When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, the polls showed disapproval by a margin of 53 percent to 35 percent. After the ruling went into effect, legislators geared up to reverse it by amending the state constitution. But two years later, the poll numbers had flipped, and the backlash never came. That's because reversing the court's ruling was a long process, not a quick and hasty ballot initiative like the one that Maine passed in Tuesday's election. In Maine, the law passed last May and never even went into effect. In Massachusetts, by contrast, as I wrote last year:

According to state law, lawmakers had to vote twice, both chambers together and in two separate years, to reject the court's ruling. And even then, they would succeed only in getting their state constitutional amendment on the state ballot, where voters would have had one more chance to save gay marriage.

The champagne and the marriage licenses began flowing in Massachusetts in May 2004, around the time the clock started on the complicated process to overturn the gay-marriage decision. The Legislature's first vote went against same-sex marriage—though for civil unions—by a bare majority, 105 votes to 92. No supporter of gay marriage lost his or her seat in the next election, according to Yale law professor William Eskridge. Opponents got nervous. So, they started down a different road: If they gathered enough signatures to get their amendment on the ballot, they'd need only 25 percent support from the Legislature at two constitutional conventions to put it to a statewide vote.

This meant more years and more marriage licenses—10,000-plus in the state. And time proved to be gay marriage's best friend. Plenty of signatures were collected, and on its first go-round, the amendment—anti-gay marriage, pro-civil union—won 62 of 200 votes in the Legislature—enough to make it past the 50-vote threshold. But when the Legislature took up the measure again in 2007, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick lobbied hard against the amendment, and 17 lawmakers defected. To the surprise of the same-sex marriage opponents, their amendment couldn't even muster support from 25 percent of the Legislature and went down to defeat.

In Massachusetts, familiarity with same-sex marriage bred the opposite of contempt. In Maine, as in California last year, voters didn't give themselves time to get used to the new unions. Andrew Sullivan is right to take heart in the closeness of the vote (53 percent to 47 percent, it looks like) and to remind us that, "A decade ago, the marriage issue was toxic. Now it divides evenly." He also predicts that, "Soon, it will win everywhere." He's more likely to be right the fewer insta-cook ballot initiatives we have. That's the reality of direct democracy right now.

Photograph of a gay rights march in Washington, D.C. in October by Getty Images.

Tags: gay marriage, maine, question 1, same-sex marriage; ballot initatives

I'm sorry, Rachael, but this story you linked about Abby Johnson's sudden conversion from a Planned Parenthood director to an anti-choice fanatic has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese after being used for target practice. Johnson's story fits way too neatly into a bunch of easily disproven anti-choice myths, the main one being that all it takes is one glance at an ultrasound to cause someone to "realize" that hey! abortion removes a fetus from your uterus. Pro-choicers already know that. Johnson seems to be selling a story that's a tad too pat, too close to what anti-choicers want to hear.

After all, your average person in the United States has seen probably hundreds of sonograms in their lives, and most of them show a fetus at gestational age well beyond the point that most women get elective abortions. If you compare the ultrasound taken prior to an elective abortion, the feeling is actually one of being underwhelmed, because there's not much there compared to the ones we're used to seeing. The anti-choice sentimental devices rely therefore on ignorance more than illumination—their own mistaken understanding of what goes on in an abortion clinic.

But as Amie Newman points out, there are even more holes than that in this story. Johnson worked at a clinic that provides abortion, amongst other things. Therefore, she's probably seen a whole lot of ultrasound-enabled abortions. Providing ultrasound is standard part of an abortion, because gestational age determines the exact procedure, and whether or not the clinic can even do it. Anyone who has worked in or even spoken to someone about working in a clinic knows that there's not a lot of mystery around the procedure, and so Johnson's story of a sudden revelation about the nature of abortion simply doesn't seem possible. Indeed, I should remind you that 99.9 percent of clinic workers who see ultrasounds and provide abortions don't have sudden, suspicious religious conversions. Most of them feel pretty damn good about giving women the freedom to choose.

Your speculation that Planned Parenthood is trying to silence Johnson doesn't fit the evidence, either. Considering the sheer amount of violence and harassment aimed at women's clinics (not just ones that perform abortion, either), the likeliest explanation is that they have a reason to fear for their safety or the safety of their patients. But Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon did the work of reading the restraining order, and it turns out that they have their reasons; namely, they saw Johnson copying and possibly stealing private patient files from their offices after she was put under performance-review watch. She is also alleged to have passed along information to the Coalition for Life that would make it easier for them to target the doctor (always alarming so soon after a doctor has been shot), and that she told a clinic employee that "something big" was going to happen.

The term "business model" you use mischaracterizes the nature of Planned Parenthood, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing affordable reproductive health care. Johnson's accusation—that her branch was trying to discourage contraception to up the number of abortions—fits into a long-standing, demonstrably false anti-choice myth about Planned Parenthood, which is that they are a profit-making business that makes most of its money off abortion. Many anti-choicers also accuse them of doing this through contraception distribution, which they see as an attempt to create more abortion by encouraging sex (with an accompanying claim that contraception doesn't work). For the organized anti-choice movement, it always comes back to the evils of sex.

