Once again, religious conservatives and their toadies find themselves in a panic over imagined threats to their narrow worldview. I can't decide which I find more repellent: The fact that in 2006 people still ascribe a mystical power to the concept of "marriage", or the fact that elected officials find it necessary to discuss a Constitutional proscription on the rights of one group in order to mollify another.

In the eyes of the law a marriage is a contract that bears both benefits and burdens for the contracting parties. Disingenuous flowcharts and facile whingeing notwithstanding, the so-called marriage debate has yet to produce a single argument in favor of a Constitutional definition of marriage that does not proceed from either perceived religious prohibitions or simple secular prejudice. Neither religion nor prejudice has any place in a discussion of state-sanctioned contracts.

Save the fear-mongering and piety for church. The grown-ups have too much work to do digging out from six years of Bush to worry about this flat-earth nonsense.

between a godless Women's Studies professor and a Fundamentalist Christian you are probably going to have alot more fun with the christian if you are a teenage boy

As a male raised in the fundamentalist-christian community I would beg to differ. I suppose things have changed a bit in the 20 years since I called myself a christian but in my day, a "fun" youth outing was a bus trip to a miniature-golf course sandwiched in between prayer meetings and constant reminders not to touch the girl in the seat across the aisle. The only thing "fun" about christian youth ministries was the opportunity to be around other people who felt just as out-of-touch with mainstream culture as I did, people who generally had the same cynical attitude about it underneath the conditioned responses to the altar call and the strains of "Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling".

I'd rather have hung out with a "godless Women's Studies professor" any day of the week.

I've had an iPod for about four years and I like it very much: It enables me to carry around a huge variety of music, including those "deep cuts" and oddball tracks that I generally wouldn't bother with if I had to tote a physical CD. I listen to the BBC News podcast on it, I listen to books, I catch up with "This American Life" and the DemocracyNow podcast: It's like a TiVo for my pocket. I can take basically my whole music collection to a party, or flip through some pictures for a friend. Relax, it's just a tool.

It's strange to me that the device seems to polarize people so much, and it also seems to encourage some broad-stroke generalizing: I listen to my iPod on the train every day, while I'm reading, despite the poster who suggested that I'm post-literate or a-literate or whatever the phrase was. Why would someone else's pleasure--at no expense to you--make you so angry?

Well said, Mr. Raut. Thank you for your eloquent letter and for your service in the cause of justice. Your response to the odious Mr. Stimson is a bracing reminder that the notions of freedom and due process are tested at their margins, where the waters are often murky and treacherous.

I completely agree about Baldwin's performance in Outside Providence, it's one of my favorites. He's certainly the best thing about the movie, although it does have its moments (Drugs's letter to Dunphy makes me laugh every time).

Someone a few letters back mentioned Baldwin's performance in Miami Blues; he is indeed terrific, and both Fred Ward and Jennifer Jason Leigh turn in some of their best work too. He was still a beautiful young man at the time but yikes, what a sociopath that character was. Just his stare managed to look both blank and calclulating at the same time. Good stuff.

People listen to Limbaugh and Hannity and the myriad other RW broadcasting stooges because they massage their listeners' egos. No new information is being presented, there's nothing to challenge the audience or engage critical thinking or present a different perspective: There's just validation of a point of view that the listeners have already adopted.

Liberalism requires a society to make difficult choices and draw fine distinctions between priorities. It requires people to make a longterm commitment to what is best for the society as a whole rather than what is best for a given individual at a given time, which requires sacrifice. It presupposes and requires a broad class of educated consumers and voters who are capable of and willing to govern themselves and balance their desires against the costs of those desires.

Does that sound preachy? Well tough shit. Democracy is hard work. It requires vision and commitment and sacrifice and empathy. If conservatives don't want to live in a republic anymore then fine, it is as they say a free country. But if we're going to survive as a nation we're going to have to toughen up and face the real hard choices, not spend our time playing cowboys 'n' Indians around the globe and fantasizing about our next leased vehicle.

Why go through all that when a chummy-sounding fratboy wannabe will spend three hours a day telling me how special I am because I put an elephant sticker on my car? It's much easier to hear that I'm great, nothing I'm doing has any impact on the nation or the world, and everything bad in society is someone else's fault. And as an added bonus, the more I listen, the better I feel.

Conservatives need this sort of ego-massage at this point in the unraveling of their ideology. The facts readily at hand only serve to further undermine the point of view in which they've become so invested; there's nothing to be done but retreat ever further into the soothing tones of their leaders' hate- and fear-mongering.