Maggie Gallagher, President of the National Organization for Marriage, sends along the following:

Florida Marriage Amendment in Trouble!

Help! After an unprecedented audit, the Florida Marriage Amendment (which we thought safely on the 2008 ballot) is in danger of falling just 30,000 signatures short. Florida4Marriage needs to raise $50,000 in two days to mail new petitions to 40,000 Florida voters.

Can you imagine what a victory gay marriage groups will claim if we fall just short?

I just went to their website to donate personally $100; Can you help too? Go to www.florida4marriage.org/contribute.html. Have a credit card handy.
Note: this takes you directly to the Florida marriage amendment group’s website. NOM is not fundraising on this — we’re trying to use our national resources to help state groups fight marriage battles.

I hope you don’t mind my contacting you for this purpose!

God bless,
Maggie (Gallagher)

P.S. For those in Florida, or who know anyone in Florida, below are some more action steps you can take:

Action Steps:

1) Find new friends, neighbors and family who have not signed the petition. Petitions can be downloaded in PDF format at www.Florida4marriage.org

2) Appeal to your pastor to do one last petition collection over the next 2 Sundays. An announcement from the pulpit is critical.

3) Collect Petitions at Early Voting Sites: Volunteer to collect petitions outside of early voting sites which opened today. Click HERE to look up your county Supervisor of Elections office and find early voting sites in your county. Make sure you stand 100 feet away from the polling place to meet the legal requirement.

News Clips:

Miami Herald: Same Sex Marriage Ban May Not Make Ballot: www.miamiherald.com/458/story/379560.html

Juno lays bare a “bitterly unfair truth of sexuality,” says Caitlin Flanagan in yesterday’s New York Times: “Female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine.”

On our website last week, I argued that Juno is far from your average teen-comedy fairy tale: Juno shows the hard facts of adolescent pregnancy, and it is effective precisely because the viewer—female or male—can begin to imagine the consequences of what Flanagan smoothly terms “desire.”

She raises some very good points: “Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood”; “Surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost”; and, of course, the age-old observation that there is a double standard for male and female sexuality. Men might suffer privately and psychologically from an “unplanned pregnancy”; women also suffer publicly and physically.

Victorian-era parents recognized these dangers, and hush-hush prudishness was their reaction. Today, says Flanagan, our reaction to the “brutally unfair outcome [of] adolescent sexuality” is different:

We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free–perhaps for the first time in history–from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level. Now we have to ask ourselves this question: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated?

Flanagan takes it for granted that the answer is Yes. But, in her assessment, freedom from the “trauma of pregnancy” and its psychological aftermath is the only consideration. Maybe just maybe, though, sexual liberation involves more than divorcing ourselves from the hard consequences of sex. Maybe it also requires liberation from the root causes, so that our young women have the strength to respect themselves–to value their bodily and emotional integrity–even when men and society do not.

Sexual liberation is a good thing. But we’ll never get it from the fairy tale of free love.

Robert: Sorry, ain’t buyin’ it.

She couldn’t be impartial because SHE’S AGAINST CRIME? Look, there were plenty of people there who made up some story for the sake of beating jury duty—but no one in that room believed she couldn’t be impartial in that particular case because SHE WAS AGAINST CRIME.

If she couldn’t be impartial because she had prosecuted too many cases of a similar nature—as one potential juror (a district attorney) argued—then fine. If she couldn’t be impartial because she was herself the victim of the crime the defendant was being tried for, and the memories were too raw—understandable. If she couldn’t treat a police officer like any other witness because she had been a repeated target of police harassment or brutality, that too would have proved very effective. (As it did in at least two cases.)

If she just wanted out because she was otherwise occupied or courtrooms gave her the creeps (strange choice of profession, then, no?), then make up a story about a sick relative or chronic pain or her English being questionable (which it was). Sad, but so it goes.

But because SHE WAS AGAINST CRIME?

Who should take her seriously as a lawyer when she is willing to state publicly that BEING AGAINST CRIME is a fit reason not to sit as a juror? Where then shall we go for jurors—the psych ward at Bellevue? Should only sociopaths be summoned to jury duty? Shall every voir dire feature a cast of anarchists and nihilists?

