Conor Friedersdorf:

If a majority of gays decide to marry, and are permitted to do so, traditional marriage will be strengthened — because relative to the alternative, getting hitched is going to seem more like the thing you do when you think you want to spend your life with or raise kids with a romantic partner. 

And if gays aren’t permitted to marry?

What straight people are going to see is the loving gay couple who’ve lived in the house on the corner together for 40 years, take walks together each evening … and aren’t married to one another. They’re going to see the two lovely women raising the adorable child in the first-grade class at the local elementary school … who aren’t married to one another. If opponents of gay marriage succeed — if there are lots of gay couples who are never permitted to get married — the affected gays and lesbians will still form longtime attachments and families, many of which will thrive.

What those families will be signalling to the straight people around them isn’t “heterosexual marriage as described in the Bible is sacred.” The cultural message that will be transmitted is the oneJoni Mitchell sang about: “I don’t need no piece of paper at the city hall/Keeping us tied and true.”

That’s why it’s North Carolina voters who’ve unwittingly hurt traditional marriage with their actions this week. Whereas President Obama has helped traditional marriage by implicitly saying that getting married is valuable for people who want to start families or spend their lives together.

As Megan McArdle calls President Obama’s economic plan… 

If Obama didn’t want to be judged on the basis of the economy’s performance, he shouldn’t have let his mouth write checks that he couldn’t cash.  If it turned out to maybe be a little harder to steer the economy where you want it than he thought it was, then maybe he should lay off claiming that the Republicans drove the thing into a ditch.  

But he hasn’t.  Instead he’s complaining that the GOP won’t let him steer—pretty rich considering that he started out with a 60-seat majority in Congress, and chose to ignore the economy in favor of passing a health care bill that has gotten even less popular since we passed it to find out what was in it.

So says Andrew Sullivan, translating this Bruce Bartlett analysis of Obama’s state of the union tax code suggestions: 

He wants a special deduction available only to companies engaged in manufacturing to be doubled, but most tax specialists think this should just be abolished. He’s in favor of extending a tuition tax credit, which mostly gets capitalised into higher tuition fees and does little to improve access to higher education for middle class families. There’s also special tax relief for small businesses “that are raising wages and creating good jobs” that he wants to introduce even though no one knows how to target such incentives and past efforts have failed. Finally, he would like a new tax credit for “clean energy” and tax credits for companies hiring military veterans.

At the same time, Mr Obama proposes a variety of gimmicky new tax penalties, to punish companies that move jobs overseas for example. He wants to force every US-based multinational corporation to pay a minimum tax, and made individuals earning at least $1m per year to pay at least 30 per cent of their income in tax.

How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (14) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you’d have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You’d have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn’t have to choose between our values and our safety. 

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things. 

- Conor Friedersdorf