It was not a dog it was a cock aka rooster in the box.

"Maybe soon it will just be called marriage!" is the best line about gay marriage I've heard.

@1: oh, well, that's alright then. Shipping chickens in boxes with no food or water for two days, that's totally OK.

I'm confused about the animal in a box. Is it still in the box? It seems as if people are standing around the box arguing about what's inside and whether its wrong to mail something like that. Open the MFing box and let it out!!!!!!!!

@3 It's the standard practice when buying chicks.

@ 3 - that's the practice. And it's supposed to be chicks, not full grown animals. But the article dose not say.

@ 1, they never said what kind of animal was in the box, just what people thought it was. Which underscores @ 4's point. (@ 4, my guess is that the rules against mail tampering are so strict that nobody wanted to risk it - not that it makes it right, obviously, but when your job is on the line it makes you think twice, three times, and more.)

@ 3, echoing the other comments, live chicks can definitely survive without food and water for up to 48 hours after hatching, which is why they survive being mailed. Even so, they need to be picked up from the post office immediately and given food and water.

@4 - As long as they keep the box closed, it is simultaneously a rooster and a puppy and both immoral and okay. I worry that there's a distinct possibility it will become only a stupid rooster that someone shouldn't have mailed if opened. I advocate for leaving the box closed.

Nine comments before the obligatory Schroedinger reference? SLOG is slow this morning.

I wonder how many rhinos will be killed by the drones before the drones manage to kill a poacher?

You're right it was a cock in a box, 7 is too early to start the mind-keyboard connection. Fixed now! Changed "dog" to "rooster."

@10 - The comment was already there (and also still not there) until you opened the link to check.

Well, here's our big chance. If we win, all Americans will become Equal before the law. If we lose, LGBT Americans will be forced back into second-class status for a lifetime.

I understand why many groups opposed challenging Prop 8 in the courts. HRC and Lambda Legal were both against it initially. The proper response to such frightening prospects is not to run and hide. A purely defensive strategy is always a losing strategy; the act of retreat weakens one's position. In the face of such terror, one has to march right at the problem face-on, unblinking and with grim awareness of the risks being taken. This is not delusional self-confidence, rather a depressive realism matched with the determination to win against such odds.

The definition of courage is an unwillingness to let fear paralyze you. We all experience fear. We need not become its prisoner.

@ 14, "for a lifetime?" I think not. The failure of Civil Rights bills in the 50s didn't keep African Americans at second class status for a lifetime. (Also, sometimes retreat is a strengthening strategy, allowing one to pick a better time and place to fight. That needs to be understood.)

Change is inevitable. We are winning the war, but that won't mean winning every battle.

Does Eddie Vedder have an alibi for the ukulele crime?

Re; GOL! or Not: Using high-tech solutions to determine if a ball crosses the goal line or not would only be addressing the tip of the iceberg. Nobody would seriously suggest that there be video reviews of every foul or non-foul. And if someone thinks that there was a hand ball, are they going to stop the game for a few minutes to review the film?

Here's something they COULD do, though. The Hawk-Eye product already involves putting a chip in the ball. It would be easy to clip a similar chip to the jerseys of all the players. Then, Electronic Arts could, in a matter of weeks, develop software that could accurately and automatically determine offsides and non-offsides. This would reduce the number of bad calls significantly.

Now that the election formalities are over and done with the oligarchs can move the war agenda Forward (TM). It's beginning to look a lot like 2003: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pla…

15,

No, it didn't. But the Dredd Scott decision did.

1) The legislature is fluid. Its composition, and therefore the laws it crafts, shift and change according to the popular will of the time. The SCOTUS is more concrete, because appointments are lifelong.

2) The SCOTUS has the Final Word. The Legislature can and frequently does revise decisions made by previous legislators. The SCOTUS is bound by precedent, to the point where it refuses to overturn prior SCOTUS decisions. And the SCOTUS can trump the Legislature in ways the Legislature cannot do to the SCOTUS without a Constitutional Amendment (which is hard as hell to do).

3) The Legislature frequently gets out in front of popular opinion, in hopes of being seen as daring and courageous "mavericks". Nobody votes for SCOTUS judges, they're appointed and then approved or rejected. Because of that, the POTUS looks for candidates who are "safe" and unlikely to embarrass them, at least till the POTUS finishes a second term. "Safe" people don't like changing things.

So yeah, this is kinda our one big chance. Whatever the outcome, it's going to stand for a very long time.

@ 20, the comparison to Dred Scot fails for two reasons.