I would think that this recent law grad’s burgeoning reputation as a member of the legal profession would have played some role in informing a more credible excuse than that SHE WAS AGAINST CRIME.

But maybe it’s just me . . .

The recent law graduate you met at jury duty, Anthony, was no nit-wit, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. In fact, she was probably pretty sharp. She knew that it’s a reversible error to seat a juror who says that he or she can’t be fair, and, presumably because she didn’t want to serve, she took the first opportunity presented to her to say the magic words that would keep her off the jury. We may, with good reason, attack her lack of public spiritedness, but not her intellect. If she wanted out of jury duty, she said exactly the right thing.

Apparently our political candidates are not being careful with their personal pronouns. This should not be too surprising, as they have other things to occupy the forefront of their minds, but the Wall Street Journal has a nice article on grammar in politics and the changing trends in American English. The best quote comes from Bryan Garner, former editor of Oxford’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage: “People who are shaky in their grammar think of ‘myself’ as a safe usage, but to a real snoot, it’s bothersome.”

When it comes to matters linguistic, myself is definitely a real snoot. But myself am also a linguistics major who remembers a bit of English syntax. I like my sentences to obey the rules of English grammar, under which reflexive pronouns (like myself) require proper antecedents and cannot be the subject of sentences. While I won’t be voting on grammar this November, I do hope that the candidates can clean up their English, if not for the sake of the English language then for that of the voters ourselves.

Yes, Ryan, you’re right that David Brooks’ column in the New York Times today was a fine one. I just wish that he had named Ward Connerly, not Ward Churchill, for his example of opponents to identity politics. Ward Connerly is the former regent for the University of California who opposes racial preferences. Ward Churchill is the radical activist recently fired from the University of Colorado. Not really the same person—though has anyone ever seen them together?

David Brooks has a sharp column in the New York Times today. Here’s a taste:

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

Fair enough. The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

(snip)

The final two points I’d make are: First, this whole show seems stale and deranged to the younger set, as Obama and Clinton seemed to recognize when they damped down the feud yesterday afternoon. The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

Some weeks ago I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on the increasing ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government, particularly under Vladimir Putin. Caesaropapism has a history in Russia, and while it has appeared in the Western Church, its greatest flourishing has been in the East, most notably in Byzantium and in Russia. The Journal’s article told of the return of an unhealthy unity between the church and the state, in this case manifested in a prison chaplain being defrocked for declaring a man under his care a political prisoner.

A few days ago in the New York Times, the unhappy resurgence of the Russian Church appeared again. In 1912, Czar Nicholas II helped to build a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Nice for the growing number of Russians vacationing on the French Riviera. The Russian government claims that Nicholas owned the property, which he leased for 99 years to the archbishop of St. Petersburg. The lease expired on December 31, 2007, and now the property should revert to the Russian state, successor to the kingdom of the czars. As one might expect, the archpriest of the cathedral, Fr. Jean Gueit, begs to differ. Aside from questions of whether the Czar actually owned the property, the church is now under different Orthodox jurisdiction and has been declared part of the French national patrimony. When experts in Russian art obtained a court order to perform an inventory of the building and contents of the church, Fr. Gueit denied them entry, and has made it clear since then that the Russian Orthodox Church has neither spiritual nor secular jurisdiction over the cathedral.

On the one hand, the Russian Orthodox Church fighting over the jurisdiction of souls and churches is nothing new, however unfortunate it might be. What’s troubling is that the Russian government is now getting involved too. And their arm is longer and stronger than that of the Church.

. . . from jury duty, but not before witnessing this exchange between the judge and a recent graduate from law school.

Judge: Can you be a fair and impartial juror on this case?

Potential Juror: No.

Judge: Why not?

Potential Juror: Because I’m against crime.

Now I would have followed up with: “What law school did you go to, and did you use a dial-up or broadband connection to access your courses?”

Instead, the judge patiently tried to explain to the law school graduate that we were all against crime, that no one was for crime, and that her objection was irrelevant. She persisted, and so was excused. I swear the court stenographer tried to trip her as she left the jury box . . .

I came this close (my thumb and forefinger are an eighth of an inch apart) to being selected for one particular jury—until I asked about jury nullification and the possibility of the case being referred to the Star Chamber.

I was physically escorted from the courtroom.