Month: May 2012

Winning short term and long term

by digby

So, Ornstein and Mann say that the GOP opposition to all of President’s Obama’s programs is not ideological but rather a strategy to make him fail. I’m sure they want to make him fail, but I think that’s too facile. It’s true that they want to make him fail, no doubt about it. But it’s also ideological.

Take this lunacy for instance:

The Navy’s ambitious renewable energy plans aren’t sunk quite yet. But they took a major hit Thursday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to all-but-ban the military from buying alternative fuels.

The House Armed Services Committee passed a similar measure earlier this month. But the House is controlled by Republicans, who are generally skeptical of alternative energy efforts. Democrats are in charge of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And if anything, the Senate’s alt-fuel prohibition goes even further than the House’s. If it becomes law, if would not only sink the Navy’s attempt to sail a “Great Green Fleet,” powered largely by biofuels. It would also sabotage a half-billion dollar program to shore up a tottering biofuels industry.

Like their counterparts in the House, senators prohibited the Pentagon from buying renewable fuels that are more expensive than traditional ones — a standard that biofuels many never meet. In addition, the committee blocked the Defense Department from helping build biofuel refineries unless “specifically authorized by law” – just as the Navy was set to pour $170 million into an effort with the Departments of Energy and Agriculture to do precisely that.

The measures — amendments to the Pentagon’s budget for next year — were pushed by two Republicans. Sen. James Inhofe has long been one of the Republican’s fiercest critics of renewable energy efforts; Sen. John McCain has in recent years turned away from long-held eco-friendly positions.

“Adopting a ‘green agenda’ for national defense of course is a terrible misplacement of priorities,” McCain told National Journal Daily on Tuesday, calling it “a clear indication that the president doesn’t understand national security.”

These old men who are apparently determined to destroy the planet are he same people who are rending their garments over the possible future tax rates of their grandchildren.

Ok. So McCain is carrying a grudge and wants to show the president doesn’t care about national security. No surprise for the mean old man. But Inhofe? He’s a true believer and he wants to stop the United States from developing alternative fuels because he truly thinks there is no need for it and has it in his head that the United States can run forever if only it will drill, baby, drill. And he represents a large faction of the throwback base and the oil barons who stand to make a lot of money. It’s a twofer.

In fact, underlying all of these obstructive maneuvers is an advancement of their agenda at the same time. This used to be considered basic smart politics. Whatever you do, win or lose, it should be in service of both your short term goals and your long term goals. Republicans have always kept their eyes on both the short term and the long term, and tend to screw up only when they are overcome by hubris and do something silly like impeach a president over a sexual indiscretion.

For all I know, Democrats are always doing this too. If they really believe that deficits are the greatest threat to the nation (it’s just a matter of getting the rich to throw in some tip money for it to be all good) or that America really should be a military empire then they’ve been doing a bang-up job. Otherwise, the Republicans have been playing much smarter politics for decades now. All along the way their stated agenda has been advanced far more often than it’s retreated. The opposite is true for the Democrats.

The GOP may be heading toward one of those hubristic set-backs. But both sides have set up a monumental confrontation on the budget and tax cuts after the election and if I were a betting person I’d have to say that it’s the GOP agenda that is likely to be the big winner. In fact, both parties have set it up so that’s there’s no other possible outcome.

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Yes, there is a difference

by David Atkins

You don’t have to be a close watcher of politics to know that Barack Obama has been far friendlier to Wall Street than Wall Street deserves. A casual read of Matt Taibbi will tell you all you need to know on that front.

But to say that because of that, there’s no difference between Romney and Obama on matters of Wall Street and austerity is an exercise in lazy equivalence. Mitt Romney just went out and proved that with his latest stance on student loans:

Mitt Romney has just released his plan for educating America’s young people, and it’s wholly consistent with his overall philosophy: Allow money to dominate politics, and everything will work out great. Except that, when it comes to policies on college education, we tried that approach under George W. Bush, and it was a disaster for students and taxpayers.

Specifically, Romney attacks — and pledges to undo — two critical reforms implemented by the Obama Administration: (1) reforming student loans and (2) holding for-profit colleges accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse.