One, Dred Scot was only the law of the land for eight years. The 13th and 14th Amendments removed the case from jurisprudence. Maybe you were thinking of Plessy v. Ferguson?

Two, would you say conditions today are more like the 1850s (or 1890s), or the 1950s?

I'd say it's more like the 1950s. I think that's so self evident that I'm not going to make a case for it, but I welcome any challenges to prove it, provided that they come with your own case as to why it's more like the 1850s.

Keep in mind, too, that this is about DOMA, which can still be repealed even if it's upheld. And there's no reason to believe it won't be.

Wait a minute - did the shoplifter bring his own ukelele to the heist? Or do convenience stores stock uke's nowadays?

Also, I forgot to mention... SCOTUS can overturn SCOTUS decisions. Brown v. Board of Education did exactly that to Plessy v. Ferguson.

21,

The effects of Dredd Scott continued to be felt long after the Civil War ended. When I say that Blacks were relegated to Second Class status, I do not just mean slavery, which rendered them as something even worse than Second Class (slaves were effectively a non-class without any rights at all, whereas Second Class implies that there are some but not all rights). It wasn't really until the Voting Rights Act that we started to see full civil rights for Blacks begin to emerge. And even then, that's when that flower began to bud. its still in the act of opening to full flower, and we are years away from that.

As for present conditions, I again state that the Legislature is more subject to the zeitgeist than the SCOTUS. The Justices are not elected, and serve for life. POTUS will not appoint a radical Justice, since such a Justice would never make it through confirmation and may prove to be an embarrassment during the administration of the POTUS, or a stain on POTUS' legacy, Even though he was not a radical by any measure, Abe Fortas serves as a good example of why POTUS will pick candidates believed to be Least Likely to Embarrass.

Least Likely to Embarrass usually means unlikely to make changes unless absolutely necessary.

the real argument here is, is Equal Marriage an absolutely necessary issue? I would argue that it is, since the 14th Amendment is clearly being violated by statewide bans to Marriage Equality. However, the SCOTUS has been reluctant to discuss considering groups not determined by precedent to be protected by the 14th Amendment since the Slaughterhouse Cases. On the other hand, Lawrence v. Texas clearly indicates that SCOTUS has the GLBT Civil Rights issue weighing on it's conscience. We therefore have a tug-of-war between the mroal conscience that demands that they protect LGBT Americans from discrimination and reluctance to change. Which side will win that tug-of-war is not clear.

What is clear is that we must win. We have to take this seriously enough to donate funds to the legal eagles so they can properly win this case. Failure is not an option here. And we must not presume that losing would in any sense be okay. We cannot allow ourselves to fail.

@ 24, Dred Scott (and that is spelled Dred Scott, not Dredd Scott or Dred Scot) had nothing to do with Jim Crow. Dred Scott was about slavery. The case that ruled Jim Crow constitutional was Plessy v. Ferguson. Jim Crow arose for a number of reasons, but the chief one was that white people in America just weren't ready to treat black people as equals. The racism was just that embedded in us.

But... the differences between the situations matter. America today is way beyond that point with LGBT rights. The idea of LGBT people being "normal" is much more widely accepted today than the notion of African Americans being equal to whites was in the 1890s.

And make no mistake... the SCOTUS is no more immune to the zeitgeist, to use your word, than Congress, or anyone else. Supreme Court justices are human, after all, and the law is so complicated that they can justify their decisions on almost anything.

Naturally, that's no reason to believe that the Roberts court is going to just go along with the zeitgeist. But ... again... this case is only about DOMA. DOMA isn't Jim Crow. It isn't part of a new, ongoing effort to suppress LGBT equality. It's just one law. If SCOTUS upholds it, Congress can still repeal it.

The pattern in US history is clear: Once oppressed minorities begin to gain their rights, there's no backtracking. So we can confidently say that Congress will repeal DOMA. Maybe not with the incoming Congress, but I'll bet you $50 it will be history in five years.

Anyway, WE won't fail. The case before SCOTUS might, but that failure won't be our failure.

25,

Lets hope that neither we nor the Court fails. Lets work as hard as we can to ensure that victory is the only possible outcome.

That said, victory and failure are not Boolean. SCOTUS can choose a number of outcomes:

1) DOMA struck down, Prop 8 upheld. This would leave it up to the states to decide who is an American and who is not. In one sense, this is monstrous, as a referendum on human rights is about as insane as two wolves and a sheep arguing over whats for dinner.

