Second quick thing

One reason the timing is bad is because there are two things I was working on that deserved a fuller treatment but now won't get it. But I will mention them here in abbreviated form:

1. The decision by Judge Vaughn Walker overturning PropHate as violating the 14th amendment to the Constitution is both welcome and surprising. Initially, advocates thought the suit was a long shot, but the refusal of the state to defend the provision and the inability of the defense (the supporters of bigotry) to come up with any rational basis for discrimination, lead to the result.

What I found most remarkable was the language Walker used, particularly his assertion in rejecting the idea that there could be a rational basis for a legitimate government interest in denying same-sex marriage because that "argument" was based on old, outdated notions of gender roles that no longer fit modern society. For other courts to reject that argument is to reject the whole idea of social progress and to embrace those outdated notions.

Equal rights will come. It will happen. It is happening, it's happening against entrenched resistance but it is happening. As MLK said, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

2. Even so and despite that hope-filled quote, there are days when I am glad I will not live long enough to see the world I see coming.

A time when personal privacy is a quaint distant memory and every secret of our lives is up for auction, to be sold to whoever thinks they can make a profit off it.

A time when even as our privacy as individuals is disappearing, even as the government is seeking more and more power to obtain more and more information about us with less and less oversight, the privacy, that is, the secrecy, of government is expanding and attempts to pierce that secrecy are attacked.

Even now, to the almost complete silence of the supposedly liberty-loving leftists who screamed about Shrub "ripping up the Constitution" but who now appear to simply have been seeking political advantage, the O-crowd is embracing some of the worst parts of that record, turning it into what a new report from the ACLU calls "a new normal." A new normal where the government cannot be held accountable for its actions in "the war on terror." A new normal which will become the baseline for establishing a new new normal and an even newer new normal as we become inured to each new shift.

We are the frog and they are the ones controlling the heat.