Sunday Morning Rambling

Man, did you hear that thunder last night? Today it's cloudy and humid, a lazy July morning. They're playing a lot of perky acoustic guitar, folksy-sounding open tunings, fingerpicking, on WPFW this morning, and that's okay with me. I'm sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, I just uploaded a recording of the band to Facebook, which was harder to do than it should have been. Everybody in the band took vacations in June, all at different times, so we haven't even seen each other for more than a month. And we are going to play a show Friday, with no rehearsal. I think it will be fun, we'll have to be alert, pay attention, we will certainly screw up the occasional ending and harmony part, but let's see what happens! I need to pick up the guitar every day this week to build my calluses back up -- don't let me forget.

Did you see this? Treasure found in India:

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India, July 2 (UPI) -- A hidden treasure worth hundreds of millions of dollars has been discovered below a temple in southern India, officials say.

The diamonds, emeralds, and gold and silver coins and figurines were found in underground chambers at the 16th century Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala state, the BBC reported Saturday.

Inspectors are cataloguing the items, which have not been officially value but are believed to be worth about 28 billion rupees, or more than $600 million.

Don't you love that?

I am not following the ugly case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn closely but it appears he's going to get out of it. Gee, who would have ever guessed that a jet-setting gazillionaire, one of the most powerful men in the world, would prevail over an immigrant hotel maid? Nobody knows what happened in that room but everybody knows how it's going to come out. Interestingly, when I was in France people talked as if obviously he is innocent, they see it very differently from us.

The media talk as if the "DSK" story is a sex scandal, like Monica Lewinsky or like John Ensign's mess, but it is not that at all. He is not accused of having sex with someone he is not married to, he is accused of a brutal rape. Sure the guy looks like something out of an ad for an expensive Scotch, and sure the girl might be lying, and all of that will come out eventually. In the meantime, Strauss-Kahn is not involved in a sex scandal, he is accused of rape, a violent crime. Can we please have the sophistication to distinguish the two?

Oh, and while I'm rambling, here's an interesting turnaround, and probably a significant one, too, in this morning's Post:

In a strongly worded legal brief, the Obama administration has said the federal act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman was motivated by hostility toward gays and lesbians and is unconstitutional.

The brief was filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco in support of a lesbian federal employee’s lawsuit claiming the government wrongly denied health coverage to her same-sex spouse.

The Justice Department says Karen Golinski’s suit should not be dismissed because the law under which her spouse was denied benefits — the Defense of Marriage Act — violates the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

“The official legislative record makes plain that DOMA Section 3 was motivated in large part by animus toward gay and lesbian individuals and their intimate relationships, and Congress identified no other interest that is materially advanced by Section 3,” the brief reads, referring to the section in the act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Though the administration has previously said it will not defend the marriage act, the brief is the first court filing in which it urges the court to find the law unconstitutional, said Tobias Barrington Wolff, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Justice opposes law against gay marriage

This is a big deal. It is embarrassing to think that the United States of America has a federal law that withholds benefits from marriages that don't pass a certain test. With the Fourth of July coming up, everybody is talking about "our freedom" and all that, and you have to wonder how a country where freedom and liberty are patriotic slogans can have anything like the Defense of Marriage Act on the record at all. Really, it's embarrassing. If any country should push the limits of freedom and liberty, it should be us, but no, that is not always the case.

President Obama has said that his opinion about same-sex marriage is "evolving," and that's ridiculous. Everybody's opinions are evolving, of course, but you know when he says it he means that public opinion is evolving and he's just going to keep his mouth shut because he's afraid of controversy. There is no argument against two consenting adults marrying one another, it makes no sense for them to have to pass a gender-complementarity test. If you belong to a religion that does not accept marriages between two people of the same sex then fine, don't do it, that's easy. But the church has no business telling nonmembers who they can marry, and it's not the government's job, either. The President is smart enough to know that. He has gone back and forth in public statements and now he says he's evolving instead of leading.

So in that light it is encouraging to see the administration putting its foot down and declaring that DOMA is legislated bigotry. The only reason the federal government has a law about marriage is because some voters don't like gay people, and I'm sorry but it doesn't work that way here. The marriage-equality train is running down the track, I don't think anybody can stop it now. New York was the final blow -- and did you see how upset everybody was when Rhode Island passed a law recognizing civil unions? It did look rather wimpy after NY passed the whole package. Gay people fall in love, they want to have a home and a family, let's call it what it is: marriage. Homes, families, love, these are things our society wants to encourage, we want to make it easy for people, not harder.

Nice slide guitar on WPFW now. Coffee's all gone. It's hot out, I'm glad I got the grass mowed last night when it was still cool. Something happened this week and I am thinking about going fishing. A couple of bluegill on the end of a flyline sounds pretty good to me, I'll toss them back but it might do me some good to stare at the water for a while. And I guess there is a chance that a trout will bite. I'd throw that back, too. Unless it was a big one.