In the recent bad old days, the big firms dominating the student loan business — Sallie Mae, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, etc. — got paid as if they were lenders, when in fact they were merely loan servicers; it was us taxpayers who actually took the risk of students defaulting on loans. These banks then used our money to hire lobbyists to protect their billions in unwarranted profits. The Obama Administration stood up to them, and Congress, with nowhere left to cut spending, finally ended this absurd giveaway. There’s absolutely no logical reason to restore this massive waste of taxpayer money. You would only do it if a central principle of your presidency was to hand out gifts to special interests who helped you get elected. Unfortunately it looks like Romney might want to be just that kind of President. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo employees are ranked numbers 3, 6, and 10 among the top 2012 Romney donors.

Then there’s the issue of the for-profit college sector, whose multiple bad actors have been caught in the act of defrauding our veterans and low-income students with deceptive recruiting practices, and defrauding government with phony reporting. For-profit colleges have grown rapidly and now account for about 12 percent of students, but their financial footprint is even bigger: With high prices, high dropout rates, and poor job placement, they account for 25 percent of federal financial aid — over $30 billion a year — and 45 percent of student loan defaults.

Romney takes direct aim at the Obama Administration’s “gainful employment” rule — an effort to channel federal student aid to college programs that actually help students learn and get jobs, rather than to programs that leave students deep in debt and ruin their lives. Many of the biggest for-profit schools get 90 percent or more of their revenue from taxpayer funds. They devoted a big chunk of that money to a lobbying and public relations campaign that succeeded in watering down — but not eliminating — the new Obama rule. But that’s not good enough for Mitt Romney.

Politics is almost never about perfect choices. But more importantly, the passions that run hot in politics would be as pointless and inane as the heated arguments on sports or celebrity blogs but for the fact that real people’s lives are at stake and important decisions hang in balance.

A vote against President Obama in a swing state is functionally a vote to give our tax dollars back to rapacious student loan companies by eliminating these needed reforms. It’s a vote to take away health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. And it’s a vote to give federal funding to Harold Hill scam “colleges.” It may feel good to cast a pox on both houses for their similarities. In the end, though, that decision affects all the many places where there are big differences, too.

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Ron Paul is the one true Christian

by digby

… according to this fine fellow:

This is not a joke (at least not an intentional one.)

Pastor Steven Andrew teaches on how is a Christian to vote. Faithful to Jesus. In God we trust.

Vote for Christians. Christian election. Vote for Jesus.

Ron Paul is Christian.

Mitt Romney is Mormon.

Barack Obama is Muslim or an anti-Christ.

Were you waiting for him to say “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me”? I know I was.

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Bachman in drag

by digby

Mitt Romney, who on Wednesday said he would bring the nation’s unemployment rate to 6% as president, offered three ways he would achieve that goal in an interview Thursday.

“Well, there are a number of things,” Romney said on Fox News. “You start off by saying, let’s stop something that’s hurting small business from creating jobs and that’s ‘Obamacare.’ Get rid of it. No. 2, have an energy strategy that takes advantage of our natural gas and oil and coal, as well as our renewables. Those low cost energy fuels will ultimately mean jobs come back here, even manufacturing jobs that left here. And finally, get a handle on the deficit so that people understand if they invest in America, their dollars will be worth something in the future.”

So basically, the Romney economic plan is to end Obamacare, drill baby drill, and slash government spending (aka “deficit reduction” in GOP-speak.)

It’s a little surprising that this alleged Master of the Universe has adopted the Michele Bachman platform, don’t you think?

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Yes, the bully pulpit can shift public opinion

by David Atkins

There has been a debate raging among political science and academic circles over whether presidential rhetoric has any real power over public opinion. The new commonly held theory is that bully pulpit statements have no real effect on legislation or public opinion.

On the legislation point, I tend to agree. Interests in Congress tend to be so entrenched that presidential speeches urging Congress to do one thing or another don’t make that much difference to how legislators will vote. The President could talk about the benefits of single-payer healthcare every single day and it probably wouldn’t budge a single legislator from their previously held position.

But on public opinion, the picture is much less clear, but the recent shift in perceptions of marriage equality after Barack Obama’s statements in favor of it do seem to indicate that poll numbers can be shifted by the power of presidnetial rhetoric. :Digby wrote earlier on this same subject, and I tend to strongly agree with her. The notion that the rhetoric of powerful and visible people doesn’t influence opinion is too bizarre and flies in the face of thousands of years of recorded history. Still, the data isn’t wholly conclusive for recent Presidnential history. Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money has a somewhat skeptical take:

Well, let’s consider this. The Post has the trends in the data online (Question 23). In terms of support for SSM, there’s…nothing. 53% support it after Obama’s interview; 52% in March; 51% in July 2011; 53% in March 2011. There’s no evidence of any effect at all. So as the headline suggests, the evidence for the power of the BULLY PULPIT would have to be in the reduced opposition, which did drop from 43% to 39% between March and May. But particularly given the longer-term trend — opposition was 55% in 2004, 50% as recently as 2010 — this is pretty weak evidence. The 4 point drop in opposition might reflect an effect from Obama’s speech, but it also might reflect statistical noise combined with longer-term trends favoring same-sex marriage. The fact that support didn’t increase is further reason to be skeptical.

