So it seems New York is getting ready to legalize same sex marriage.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Another undecided New York senator says he will vote for gay marriage, adding momentum to the state's effort to become the sixth in the nation to legalize same-sex unions.

Do I care? Not much, it doesn't affect me. What bothers me is this: for the gay community, it's still not enough. What, they ask, about the gays that don't want to be married?

Here’s why I’m worried: Winning the right to marry is one thing; being forced to marry is quite another. How’s that? If the rollout of marriage equality in other states, like Massachusetts, is any guide, lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners will be required by both public and private employers to marry their partners in order to keep those rights. In other words, “winning” the right to marry may mean “losing” the rights we have now as domestic partners, as we’ll be folded into the all-or-nothing world of marriage.

Not to worry, though. The concerned "director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School" has this all figured out for us, and better than all of history to boot.

As strangers to marriage for so long, we’ve created loving and committed forms of family, care and attachment that far exceed, and often improve on, the narrow legal definition of marriage. Many of us are not ready to abandon those nonmarital ways of loving once we can legally marry.

Okay, by this theory, all loving and committed relationships, be they called marriage or something else, need to be treated equally under the law. Brothers and sisters are loving and committed, as are fathers and daughters. Heck, even roommates qualify under this definition.

And this is the problem in my eyes. In equating virtually any co-habitation with marriage, we will ultimately degrade the meaning of marriage.

Althouse comments as well.

Holy crap. Check this out:

(F)ormer President Bill Clinton was particularly troubled by the sex scandal: "Bill Clinton is very unhappy with Anthony Weiner right now. The Clintons are not thrilled with this."

The mind reels. What precisely is Clinton unhappy about? Weiner's failure to actually meet these girls? His failure to take them to his government office for some fun? His failure to employ the Cigar Gambit? And it gets better.

Congressional correspondent Luke Russert had described how "Among those Weiner has turned to since the scandal has broke is former President Bill Clinton, a close friend who presided at the Congressman's wedding and has referred to Weiner's wife as his second daughter."

Oh, that's rich. You're involved in a sex scandal, so you turn to Bill Clinton for guidance. That's like asking Ted Kennedy for help after a drunk driving incident.

Playwrite David Mamet has an interesting essay in the Village Voice documenting his political shift from left to right. Some choice outtakes:

We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. [...]

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long. [...]

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.