Like many others, I found President Bush's speech at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal to be truly remarkable. It is exceedingly rare that a public figure so clearly articulates a condemning judgment of prior generations, and so clearly refutes the claim that it is unfair and anachronistic to judge past generations by today's standards:

At every turn, the struggle for equality was resisted by many of the powerful. And some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time, yet in every time there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name.

I am writing an essay this summer on this very problem--how we in the present should assess the wrongdoing of prior generations--and I have concluded that the point on which President Bush focused is key: Was there, in that prior generation, a sizeable group of people who parted company with the wrongdoers and resisted, condemned, or protested it? If so, then the wrongdoers' acts look a lot more like choices, and a lot less like unreflective conformity with the unquestioned standards of a given time.

The counter to the argument for condemning the wrongdoing of past generations was eloquently stated by the nineteenth century historian and legislator Lord Macaulay, who wrote:

the very considerations which lead us to look forward with sanguine hope to the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the past. We do not flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained perfection, that we are wiser than our ancestors. We believe, also, that our posterity will be wiser than we. It would be gross injustice in our grandchildren to talk of us with contempt, merely because they may have surpassed us . . . . As we would have our descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace person in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be. But it is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should be reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.

Yesterday the president called slaveowners criminals. ("One of the largest migrations of history," said Bush, referring to the slave trade, "was also one of the greatest crimes of history.") It would be a stunning thing for a reporter to ask the President whether he really meant that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington--and even his own great- great- great-grandfather--were criminals, "[s]mall men" who "took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters," and practicioners of "hypocrisy" and "injustice."

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
Last night in our “Political Buzz” segment, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who is running for president, accused some in the United States Congress of attempting to criminalize abortions, in other words, put women in prison who’ve had abortions.
***
MATTHEWS: Congressman Chris Smith represents the 4th District of New Jersey. He joins us now.
Congressman Smith, do you believe in putting women in prison for having abortions?
REP. CHRIS SMITH R, NEW JERSEY: Absolutely not. That was a very irresponsible and a presumptuous statement on the part of Mr. Kucinich. He’s dead wrong.
Legislation including the partial-birth abortion which is making its way through Congress and all of the previous bills that have gone forward, some of which were vetoed by Bill Clinton, have an explicit piece of language in there that says no woman will be prosecuted under this act.
That is the intent of what we tried to do with all of our legislation and even pre-Roe v. Wade.
MATTHEWS: What is your thinking behind that?
SMITH: Without a doubt, we believe and I believe in pro-life woman believes that these women are co-victims with the babies. The baby has an act of violence on him or her. Physical dismemberment or poisoning by harsh chemicals.
MATTHEWS: Sure.
SMITH: But the mother carries incredible psychological consequences.
And as a matter of fact, I’m part of and recently hosted on Capitol Hill a Silent No More campaign. This is a group of women who have had abortions who are trying to tell others that there’s an enormous pain that they carry. They’re co-victims.
And like I said, the proof is in the legislation. It clearly states something as horrific as partial-birth abortion, where the baby is partially delivered and then his or her brains are sucked out, there’s a protection that the woman will not be...
***
MATTHEWS: Is there any other member of Congress, man or woman, Democrat or Republican, who advocates jailing women for abortion?
SMITH: I know of absolutely no one.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about-just a point here. We only have 30 seconds.
Why is it important to put the doctor in prison or finding him heavily or her heavily when they’re operating as an agent of a woman who seeks an abortion? And in most cases, when you ask somebody to do it, you’re the principal. Why in this case would a woman not be-should not be subject to penalization?
SMITH: Again, very often, women are under enormous pressure to have an abortion. They may be frightened. They’re very vulnerable.
The physician, if you want to call him that, the abortionist, should know better. He’s the one who has to go in there and dismember or chemically poison an unborn child. And in the past, prior to Roe, that’s who was the subject of sanctions.
You know, we have a sanction right now. If you kill a bald eagle, you get a year in prison. Kill a second bald eagle, you get five years. Partial birth abortion, we’re saying two years.
MATTHEWS: That’s the bottom line, that women shouldn’t go to jail for having abortions?
SMITH: Exactly right.
MATTHEWS: Thank you very much. Congressman Chris Smith from New Jersey