Of course, this one data point hardly disproves the theory that Obama’s support will have some effect. It’s possible that this could, like foreign policy, be an exception to the rule that presidential rhetoric doesn’t influence public opinion. Since what matters here is the position-taking, at least believing that there will be some effects doesn’t require transparently implausible theories about the electorate paying close attention to the details of presidential speeches (when even professional BULLY PULPIT obsessives can’t remember the details of presidential speeches.) Nonetheless, as a general rule using the bully pulpit can’t sway public opinion, so I won’t believe that Obama’s interview will significantly increase support for same-sex marriage unless the data clearly shows otherwise. As of now, it doesn’t; hopefully Amanda and Digby will be proven right in the future.

In the comments there, David Mizner points out what I think will become obvious:

There’s polling evidence suggesting that President Obama’s position is swaying opinion among African-Americans.

The increase in support toward gay marriage was mainly fueled by increasing support for it among African Americans, who now narrowly support the issue 42 percent to 41 percent. In their November survey, Public Policy Polling found that black voters overwhelmingly opposed gay marriage 52 percent to 34 percent.

This change in support among black voters reflects similar findings in North Carolina. After President Barack Obama publicly announced his support of gay marriage, Public Policy Polling found that 27 percent of black voters supported gay marriage, up from 20 percent in a May 6 poll taken three days before President Obama made his announcement.

This is a pretty specific case for several reasons and could be an exception that proves the rule, but the movement seems to be real. He’s also inspired others — Colin Powell, Jim Clyburn, and Steny Hoyer — to come out of the closet. I wouldn’t be surprised if history books treated President Obama’s step as a Pivotal Event.

I don’t see how it could be perceived otherwise.

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Getting rid of the old ball and chains

by digby

It’s hard for me to imagine that all the people in charge of redistricting sat down and said, “first, let’s get rid of all the bitches” but it sure looks as if they did:

That Democrats became roadkill during the latest round of redistricting, mostly at the hands of Republican state legislatures, has been well documented. But less widely known is that the casualties at the state level often hit women lawmakers the hardest — eating into the slow but steady gains women have made in statehouses across the country.
[…]
In North Carolina, where Republicans controlled the redistricting process and women lawmakers have been particularly hard-hit, those dealt a tough blow by redistricting include state Sen. Linda Garrou, the deputy Democratic leader, and Rep. Martha Alexander, who has served for nearly 20 years and is a former co-chair of the redistricting committee. In all, 10 of 25 Democratic women lawmakers in the state were either “double bunked” — forced into a district with another incumbent — or drawn into heavily Republican districts.

“I just don’t see how that’s anything other than deliberate,” Carol Teal, executive director at Lillian’s List, a group working to elect pro-choice Democratic women in the Tarheel State, told TPM. “There’s no other category of people who took that kind of hit.”

“Republican legislative leaders seemed especially eager to target Democratic women in the General Assembly for defeat,” noted NC Policy Watch.

Republican women in leadership have been targeted, too. Take Colorado, for example, which has the highest percentage (40) of female lawmakers in the county and where Democrats essentially controlled the redistricting process via a special commission. “Three of the nine Republican women in the House will have to run in a primary with another GOP incumbent. Two of them, House Majority Leader Amy Stephens and Rep. B.J. Nikkel, the majority whip, are in leadership,” according to the Denver Post. Party primaries for legislative seats in Colorado are scheduled for June 26.

In New Jersey, where women accounted for 28 percent of the 2011 Legislature, they made up 70 percent of the legislators who retired as a result of redistricting.

“The impact of the new map has been especially harsh on incumbent Democratic assemblywomen, with one quarter of them leaving the legislature,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics.

Walsh believes the impact of redistricting could be even worse than the numbers indicate.

“Much of what goes on, unfortunately, is very non-transparent, so it’s hard to figure out exactly what happened,” she told TPM.

