"State legislators cannot withhold the names and email addresses of constituents who contact them..."

"... the Wisconsin Court of Appeals decided Wednesday."

Currently, some public officials, including [Gov. Scott] Walker, leave names on correspondence requested under the open-records law while others have blacked them out. Dreps said the ruling creates a “bright-line rule” for all officials to follow.

Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, called the ruling “a win for transparency in government and the taxpayers of Wisconsin.”...

“I think people don’t realize how far-reaching this is,” [Sen. Jon] Erpenbach said...

NYT columnist Frank Bruni, 49, is teaching a college class and the students don't get his allusions.

They didn't know the Jane Fonda movies "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" and "Barbarella." They hadn't heard of Vanessa Redgrave or Greta Garbo.

Or at least they looked like they didn't. Should we trust Bruni's interpretation of the blank expression on their face? Did it mean "I don't know what you are referring to?" or "Boring!"

The school is Princeton, Bruni reveals in paragraph 4, which means, of course, the students aren't dumb. They're just fractured, lacking shared experience, which Bruno concedes might be good:

No single, potentially alienating cultural dogma holds sway. 

Oh? Young people may not know the grand old actresses that swan about forever in the mind of Frank Bruni....



... but I think the young people are actually quite aware of the sway of a single, potentially alienating cultural dogma.

Cue inevitable discussion of Brendan Eich and Bill Maher's talk of the "Gay Mafia."

"If it is unconscionable to support a company whose CEO once donated to the cause against marriage equality..."

"... why is it not unconscionable to support a candidate who opposed marriage equality as recently as 2008, and who was an integral part of an administration that embraced the Defense Of Marriage Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton?"

Asks Andrew Sullivan, noting that Hillary Clinton only came out for marriage equality in 2013.

Was she then a bigot? On what conceivable grounds can the Democratic party support a candidate who until only a year ago was, according to the latest orthodoxy, the equivalent of a segregationist, and whose administration enacted more anti-gay laws and measures than any in American history?

As I said in "What accounts for this sudden and shocking spike in bigotry?," opposition to same-sex marriage became bigotry, for purposes of the American political culture, in the year 2013. At that point, all the politicos who'd crafted some other position in order to get through a difficult transition got the message that now was the time to say yes to gay marriage, and this was the big opportunity for every politician who had secretly supported marriage equality or who didn't mind it enough to miss out on getting in good with the sector of our society that had come to believe in the righteousness of marriage equality. 2013 was the political amnesty year, and Hillary took that amnesty. Anyone who didn't jump at that point looks very different moving forward.

Now, Sullivan opposes the hounding of Brendan Eich, so understand his question that context. And I have no idea whether Eich still opposes marriage equality. His contribution of $1,000 to the Prop 8 cause came in 2008, 5 years before what I'm calling the amnesty year. Another key difference is that Hillary didn't make contributions to the anti-marriage-equality cause. She merely staked out the same safe, practical political position that other politicians used at the time. And she was a politician, so she needed to have something to say on this topic. Eich was a businessman, so he didn't need any position. He wanted to take a position.

I do think it's a bit ridiculous that there was a year when everyone was supposed to "evolve" on the subject. Obama said he'd evolved, and so everyone was supposed to be evolved alongside him. But Obama and plenty of other politicians were already fine with same-sex marriage. All that had evolved was the interest in saying so. 

"I think there is a gay mafia. I think if you cross them, you do get whacked."

Said Bill Maher, on the "Overtime" portion of his HBO show "Real Time," and this really annoys me, because I watched the whole damned show last night, hoping he'd do this issue, and the show was pretty bad and boring, never getting to this issue, and now I see it was dumped in the on-line only part?!

How did that happen? Hmm??? I suspect The Gay Mafia!

Blacklisting Prop 8 supporters and gay-rights antagonists is perfectly analogous to the old blacklisting of Communists and Communist "sympathizers."

Isn't it? I'm inviting you to probe this analogy, which may be a good or great but not perfect analogy. Help me locate any possible lack of alignment between the 2 phenomena, for the purpose of close examination.

Militantly tolerant — now, there's a concept. Too bad it's only an editing error.

From an article that's been up at the NYT since yesterday afternoon, by Farhad Manjoo, titled "Why Mozilla’s Chief Had to Resign":

Is this an instance of political correctness run amok? Is it a sign that Silicon Valley has become militantly tolerant, unwilling to let executives express their personal viewpoints on issues unrelated to their jobs? I’ve seen many such worries expressed online; even supporters of same-sex marriage have been characterizing Mr. Eich’s ouster as an awful precedent for giving in to moralistic mob rule.

"The people who were criticizing Brendan [Eich] were people who have advocated passionately for the rights of the oppressed."

"For them to turn on someone this way is wrong," said Geoffrey Moore (identified in the NYT as "a Silicon Valley consultant and author who has worked closely with Mozilla"):

Mr. Eich, he added, is a very analytical person who got into a situation he did not have the social skills to navigate. “My bet is he’s feeling very wounded. He gave his life and soul to this. Sometimes a community doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” Mr. Moore said.

Community speech — collective speech — it matters. But it doesn't really know what it's doing.

AND: Andrew Sullivan prints and responds to some reader mail he got after he wrote about what happened to Eich.

Morality has always been about keeping society on the same page. If you violate the the norms, then you are shamed and ridiculed. The ultimate “victory” of the gay rights movement will be that those discriminating against homosexuals will be ridiculed and isolated as bigots. Ultimately we can only hope that the best values win out, and that we will always find outcasts in society that share our values, should our values violate the norm.

There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.

NOTE: I'm adding this note to make that double indentation clear. The single indent is Sullivan's response to his reader. I wouldn't put the punctuation outside of the quotation mark like that, by the way.

"If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. "

"If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us."