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On Tuesday afternoon I phoned my mother, who returned to work this week after a long vacation mostly spent at home, and the first thing she said, half-joking and half-worried, was, “Did you get married?” Oh, mom. Gotta love her.

I asked her if she’d seen any of the TV coverage of the Massachusetts weddings. She said no, but did tell me about a front-page article she read in the Chronicle, noting a particular couple, former Bay Area residents, one of whom is an artist currently based in Boston and originally from my hometown, Daly City. Cool.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick counters the “slippery slope” argument against gay marriage (“Slippery Slop“). An excerpt:

Sen. Rick Santorum got into hot water for spewing this argument last spring: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.” Anything, mind you. […]

The real problem is that there are really only three arguments against gay marriage: One is rooted in entirely God’s preferences–which have little bearing on Equal Protection or Due Process doctrine, as far as I can tell. The second cites inconclusive research on its negative effects on children. The backup is the slippery slope jeremiad, which seems to pass for a legal argument, at least on cable TV. But fear of the slippery slope alone is not a sufficient justification for doing the wrong thing in any individual case. In a superb dialogue on gay marriage in Slate, Andrew Sullivan, responding to David Frum, makes this point eloquently: “The precise challenge for morally serious people is to make rational distinctions between what is arbitrary and what is essential in important social institutions. […] If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage–or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs.”

Our weekday morning routine begins like this: the alarm clock goes off, Thom gets up and takes a shower, etc., and comes back to the bedroom around 7:30 a.m., upon which it’s my turn for the bathroom, with NPR’s Morning Edition all the while lulling the news into our sleepy brains. (By this time, Alex is usually already up and prowling around, rubbing up against me. Oh, Alex is the cat, by the way.) So while Thom showers, I get that bit of extra time in bed to lazily rouse myself, and I’m sometimes (often?) reluctant to get up when he’s done. This morning we mused that he might be making a donation to NPR soon: “This traffic report is brought to you by Thom Watson, who says, ‘Jeff, time to get up!'”

In addition to their “Bushisms,” Slate has introduced “Kerryisms,” which poke fun at the senator’s “caveats and curlicues.” They helpfully translate a Kerry quote into plain English:

Let me just say that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is unacceptable. And the response of the administration has been slow. I believe the president needs to [give] an explanation. What happened there has done a disservice to all of our troops, and it undermines America’s efforts in the region. It [puts] our troops in further jeopardy. It can increase acts of terror against America, and it undermines the effort of the United States in the region. So it is important to [understand] this as rapidly as possible and to make that explanation to the world.

and then present the original, as delivered by Kerry, with “caveats and embellishments” intact:

Let me just say very quickly that the horrifying abuse of Iraqi prisoners, which the world has now seen, is absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable. And the response of the administration, certainly the Pentagon, has been slow and inappropriate. I believe the president needs to guarantee that the world is going to have an explanation. What happened there has done a disservice to all of our troops who serve with great valor and greater courage and, I think, with distinction. And it also undermines America’s own efforts in the region. It has the potential of putting our troops, the rest of them, in further jeopardy. It can increase acts of terror against America and Americans. And it undermines the overall effort of the United States in the region. So I think it is important to have an understanding of this as rapidly as possible and to make that explanation and any other appropriate comments to the world.

Well, curlicues notwithstanding, I’d rather listen to Kerry than to Bush any day, I can tell you that.

See also Ben McGrath’s bit in a recent issue of the New Yorker, which features Kathryn Cason’s proposal of thought process as predictor of presidential election success (“Complex Process“). An excerpt:

There are two more categories on Cason’s complexity ladder. Moving up, we get serial, or conditional, processing (lots of “if”s, “or”s, and “because”s), and, finally, parallel processing (employing multiple serial constructions simultaneously). Serial minds, wouldn’t you know it, belong to natural-born winners like Reagan and J.F.K.

Cason has discovered that in the Presidential elections for which adequate transcripts are available–the previous seven, plus Kennedy-Nixon, and Lincoln-Douglas–the winning candidate has almost always been the man who rates as a more complex thinker. In cases where the opponents were, say, comparably cumulative, as in Clinton vs. Bush père, the younger candidate gained the White House. And between Gore and George W., Ralph Nader had it right: same brain, same age, same difference. No wonder the Supreme Court had to break the tie.

So it may surprise few people to learn that John Kerry, the master of nuance and gray shading, has demonstrated serial/conditional processing on the campaign trail. (To illustrate, Cason diagrammed a Kerry debate transcript: “If their property tax went up, and if other taxes have gone up, because of the tax cut for the wealthy…”)

I caught the first hour of PBS’ Colonial House, and it’s pretty good. In the tradition of the various other “House” series, the idea is to take a group of people and recreate some historical setting; here it’s an English settlement in Maine, circa 1628. There’s a lot of educational narration (did you know that once the Mayflower arrived in Massachusetts, the women and children stayed aboard the ship for two more months while the men began to set up the colony?), so it’s as much history lesson as it is unscripted drama. (I am loath to call it a “reality show.”) By the way, the queer factor: among the colonists are two gay men. (The photo caption in the Blade article is a little misleading; it implies their roles in the project are “written” as gay, which is not the case.)

Here’s some comic relief for your writer’s block. The Stranger‘s Ryan Boudinot offers up “Salmon, Trees, Cancer: A Primer. How To Write a Great Northwest Novel” (link via Arts & Letters Daily). An excerpt:

Tip 1: Salmon

If you’re going to write a novel set in the Northwest, you’re going to have to mention salmon. But don’t make the common mistake of simply referring to salmon as “salmon.” You know the varieties; show off your grasp of local nomenclature! Consider the following opening sentence:

Lance Nakayama was calling his broker to dump his InfoSpace stock when he was almost struck by an airborne Chinook.

See how we were able to pique the reader’s curiosity while displaying our intimacy with regional wildlife? This is the kind of opening sentence that keeps a reader turning pages. A flying what? Where the heck is this taking place? They will want to read on!

See also James Pinkerton’s “How To Write Suspense,” originally written for Modern Humorist; an expanded version appears in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 (ed. Dave Eggers).

Amen, people.

Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to permit gays and lesbians to wed just after midnight today, when Cambridge City Hall welcomed more than 250 same-sex couples who hugged, cried, cheered, and applied for the marriage licenses many thought they would never see in their lifetimes.

(Links: Boston.com homepage and gay marriage coverage, and HRC wedding album.)

There’s an article in this month’s GQ about the Log Cabin Republicans. Not an eye-opener, really, since the facts are nothing new, but I made a point to take a look at it, ’cause it’s written by David Rakoff, whom I enjoy reading and hearing: his wry observations are occasionally heard on This American Life. Entitled “They’re Here, They’re Queer, They’re… Republican?” the GQ article opens:

“I’ve heard it all,” says Mark Mead, director of public affairs for the Log Cabin Republicans. “Everything from ‘You guys are like Jewish Nazis’ to ‘What are you, the syrup lobby?'” What the Log Cabin Republicans really are, Mead informs me, is a bunch of political renegades, 10,000 strong and growing. “We’re the cutting edge of the gay civil rights movement,” he says.

I almost let out a hearty “And I am Marie of Romania!”–until I see he is not joking.

Nice.

[Update (17 May): In his comment to this entry, Seyd points out (with photo link, thanks!) the clever Victor Juhasz illustration that accompanies the Rakoff article. Dominated by political and religious symbols, it depicts a pair of pink gay elephants, pierced by arrows à la St. Sebastian, subject to the wrath of a fiery-sword-wielding elephant on high. Looming in the background is a dome I assume to be the U.S. Capitol, here topped with a cross.]