Sunday punditry, bright and early!
Frank Rich:
This is increasingly the live-and-let-live society we inhabit — particularly younger America. In a Times/CBS News poll in April, 57 percent of those under 40 supported same-sex marriage. The approval figure for all ages (42 percent) has nearly doubled in just five years. On Tuesday the California Supreme Court will render its opinion on that state’s pox on gay marriage, Proposition 8. Since Prop 8 passed last fall, four states have legalized gay marriage and New Hampshire is about to. This rapid change has been greeted not by a backlash, but by a national shrug — just as a seemingly gay "American Idol" victory most likely would have been.
Nicholas Kristof:
We in the West misunderstand starvation — especially the increasing hunger caused by the global economic crisis — and so along with Paul Bowers, the student winner of my "win-a-trip" contest, I’ve been traveling across five countries in West Africa, meeting the malnourished.
Christopher Caldwell:
That is why Mr Cheney’s big push has been successful. It confronts Mr Obama with a Gordian knot that he dare not cut. A constitution that enshrines rights is an asset, but it does not come free. If it did, every country would have one. Eight years ago, Americans reckoned that some rights were worth trading for security. If they want those rights back, they will probably have to trade some security. That is the bargain. Until Mr Obama admits it he will be tangled up in an illogic from which no oratory can extract him.
That assumes Mr. Cheney's big push has, in fact, been successful.
Margie Omero:
Bad news continues for Republicans. Not only is the national party identification gap widening, as I posted a few weeks ago, support for progressive views on social issues is increasing. Now a recent Democracy Corps survey piles on. For the first time in Democracy Corps' research, voters are now evenly divided on which party is doing the better job on national security (41% Democrats, 43% Republicans). In 2003, for example, more than twice as many voters felt Republicans did a better job (54%) than said Democrats were doing the better job (25%).
Timothy Rose:
Like me, many remain cautiously optimistic that Iowa will not stand alone in the Midwest as a beacon of equality for long, but the record is mixed in the region and elsewhere. In 2006, Wisconsin and South Dakota passed constitutional bans on marriage equality. South Dakota's ban passed by only 52 percent after a remarkable grass-roots campaign fighting the ballot initiative with the simple slogan, "Good neighbors don't discriminate." This year, an effort to ban discrimination in North Dakota went down in flames. However, both Maine and New Hampshire passed marriage-equality legislation recently. Marriage equality in my home state of Minnesota may be litigious rather than legislative.