2) proposition 8 struck down in a narrow sense, DOMA upheld. In this event, the only change is that California becomes the tenth state with legal Equal Marriage.1/5 of the country is therefore free, and 4/5 are in chains.

3) Proposition 8 overturned broadly, DOMA upheld. You're fucked in terms of the IRS, but in states with state income tax you at least gets some consolation. Federal employees and service members receive equal treatment before the law at the whim of the POTUS. Given that one of the two major political parties actively hates GLBT people, that means we're in trouble half the time. You're better off working for a state than you are for the feds.

4) Prop 8 struck down in a broad sense, DOMA overturned. In this case, all Americans are Equal before the law. Democracy wins, and mob rule loses. Our country moves one step closer to the ideal we all aspire to.

The only acceptable outcome along this spectrum is 4. To settle for less is equivalent to breaking into the National Archives to steal the copy of the Constitution housed there to use it for toilet paper while firing bullets into the Lincoln Memorial. the very idea of America is that we succeed or fail based on how hard we work, how brilliant our ideas are, and how dedicated we become to our mutual protection. Failure is an affront to that very concept.

Thus, we cannot fail. Doing so not only means we disappoint the GLBT community, it means we disappoint our very identity as Americans.

@26: Ooh, nice hyperbole.

27,

Thank you!

@13 I think I love you

@ 26, you put way too much stake in one case. The tide is with us, and if it isn't brought about by a single judicial fiat, it will be brought about by tireless work. What will NOT happen is a setback so severe as to outlaw marriage equality where it exists and basically shove everyone back into the closet. Which was essentially what you were predicting way back @ 14.

30,

Anything less than total egalitarianism is completely unacceptable to me. I would recite the line about nobody being free unless we all are, but I'm also completely opposed to the use of cliches in blog postings.

I am not above hyperbole in the service of motivation toward success, however. Faux News was remarkably successful in propping up the Bush regime and the Tea Party. Keith Olberman showed that hyperbole can be used to promote Social Liberalism just as effectively. John Kerry proved that just standing there looking horrified when they pitchforks and torches crowd shows up doesn't get you anywhere.

nor is it that much of a stretch to state that Second Class citizenship is the state of affairs in Gay America. It may not feel like a state of emergency in our comfortable gayborhood urbanite lives, but to a teenage kid about to throw himself off a bridge in some podunk Midwestern town, it sure is. And to those trapped in unhappy lives forced to live out marital roles dictated to them by religious fanatics in the South, furtively seeking brief encounters at dank little bars hoping nobody recognizes them, life is pure hell. It was only a couple years ago that the Dallas Police raided a gay bar and bashed some guy's head in and left him paralyzed.

So is it hyperbolic of me to state that we face a choice between affirming our democracy as one in which even the unpopular minority enjoys equal protection before the law or mob rule punctuated by violence and terror in over half the country? No, that's actually a statement of fact. Hyperbole is when you think that the whole world looks like Capitol Hill.

You and i are lucky enough to live in havens of peace and toleration separated by only an hour's distance from one another. Our island of safety is just that. And there are those who should be so lucky to call this hyperboreal wetland paradise their home. For those who can't, we have to fight as if losing was something so horrible that we will simply not allow that event to occur.

Because if we do win, that kid might climb down off that bridge. That poor fellow might have the choice of marrying a husband rather than a wife, even in his conservative Southern village. And the next time the Dallas Police visit the Rainbow Lounge, it will be to have a drink with the patrons.

If we win, the country as a whole wins. Democracy wins. People whose lives will be enriched by their gay neighbors even way out in places like Orange County, Virginia or Anadarko, Oklahoma, or Bethel, Alaska or Kouts, Indiana will come to know a better America than they did the day before. They will come to know a nation whose embrace of diversity and love makes it stronger, more beautiful, and more hospitable.

We must fight against the angry mob that wants to send us marching back to the 18th century so much that they show up in period dress to political rallies. We must douse their torches and dull the tips of their pitchforks. we must hold the angry mob with its nooses at bay, defending the frightened and shivering figure huddled in the dark. this has been the historical role of the just throughout our history. it is your duty, and it is mine.

And to the whole world, let me apologize not for my hyperbole but for my prolix. Concision may indeed be the soul of God, but I am a soulless atheist. I beg mercy therefore not from the heavens, but from my fellow Sloggers, in hopes of the kind of redemption that will someday result in wedding invitations.

Did I mention that I have the whole day free tomorrow? *Ahem*.

