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OK, we've got somewhat of a backlog to take care of here, due to summertime laziness striking early this year. So we're just going to plow through the swirling storm of craziness as fast as possible. Insert your own "Sharknado" joke, if you feel so inclined.
Welcome back to our monthly review of President Obama's job approval polling numbers. This is going to be an abbreviated version of our normal column, because it got squeezed out of the Monday slot by the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, so apologies for this month's brevity in advance. June wasn't a particularly good month for Obama's numbers -- in fact it was a fairly bad month for him, as his numbers went "underwater" for the first time in his second term. Let's take a look at this month's chart:
Today, exactly 150 years ago, the Battle of Gettysburg began. Seen by most military historians as the turning point of the Civil War, the victory of North over South was indeed a profound moment in time. But I'm going to leave that sort of thing to the military historians who are much more informed about the battle itself, the meaningfulness of the victory, and all the rest of the arrows-on-a-map analysis. There should be plenty of such commentary this week to commemorate the battle, a three-day affair that left roughly 50,000 Americans dead. Instead, today I'm going to go off on a rather large tangent into the history of the American political world, so be warned.
Well, we've been away for two weeks, and those two weeks were just chock-full of political news, so we've got a lot to cover. The reason for the interruption in columns was, of course, our attending Netroots Nation, the yearly conclave of bloggers, Progressives, and all and sundry who like hanging out with them. Which brings us to this week's unusual title -- today's Friday Talking Points, for the first time ever, are going to be professionally-produced and focus-group-tested. More on this later.
However, for a whole lot of gay couples, life will have gotten one whale of a lot better. Today's Supreme Court rulings are a giant leap forward along the path to fully equal rights. The federal government will now recognize marriages which their states recognize, and the barriers to equal treatment under federal law have disintegrated for good. That is indeed something to celebrate. Which is why I'm going to stop using the term "gay marriage" ever again in my writing. There is no "same-sex" and "opposite-sex" marriage anymore. There is just marriage, period. From now on, the phrase I'll be using is "marriage equality," because we're all now equal under federal law -- as we should be under state law, as well.
This is an article about Paula Deen, racism, and the upcoming gay marriage decisions from the Supreme Court. But mostly it's an article about the long, slow road to true changes in American society. The beginning of this road always starts with the prevailing casual acceptance of bigotry and prejudice in everyday life, and the road doesn't end until society as a whole reaches the point of near-universal condemnation of a way of thinking which used to be widespread and unremarkable.
The Supremes could surprise me, of course -- they've certainly done so in the past, on many occasions. It's a lot tougher to pick outcomes on the Supreme Court than it is to, say, pick who is likely to win an election. Only nine people get to vote, after all, and they don't answer public opinion polls in the meantime. But I have a strong suspicion that the Supreme Court is going to try to kick the political can down the road a bit.
Some weeks, not much happens in political news, and other weeks it seems like almost too much happens. This was one of the latter types of week.
Boy Scouts, traditionally, have been associated with the tying of knots. Knot-tying has always been a part of scouting, and even today just about any Boy Scout would be able to tell you the difference between a square knot and a granny knot. But today, the Boy Scouts seem to be attempting to unravel a Gordian knot, instead.
A comprehensive immigration reform bill has been approved by the Senate committee responsible for immigration laws, and the bill will now move to the Senate floor. This is good news for people who want to see immigration reform, obviously, but the bill’s still got quite a ways to go before it reaches President Obama’s desk for his signature. There are, in fact, six more hurdles the bill will likely face, and some of them are dauntingly high.