Culture: February 2004 Archives

From Stanley Kurtz, in NRO:

There's been a lot of commentary on how San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's flouting of the law is not nearly so bad as the conduct of former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore. ...

What Mayor Newsom is doing has much deeper social and legal consequences — and is meant to have those consequences. Newsom is intentionally creating legal, political, and cultural facts on the ground designed to overturn current law — both in California and beyond. Newsom is purposely trying to initiate legal challenges to state and federal defense of marriage acts. And he is doing this is two ways — by encouraging copycat civil disobedience in other parts of the country, and by generating "married" couples who can file lawsuits, in California and beyond. Especially because he is creating couples who can file suits, Newsom's actions are far more disruptive and consequential than Judge Moore's. And the judges who have refused to swiftly shut down this obviously lawless action are equally to blame.

Newsom is using extra-legal means to bring a major national debate to resolution on his own terms. By creating "married" couples, Newsom is trying to put the cultural, political, and legal momentum inherent in "possession" behind his side of the argument. If Newsom is allowed to determine a major policy debate by resort to extra-legal means, the damage to social trust and civil comity in our divided nation will be immense....

Since 9/11, conservatives have felt pretty confident about their position. I say we are living on sand. Yes, we have the presidency and, by the narrowest of margins, Congress. The Left controls the other key levers of the culture. If we lose the presidency, we lose the courts, and we lose the culture. It is only our political success that has given us a counterweight to the liberal domination of the culture....

But if we lose the presidency now — and lose it in the face of San Francisco — we lose all. No court will ever pay us any mind again. They will fear and bow to the Left alone.

Read the whole thing.