Reading the Times with my coffee

Well, time for something a little lighter than my usual fare. Let’s read the New York Times this morning for our amusement and enlightenment.

1. From an article http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/arts/design/13dino.html?th&emc=th about a new dinosaur exhibit:

The final section is, appropriately, on the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. Much is made, of course, of the asteroid or comet that struck Earth at that time and contributed to a mass extinction of life. But other things were going on, including global climate change….

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE killed the dinosaurs!? So it was the Republicans. I suspected it all along. They wouldn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty, and look what happened. Well, maybe we should all vote Democratic next time and see if we can bring the dinosaurs back.

2. From an article http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/national/13nebraska.html?th&emc=th about redefining marriage:

LINCOLN, Neb., May 12 (AP) – A federal judge on Thursday struck down Nebraska’s ban on same-sex marriage….

The amendment to the state’s Constitution, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, was passed overwhelmingly by the voters in November 2000.

The Nebraska ruling is the first in which a federal court has struck down a state ban on same-sex marriage, and conservatives in the United States Senate pointed to it as evidence of the need for a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The judge in the Nebraska case, Joseph F. Bataillon of Federal District Court, said the ban “imposes significant burdens on both the expressive and intimate associational rights” of gay men and lesbians “….

Actually–remember, you heard it here first!–Judge Bataillon was at first inclined to bow to the wishes of the people of Nebraska. He told the plaintiffs in the case, “Guys, if you want to live together, live together! Who’s stopping you?” But he was secretly paid $7.5 billion as an inducement to change his ruling , and to override the usual legislative processes previously thought essential to democracy and the rule of law.

Some think it was the gay lobby that paid him to change his ruling, but the real scoop is that the bribe was paid by the Republican Party.

You see, ever since the founding of this country, marriage has always been understood as “between a man and a woman.” So when the Republicans started talking about how we need to nail down that definition in a Constitutional Amendment, there was a lot of grumbling. “Why do we need an amendment just to keep what we’ve always had? Why go through all that rigmarole?”

So the pro-marriage people said, “Well, if we don’t explicitly write it in the Constitution, some Federal judge is going to just go ahead and amend the Constitution the other way, to CHANGE the definition of marriage as we’ve always known it. And if it’s a liberal pro-gay judge, he won’t bother with all that stuff about Senate votes, three-fourths of the states and all that. He’ll just issue an opinion, and the ‘right’ to gay marriage will be a fait accompli.”

Then the anti-Marriage Amendment people said, “Aw, come on, one judge can’t change the Constitution all by himself! Not if a clear majority of the American people–of both Democrats and Republicans–don’t want it changed. Let’s just leave it to the American people to decide in their own states how to define marriage.”

So the pro-Marriage Amendment people bribed the judge, to prove that one judge could so change the Constitution all by himself. QED.