| January 10, 2010 | Calendar | Archives |
In the doldrums of January, we have this historic trial-as-teaching-momnet in California. It's fun to follow it live except that you can't get any work done.
Civics or political science classes should be using the live blog as required reading because people comment on the feed with links to the books and articles being cited in the courtroom. Although the Prop 8 case (Perry v. Schwarzenegger) issue is more akin to Loving v. Virginia which threw out bans on interracial marriage, I think of this trial more as the Scopes trial of our time because it is a fight against ignorance. If video of it ever makes it to YouTube, it will be such a teaching tool. Instead of hearing only sound bites and slanted ads from each side, we get to hear each side's best arguments carefully laid out in a civil environment and backed up by reference material. I wish more controversial issues had such forums.
Two great pieces on it are Ted Olson's The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage in Newsweek and Margaret Talbot's piece in the New Yorker.
The trial itself with its famous litigants is a marker for where we are in civil rights history. Like Scopes, we will probably lose the trial, but change history.
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I have a new camera (Canon PowerShot SX20IS 12.1MP Digital Camera with 20x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch Articulating LCD), just a fancy point and shooter really; I'm not a photographer, I just take a lot of pictures. I document. The twist and tilt LCD is an extremely useful feature (the performer above the heads of the crowd, the creature in the culvert, boiling maple syrup inside the evaporator), and the camera takes high def video. Now that we have only one dog, I take her and the new camera for walks in the neighborhood, including up to Bill Russell's barn where I encountered this '52 Ford truck. Fresh paint on an old truck pretty much destroys its visual historical record, its pentimento. Nowhere near as interesting as