This actually doesn't really sound like bed bugs. I would hope they had them identified by a professional entomologist. "Small black dots in a book" is not a bed bug and sounds more like a booklouse or possibly collembola; or even fleas. And that New York Times article was blown hugely out of proportion and does not reflect what's really going on at the libraries.

And freezing is not an effective method of control for bed bugs. Please, keep that in mind if you ever get an infestation.

re: bedbugs. i get my house treated for spiders, and my bug guy, ed, and i talk shop sometimes. "what's the grossest thing you saw this week?" etc (i'd ask him - fortunately not the other way around!)

one day we were talking bedbugs and he told me that last year they never got one call. (they had a woman who was convinced she had them but it turned out her pets had fleas). hardly anybody on their staff had ever seen one in real life. this year, he says, has been insane! he said they've been getting two or three calls a week and that most of them have turned out to be actual cases of bedbugs. there is an explosion of them all over seattle and the eastside. he said most often they are originating in childrens' bedrooms, and the prevailing theory is that the kids are picking them up at school or sleepaway camp.

this conversation happened in september - i haven't talked to him since then, but there's no reason at all to assume it's dropped off. i don't want to feed paranoia but i'm just saying, it IS a thing that could happen to you and it is a HUGE ordeal when it does. so take precautions.

ok, public service announcement over. (and i have a short list of restaurants to avoid but i can't name them or i'll get sued or something probably).

@ 31, anything less that total egalitarianism is reality. Total egalitarianism has never existed anywhere on earth, and probably never will. We just try to make the best of it that we can.

Anyway, I'm going to regard most of your post as being addressed to venomlash, not me. I didn't accuse you of hyperbole.

I'll sign off by saying that we will win, no matter what happens with SCOTUS. The tide is on our side, and even the worst possible decision they could issue will be overcome in a matter of years, not a lifetime.

35.

If we lose, they are no longer SCOTUS, they instead become SCROTUM.

Zeno's Paradox inhibits all forward motion if compromise is your strategy. I prefer the strategy of William Sherman, who would settle for nothing less than total victory, and therefore got it.

@36: "Zeno's Paradox inhibits all forward motion if compromise is your strategy."
Lol wut? But yeah, I'm a fan of William Tecumseh Sherman, and plan to keep his name on the tip of my tongue if I ever find myself in the South.

37,

Well, if I had said "Half-measures avail us none" it would have been a violation of my previously mentioned ban on cliches. And after those long diatribes posted above, i figured that i had better find a way to express the idea in as few words as possible, lest I bore you.

one can be forgiven of many things, but one must never bore.

@Tacoma Traveler and Matt from Denver:

I think the issue is one of tactics, not strategy. Socially conservative, homophobic, theocracy-friendly justices Scalia and Thomas* and swing-voting justice Kennedy could die or become incapacitated within the next four years and -- if Senate Democrats get their act together and repeal or emasculate the filibuster and the personal hold on the first day of the next Congress** -- be replaced by significantly more socially progressive jurists. Why risk the substantial possibility of a precedent upholding anti-gay discrimination as constitutional when, with a little patience, you might have a shot at one holding it unconstitutional? As Tacoma Traveler noted, the Supreme Court is reluctant to overturn precedent, and constitutional amendments are extremely difficult to pass. (We couldn't even manage to pass an amendment granting women equal rights under law.) In constitutional litigation, discretion as to timing is often the better part of valor. It's not like HRC and Lambda Legal wouldn't have their pick of cases to champion in case of a pass on these ones.

But the cases are going forward and whether they were tactically well advised is a moot point. Now, equality advocates' hopes are probably all resting on which way Kennedy decides to swing. Let's hope he comes out swinging against bigotry but not be surprised if he doesn't.

*Yeah, Thomas is a relative youngster so it might just be wishful thinking on my part, but like Scalia, he looks like he can't say no to a copious, rich, fatty meal.

**Incidentally, Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- the progressive justice most likely to leave the Court in the next four years -- should be riding Obama's ass to ride the Senate's ass on this for the very same reason. How is she going to feel about leaving if she knows that a minority of 41 Republican senators gets to veto her potential replacements?

39,

How did you get it to do italics and bold print? Also, can you adjust the font on this thing?

@40: <b>bold text</b>
<i>italic text</i>
<u>underlined text</u>
You can nest tags, but make sure to close them off properly so as not to fuck up the whole thread and arouse the ire of SLOG. Also, you don't know what a mess of syntax I had to go through to make those example tags show up properly.

He obviously doesn't, but I do. Well-done, sir.