This could be a coincidence (or partly a coincidence.) But whatever it is, it’s a sad comment on this country. We’re already way behind most other nations in national female representation and this will probably make it worse. If women are being run out of politics at the state level it’s hard to see where the new blood for federal office comes from.

(This chart says we rank number 78. You have to scroll waaay down to find us.)

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Penguins

by digby

West coast lunch break:

h/t to @sethdmichaels

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Dissonance and hypocrisy: why so many Americans lie about what they believe

by digby

Amanda Marcotte takes a closer look at the new Gallup poll which shows that theterm “pro-choice” is losing ground as a self-identifier. (The data shows that people’s views about abortion have changed little.) This is a very astute observation and one which I wish more poli-sci types would look into when they use polling to demonstrate this or that about the state of mind of the polity:

Polling Americans on vague beliefs and self-identity doesn’t really tell us much in general beyond highlighting how delusional and/or hypocritical our nation is. The reality is that there’s a huge gulf between what people claim to believe—even when speaking anonymously to a pollster—and what they actually believe, which is easier to measure when looking at behavior or what kind of policy choices they support. Gallup didn’t just measure views on abortion this week, but also took a more general look at Americans’ beliefs about various morally contentious issues, including sexual choices. While some of the answers are in alignment with people’s actual behavior—nearly nine out of 10 Americans support the use of contraception, for instance—in some cases the gulf between what people actually believe and what they tell pollsters is comical. For instance, 38 percent of Americans say that sex between unmarried heterosexuals is wrong, but Guttmacher data demonstrates that 95 percent of Americans actually do the deed at some point. Even in the unlikely event that there’s complete overlap between the “thou shall nots” and the “didn’t dos,” that still means one in three Americans is so invested in an image of themselves as an uptight prig that they will misrepresent themselves to a pollster who they know isn’t attaching their name to the answers.

It’s of course possible that one-third of our nation are swimming in daily guilt about their fornicating ways, but the likelier answer is that most of these people have rationalized their own choices while passing judgment on others. (Abortion providers see this all the time with self-identified pro-life patients, who usually have a reason why their abortion is the moral one.)

Religiosity is another example:

Two in five Americans say they regularly attend religious services. Upward of 90 percent of all Americans believe in God, pollsters report, and more than 70 percent have absolutely no doubt that God exists. The patron saint of Christmas, Americans insist, is the emaciated hero on the Cross, not the obese fellow in the overstuffed costume.

There is only one conclusion to draw from these numbers: Americans are significantly more religious than the citizens of other industrialized nations.

Except they are not.
[…]
There was an obvious clue (in hindsight) that the survey numbers were hugely inflated. Even as pundits theorized about why Americans were so much more religious than Europeans, quiet voices on the ground asked how, if so many Americans were attending services, the pews of so many churches could be deserted.

“If Americans are going to church at the rate they report, the churches would be full on Sunday mornings and denominations would be growing,” wrote C. Kirk Hadaway, now director of research at the Episcopal Church. (Hadaway’s research has included evangelical congregations, which reported sharp growth in recent decades.)
Hadaway and his colleagues compared actual attendance counts with church members’ reports about their attendance in 18 Catholic dioceses across the country and Protestants in a rural Ohio county. * They found that actual “church attendance rates for Protestants and Catholics are approximately one half” of what people reported.

A few years later, another study estimated how often Americans attended church by asking them to minutely document how they spent their time on Sundays. Without revealing that they were interested in religious practices, researchers Stanley Presser and Linda Stinson asked questions along these lines: “I would like to ask you about the things you did yesterday from midnight Saturday to midnight last night. Let’s start with midnight Saturday. What were you doing? What time did you finish? Where were you? What did you do next?”

This neutral interviewing method produced far fewer professions of church attendance. Compared to the “time-use” technique, Presser and Stinson found that nearly 50 percent more people claimed they attended services when asked the type of question that pollsters ask: “Did you attend religious services in the last week?”

In a more recent study, Hadaway estimated that if the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they attended church in the last week were accurate, about 118 million Americans would be at houses of worship each week. By calculating the number of congregations (including non-Christian congregations) and their average attendance, Hadaway estimated that in reality about 21 percent of Americans attended religious services weekly—exactly half the number who told pollsters they did.

Finally, in a brand new paper, Philip Brenner at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research compared self-reported attendance at religious services with “time-use” interviews in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Austria, Ireland, and Great Britain. Brenner looked at nearly 500 studies over four decades, involving nearly a million respondents.