One of the lamest arguments against same-sex marriage is that it violates the principle that marriage is for procreation. Tell that to Pat Buchanan, who has no kids, or to the hundreds of thousands of childless couples who consider themselves rightly married. But there's even a statute in Arizona, a legal scholar/friend of mine notes, that takes this discrepancy further. It grants marriages on the grounds that at least one of the parties is infertile. Here's the statute (the cite is A.R.S. Section 25-101):

Void and prohibited marriages
A. Marriage between parents and children, including grandparents and grandchildren of every degree, between brothers and sisters of the one-half as well as the whole blood, and between uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews and between first cousins, is prohibited and void.
B. Notwithstanding subsection A, first cousins may marry if both are sixty-five years of age or older or if one or both first cousins are under sixty-five years of age, upon approval of any superior court judge in the state if proof has been presented to the judge that one of the cousins is unable to reproduce.
C. Marriage between persons of the same sex is void and prohibited.

Note how same-sex marriages are prohibited but explicitly non-procreative near-incestuous marriages are not. A similar discrepancy occurs in the Catholic Church, which allows marriages between the infertile or the post-menopausal but denies such marriages to gay people partly on the grounds of thier inability to reproduce. When John Kerry invokes reproduction, he needs to address this argument. So do all who agree (emphasis is Sullivan's).

A majority of New Hampshire Supreme Court justices appeared Wednesday to favor a narrow definition of adultery in their comments on a disputed Lebanon Family Court ruling that said gay extramarital sex should count as adultery....
The justices heard oral arguments in an appeal brought by a gay woman from Brownsville who is accused of adultery in the pending divorce action of a Hanover couple. "My position is New Hampshire has no same-sex adultery," said Robin Mayer, who represented herself in her appeal to the court. The 1791 adultery statute was meant to apply only to heterosexual intercourse, she said.
...While none of the justices explicitly supported either side in the debate, several of them indicated they see obstacles to an expansive interpretation of the law."Our task is to be sure we interpret the constitution and these laws in line with what people thought at the time," Justice Joseph Nadeau said.
...Justice James Duggan said that without a "bright line" defining prohibited sex acts, it will be very difficult to decide what kind of conduct constitutes adultery.
..."The Ten Commandments say, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' It doesn't say, 'Thou shalt not have an intimate relationship with someone,' " Nadeau said....
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) filed a brief calling for equal treatment...."Gay and lesbian relationships are as significant as non-gay ones and therefore pose the same threat to the marital union. . . . New Hampshire courts should treat gay adultery the same no matter the gender of the person with whom a spouse engages in an extramarital relationship," they wrote.
...Adultery is a misdemeanor crime under New Hampshire law, and the criminal statute defines adultery simply as sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not that person's spouse. The criminal statute doesn't define the term "sexual intercourse."

This is just the occasional reminder that the reason we need to find WMDs in Iraq, if they exist, isn't simply to help re-elect George Bush. It's also because if they really exist, and we don't know where they are, then we have a wee bit of a problem on our hands. That's why we went to war in the first place, remember. I'd find the notion that they really believed Iraq was a threat more plausible if all discussions of the weapons weren't simply about ass covering.

Those who wanted a presidential candidate who would run the strongest possible campaign were asked to stand in one area. Those who wanted someone who would run only in areas where electoral votes would not be pulled from the Democratic presidential candidate stood in another. Those who wanted to skip the race altogether and, instead, support the Democratic candidate stood in yet another.

Most house races have been gerrymandered out of competitiveness. Delay, especially if he succeeds in juryrigging the Texas map, will probably have a seat for life. Democrats know this and therefore expend very little resources on about 90 percent of the house races where they have no chance. I'm saying to the Greens, pick 10 or 20 seats that the Dems won't fight for anyway, which preferably have large college populations, perhaps stirred to anger about the prospect of both grant cuts and a new draft to build the empire, and shoot for 70 percent turnout.