Yours truly is staying here in town. I’m joining some friends near Annapolis for a wonderful, veggie-friendly Christmas Eve dinner tonight, and some more friends tomorrow. I usually go home to Western New York or on vacation, but after a very busy month, I just want to relax, take care of some things, and just chill out. And of course, have my Courageous Conversation with a family member. I’m checking out a copy of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen today (anyone read it?), visiting the new Wegmans grocery store in suburban Maryland (see here if you want to know why this is a big deal), starting Battlestar Galactica with my boyfriend next week, playing some touch football, etc. But, my Chanukah present from my boyfriend was a trip to NYC plus a musical, so we’re going to head up for a few nights next week to see In The Heights (it’s closing in January), eat at Zen Palate, see some friends, splurge at 2nd Avenue Deli, and continue my quest to find the best bagel in the city (leave your suggestions, please!). Then, we’re hanging with some friends for New Year’s.
How will you be spending your holiday?
As for P8TT, this’ll probably be my last post until after New Year’s. Real time off means real time off from everything, including blogging here and at my home blog, OpenLeft.com. If something comes up and I am inspired to write, I will, but we’ll have having Golden Oldies here for the next week or so. Of course, feel free to comment on their content, or on whatever else you like. And if you haven’t suggested a post you’d really like to see re-published, tonight’s the last thread in which to do it.
And remember, if you found some great holiday deals and have some extra cash on you (or if you love this site enough), please make a tax-deductible contribution to Prop8TrialTracker.com. We’ve become such a strong community here, but it doesn’t come free. It’s all funded by small donations, so every dollar you put it in is another dollar you’ll get back out of P8TT. You can chip in here.
So happy holidays, and if you’re celebrating, Merry Christmas to you. We’ve come a long way for equality in 2010, from the Prop 8 trial to repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the It Gets Better campaign and more. It was fun doing it with you, and will be fun doing it even better in 2011.
By now, most of you have seen the response video from NOM over the FCKH8 vide0s (on marriage and bullies)
Like Jeremy Hooper, I liked the video but wasn’t thrilled about (a) the strategy of using kids (b) how the video would present to the movable middle. I think some tactics are meant for rallying the base and exciting marriage supporters- which this clearly was and did- while others are not. There wasn’t much in the video about responsibility, commitment, equality, or other messages shown to be effective to persuading open-minded non-equality supporters. You can’t argue with raising $200K, but I might have tweaked how it was done a bit to appeal universally.
On the other hand, like Jeremy, I think NOM using kids to attack the use of kids is, well typical. And for all the concerns about the FCKH8 video, raising cash off this is far worse. As you know from my writing around the NOM bus tours, I’m never one to stay away from confrontational tactics, so if NOM is going to take this and use it in the way we all knew they would, it only further drives me to kick their butt in 2011.
An original version of this post was published on Sunday, December 19th, 2010. We’ll be having an open thread every night of the week leading up to Christmas for submissions on your favorite pieces of the year.
By Adam Bink
Over at my home blog, OpenLeft.com, we on the management team like to take the holidays off to rest, recharge, etc. While folks are often driven to write anyway because of current events or inspiration, what we do to keep things lively is feature past pieces that our readers particularly like. We call them “Golden Oldies”.
My tenure running the shop here ends on Christmas, as I plan to recharge as well (and travel), although I may continue at some point in the future. In the meantime, I decided to bring the same idea to P8TT. For the upcoming holiday season between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ll be re-posting some of the more interesting/provocative/brilliant front page pieces from P8TT’s history. The reason is because not everyone has a chance to read every piece throughout the year. As many of you know, if you Google “Prop 8 Trial”, it takes you here, and many folks who came here because they did that during the 9th Circuit hearing, or simply because they just heard about the blog, haven’t had a chance to read some of the better, more insightful pieces from the blog’s history.
So, we’d like to open up the floor to you to recommend your favorite stuff. It could be live-blogging from the Judge Walker’s district courthouse. It could be NOM tour posts, whether the national tour or the California tour. It could be a commentary piece you find particularly insightful that I did, or Eden, Julia, Rob, Jeremy Hooper, Karen Ocamb, Arisha, Rick, or someone else. Just leave a URL in the comments and we’ll pick the best suggestions. And of course, the management has ideas of our own.
To help you find the URLs, I recommend using the Categories “tags” on the right side of the page you’re currently viewing (they say Community/Meta, DADT Trial… NOM Tour Tracker… etc.). And if you want to go back to find earlier posts beyond the page you’re viewing, scroll down to the bottom and hit the “Older Posts” button. You can keep doing that to scroll back and back. Or, you could just use Google, and I recommend inserting the words “Prop 8 Trial Tracker” in your query along with whatever terms you remember, such as the author or topic. If you simply can’t find it, try asking your fellow P8TTers to help in the comments. And if you like someone’s nomination, be sure to leave a comment “second!” or “third!” or whatnot so we know what the good stuff is. An example is here.
I’ll be asking you as an open thread each night throughout the week leading up to Christmas.
Three candidates for the chairpersonship of the Republican National Committee recently sat down with Susan B Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser and National Organization for Marriage Chair Maggie Gallagher to answer questions pertaining to choice and marriage. Here’s what they had to say (with videos fast forwarded to Maggie’s marriage part):
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