Brenner found that the United States and Canada were outliers—not in religious attendance, but in overreporting religious attendance. Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans. The significant difference between the two North American countries and other industrialized nations was the enormous gap between poll responses and time-use studies in those two countries.

I recall reading years ago that when they compared people’s self-reported driving records to their claims of church attendance, they were clearly lying. We’ve known this for a while, but nobody wants to deal with it.

I think Amanda is right about many, if not most, Americans being moral hypocrites. And it’s not just over abortion and religion. It also applies to their feelings toward government and the common good. (I have long had my own hypothesis about why that is, but YMMV.) Until someone figures out how to use this information properly, I suspect that we’ll continue to be at the mercy of data that doesn’t reflect reality and smart propaganda that knows how to exploit the dissonance.

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The condemnation roundelay

by digby

I will happily join the Women’s Media Center’s condemnation of Hustler Magazine for the demeaning, sexually explicit depiction of SE Cupp in its pages. Nobody deserves that kind kind of treatment.

I was curious, however, to see if any of the right wing women’s groups had likewise come to the defense of Sandra Fluke when Limbaugh went on his days long tantrum. Here’s all I could find at Concerned Women for America:

In an election year gambit to unite women everywhere, feminists have launched the “Rock the Slut Vote” campaign.

Why, you ask? Their answer, “Our mission is to fight the GOP effort to bully, subjugate and silence women. We will wrest the power from the word slut and help women get informed, get involved, get registered and vote.” (Seems to me it was the left trying to bully, subjugate, and silence Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, by calling them names far more offensive than “slut.”)

According to the Daily Caller, “The previously not politically active study guide publisher, Susan McMillan Emry, started the group in early March following The Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood controversy, an increase in pro-life legislation and radio giant Rush Limbaugh’s controversial comments about contraception activist Sandra Fluke.”

So, this is about the GOP having a difference of opinion with feminists. That would be the feminists who declare they don’t need a man, while they are on Capitol Hill begging members of Congress (many of whom are men by the way) for money to support their sexual practices and resultant consequences of said sexual practices, which frequently occur with men. At least those that end up with a pregnancy. Once pregnant, these independent feminists need big daddy government or big daddy employer to step in and pay for their abortion. Of course, they claim if big daddy would provide them with contraception they might not need abortions too often.

They also mentioned it in this article condemning Bill Maher, referring to it as a “flub.”

Too Much Hypocrisy in Limbaugh-Fluke Fight

Decrying Rush Limbaugh’s recent Sandra Fluke flub while supporting comedian Bill Maher, who refers to conservative women as “Bimbos,” is a pure double standard.

Other than that, nada. As far as I could tell Concerned Women of America didn’t issue any kind of official condemnation of Limbaugh. And the unofficial criticisms were all prefaced by flowery paeans to Rush’s overall wonderfulness.

There was a blogger at the Independent Women’s Forum who expressed some discomfort with Limbaugh’s words:

From listening to Rush, I know what point he wanted to make. He wanted to highlight the absurdity of women, under the banner of feminism, who want to be seen as independent as they try to force other people to pay for their choices and lifestyle. Painting yourself as a victim for having to figure out how to buy your own contraception, especially when you are enrolled at one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools, is pretty difficult to mesh with the idea of true independence. Grossly exaggerating the costs of contraception invites jokes—childish to be sure—about how exactly one could run up such a tab.

But Rush shouldn’t have resorted to name calling. He has much better ammo than that. He knows this, and he has apologized to Sandra Fluke, and to the public more broadly, and I believe those apologies are sincere.

That same blogger is demanding that the left step up to defend Cupp, although she doesn’t think it will.

Another blogger said this:

Although I in general get a kick out of Rush, I didn’t care for his crude remark about Sandra Fluke either. (I have a thing about chivalry.) But the feminist troika is calling for the FCC to suppress Limbaugh. At one point, they describe Limbaugh as “hiding” behind the First Amendment!

Citing the scarcity of radio bandwith, Steinem, Morgan, and Fonda creepily wonder if letting Limbaugh, who brightens the day for millions, speaks is “in the public interest.” When they admonish the FCC that broadcasters should “serve their respective communities,” what they are talking about is getting a public agency to make sure people who don’t agree with them aren’t able to express their opinions on the radio.

