.  But even there things are hardly universal.  Up until 150 years ago it wasn't murder to shoot a man in the face with no provocation, provided the victim was a slave. 

All law attempts to prevent undesirable behavior, and on the flip side attempt to produce desirable behavior.  "Thou shalt not do murder" is attempting to prevent killing, and an attempt to encourage not-killing.  It's just a question of how much behavior you want to regulate.  You're already on the slippery slope, my friend.