Fear and Loathing in California

I've got a new piece up at CifA about the Prop 8 hearings yesterday in California:

Watching and listening on TV to the attorney for the sponsors of Prop. 8, Ken Starr – last seen feverishly masturbating over a Beltway tryst and a stained blue dress – speak in his yawn-inducing monotone about revisions versus amendments, what struck me most was how passionless it all was. We're talking about people's lives, and family and sex and romance and love, and people's right to have that love legally recognized – everything we associate with emotion and intimacy and the most fundamental expressions of our humanity. Yet all of that was being very carefully ignored, talked around in this dreadfully staid and formal way.

It made me want to run into that courtroom and shout and gnash my teeth and stomp my feet, just to inject some semblance of passion into the proceedings.

(If I could simultaneously have drowned out Starr's inserting into the record such laughably absurd asides as "Each of us is a minority – a minority of one" and "Proposition 8 doesn't invalidate – it merely denies recognition" in that condescending cadence he picked up at the Bobby Jindal School of Speaking Good, it would have been even better.)

Naturally, I know that a courtroom isn't the place for that sort of thing – that justice isn't meant to be meted out on the basis of emotional entreaties – so I didn't expect fists pounding against podiums. Yet there was something somehow indecent about the calm, abstract, detached legal proceeding meant to consider a thing born of the messy vulgarity of irrational fear and raw hatred.

Read the whole thing here.