PunditPending

I, for one, am still chewing over Mr. Beck’s apology.

UPDATE: Via the Feed, Greg has video of the one mildly-amusing portion of the interview. Two words: tickle fight.

Friday night on Real Time, Bill Maher, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and I discussed Move Your Money. Andrew liked the idea, but worried that it might cause a run on the too-big-to-fail banks. It won’t. But it’s clear from what’s happening in Washington that we need a citizens’ intervention to reform our financial institutions. Creating a de facto Glass-Steagall by separating our government-guaranteed deposits from the casino/investment side of the banking industry is a great start. More people are reaching the same conclusion. A new poll found that 9 percent of Americans have already moved their money out of a big bank as a protest. And the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to require any bank doing business with the city to reinvest in the community. It’s about time citizens and local governments inject some much-needed competition into our increasingly oligarchic banking system.

The nationwide furor around gay marriage has eclipsed at least temporarily the health crisis that continues to plague gay men. At the same time that we heard wedding bells and pledges of life-long fidelity from gay men in Massachusetts and elsewhere, we have soaring rates of HIV in homosexual men. One almost feels guilty bringing up the subject of sexual responsibility at a time when the gay community is waging a pitched battle to secure the right to marry. But ironically, gay marriage — and the values any sanctioned marriage encourages — may be one of the single most successful ways to promote safer sex.

In the past, most everything in gay sub-culture revolved around being single and available. Long-term couples often felt like they were on the outside looking in. Slick advertising for circuit parties where men “party” for days on end became the order of the day. There was little room for marital bliss in this picture. And while the yearning for committed relationships and love often burns as brightly in gay men as in anyone else, it didn’t have a lot of support. No gay wedding magazines or announcements in the newspapers. Meanwhile, many gay men became conditioned to see becoming HIV positive as a natural right of passage of gay life.

Suddenly everything seems different. It is hip to be gay and be married. In 2004, Massachusetts — the state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation — paved the way, and despite fear and protestations, the Commonwealth somehow survived. In the heart of the homeland, Iowa followed, joined last year by Connecticut. California also took a step closer to this goal, which resulted court rulings and the landmark federal court case, Perry v. Schwarzenegger currently before the 9th circuit court.

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There has been an interesting flap in Cambridge this past week regarding some appalling remarks made by one Martin Kramer. As some of you undoubtedly know, Kramer is a hard-line Israeli-American commentator who has made something of a name for himself attacking the Middle East studies profession, and just about anyone who is remotely critical of Israel’s actions or the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship.” (Full disclosure: he’s taken various ill-aimed swipes at me in the past few years). He was an early supporter of Campus Watch (the organization Daniel Pipes founded to blacklist scholars it disapproved of), and Kramer has also sought to convince Congress to curtail or at least closely monitor the Title VI funding it provides to support Middle East studies and other area studies programs at American universities. He is affiliated with a number of right-of-center organizations in the United States and Israel, and for the past few years, he’s also been a research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs here at Harvard, under the auspices of its National Security Studies program. […]