And the Executive Director did publish this in the Hill:

Let’s be clear: There is no war on women. And it’s time to tone down the rhetoric.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans are actually attacking women. Calls for government-run, cradle-to-grave policies — from either the right or the left — are bad for women and their families; but they’re a far cry from an assault on women.

Ted Nugent’s (most recent) inflammatory comments, in which he referred to Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Nancy Pelosi as “varmints,” ought to be condemned — and forcefully. This kind of rhetoric — whether it’s from Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann or Rush Limbaugh — is not only repulsive, but also distracting.

I’m not sure I even know what that means, but whatever. (They had a lot to say about Sandra Fluke being wrong about everything.)

Michelle Malkin did come through, however:

I’ll tell you why Rush was wrong. Young Sandra Fluke of Georgetown Law is not a “slut.” She’s a moocher and a tool of the Nanny State. She’s a poster girl for the rabid Planned Parenthood lobby and its eugenics-inspired foremothers.

So there you have it. The funny thing is that I don’t recall anyone specifically demanding that they condemn Limbaugh.(They might have, I just couldn’t find it.) But then I suppose everyone knew it was a waste of time.

Calls to disavow and condemn are something we commonly do in our politics. (It’s one of my least favorite tactics, frankly.) But I hope nobody thinks it works the same way on both sides. The difference here, in case you haven’t figured it out, is that there is no one on the left who would defend Hustler’s misogyny on the merits. Limbaugh had no problem finding millions of defenders, even among women who could barely find even a throwaway sentence to condemn him. Liberals will never win in the condemnation roundelay. The two sides play by different rules.

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Rights are rights. Blowback is irrelevant.

by David Atkins

Marriage equality advocate Mae Kuykendall writes an op-ed in the New York Times demonstrating the key element, that has gone wrong with liberalism over the last 30 years. She argues, essentially, the the Supreme Court should thread the needle on the coming challenges to marriage discrimination laws by forcing states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, without requiring those states to perform the ceremonies themselves:

Some observers expect the court to dodge the issue. They assume that the best that can be hoped for is a long period of legal skirmishes that will gradually chip away at states’ denial of the rights and privileges of gay couples who marry where it is legal to do so. But a protracted and agonizing battle would not be good for anyone.

I happen to believe that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. But I also believe that the court isn’t ready to go that far. Directly mandating that states rewrite their laws to allow same-sex marriages (and that county clerks issue marriage licenses to gay couples) would risk the kind of backlash that followed court-ordered school desegregation in the 1950s.

In contrast, a more limited ruling that forbade states from voiding other states’ marriages would recognize equality as a fundamental norm of citizenship while also speaking to values, like fairness and neighborliness, that are often obscured by anti-marriage ballot initiatives. An example of this can be found in Wyoming, where Republican legislators defeated a bill last year that would have prohibited recognition of out-of-state marriages.

One can empathize a little with Ms. Kuykendall’s desire to find an outcome that might allow conservatives to save face and avoid a major backlash. But it’s deeply misguided.

Rights are rights. That’s why they’re called “rights.” One might wish they were enforced globally, but the limitations of power structures usually prevent that, at least at this point in human history. So insofar as our courts have jurisdiction, we expect them to enforce rights within our borders.

Imagine the contempt we would have today for an opinion writer who used the same logic for interracial marriage that Ms. Kuykendall does on same-sex marriage. Did Loving v. Virginia create a backlash, especially in certain states I’ll politely refuse to characterize? Yes, of course it did. Was it the right thing to do, anyway? Of course it was. Did the locals view it as the tyranny of a federal power intervening in business that it didn’t belong in, obliterating decent God-fearing local customs at the point of a federal marshal’s gun? I guess so. Too damn bad. Rights are rights, and local prejudices don’t get to determine who has rights and who doesn’t. If we had the civil rights era to do all over again, knowing that the Civil Rights Act would usher in two generations of Reaganomics delivered at the hands of racists and their puppeteers, would we do anything differently? No, we wouldn’t. Some principles are worth fighting for, and applying as universally as possible.

And if that means the regressive localities in question decide to wage a culture war and deliver blowback to the more progressive ones? Too damn bad. We’ll do without their votes, and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century, anyway.

That’s been the progressive program in the modern era ever since at least the late 19th century. The victories are never easy. There’s usually blowback, mostly political but also violent at times. And in the long run it’s worth the cost. The left broadly speaking used to understand that. I wonder if it still does.

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