As you allowed, Planned Parenthood probably does more to prevent abortion than any anti-choice organization on the planet. There's no reason to think that Planned Parenthood's small increase (5 percent) in the number of abortion performed is any evidence against this. Planned Parenthood has always come through when women couldn't find necessary services elsewhere, or at the right price. The growing number of women without health insurance every year alone would account for this, since Planned Parenthood specializes in helping the uninsured. But also, the growing number of threats—and of course, the actual murder—against doctors means it's that much harder for women to find a provider in the area, and Planned Parenthood is picking up the overflow. Instead of seeing this as ominous, I see it as further evidence that they are a brave group of people who deserve support, not weird speculation over motives.

By the way, since Planned Parenthood makes most of its money providing low-cost health care to women without insurance, you'd think if they were a "business" in this for profit, they would oppose universal health care. After all, at a bare minimum, it means they would have to remake their organization completely. But instead, you see the president of the organization out there working for universal health care, which is the exact opposite of the behavior you see in those who think health care is a for-profit business.

Tags: Abby Johnson, planned parenthood, pro-choice

There’s a funny spoof video up on Boing Boing framed as a PSA of sorts in support of douchebag solidarity. It features a handful of self-pegged douchebags, one pumping iron at the gym, another riffing for the amusement of drink-dangling babes at a bar, all waxing on about the persecution of the douches: “For too long you’ve told us to shut the fuck up ... that people who are different from me matter.” But because I evidently cannot take a joke (and this may in fact make me a douchebag according to the video’s standards) my first thought was: This is a grossly incorrect use of the word “douchebag.”

Some of the guys in the video—the weight lifter, the greasy skater kid at the bar, the gangsta-style, oversized-jersey-wearing dude in the garage—they’re just simply not douchebags. They may be dumbshits or pricks, but I’ve always been under the impression that a douchebag is a very specific sub-segment of the asshole population (I am so tempted to draw you a Venn diagram here), and that the douchebag label necessitates a middle-class or higher wealth level, a gross adherence to fratty mainstream tastes (think popped collars and bars in midtown Manhattan), and a rather pretentious pride in that specific way of life. In a word: Dane Cook. He looks like the homecoming king and has the comedic sensibility of the bro-iest bro (A Dane Cook joke: “We should just have an orgy right here, right now. Let's just fucking turn off the lights and everybody just feeeeeeel around. Let's just turn off the lights and play a game called Who's In My Mouth?”) He is the human embodiment of the douchebag concept. An overeager skater kid is not.

I ran into this same problem back in August when GQ named Brown University their douchiest school. Now Brown is a lot of things (Disclosure: It’s my alma mater), but the one thing it’s not is douchey. It’s trust-fund hippie-ish and masturbatorily idealist, but there is not one popped collar, managerial-aspiring, Dane-Cook-loving student to be found.

This is all just to say: Let us keep our insults semantically pure please!

Tags: boing boing, brown university, dane cook, douchebag

Just one small response to Hanna's excellent observations in today’s DoubleX discussion of an alternate universe in which Hillary had become President: I can't resist disagreeing with her that the Obama marriage is post-feminist. I don't think any marriage where one spouse is gone out of the house to the extent that he was, and one spouse is left to raise the small children and hold down the fort, and, oh yes, make the money necessary for the mortgage payment, can be described as post-feminist. At least not in the ideal sense. It may be a post-feminist marriage in the sense that it's what a lot of women in her generation have struggled with—albeit an extreme version—but it's not post-feminist in the sense that it's the kind of set-up one would aspire to. Michelle Obama talked about that all the time on the campaign trail—how she was always the one who had to stay at home and wait for the plumber when the toilet overflowed. She would joke about it, but there was a knowing bite to her words. There were several interviews in which she would say something like, "Barack has been home with free time for 10 days out out of the past year." I think their marriage is less post-feminist than a lot of marriages I've witnessed in which the man really is able (or compelled) to help more at home and cover child care and home chores during his wife's business trips, which is something that Barack Obama to my knowledge never had to do. What if Michelle Obama had, herself, had a professional calling as strong as her husband's—would he have dialed back his career to enable hers? Foregone some fundraisers?

There are actually some interesting parallels—like Hillary Clinton, she for a number of years was obliged to work in part to bankroll her husband's political career.

And just because she, like Hillary, will get to have her own high-profile career after he has had his, doesn't make it, to my mind, post-feminist.

Judging from the New York Times Magazine piece and other sources, they have a strong, affectionate, joking, highly functional marriage that has survived very well the tensions inherent in marriages of high achievers in this generation. Barack Obama is described by his friends as being very open in his praise of her, and he is obviously good about bringing flowers and making restaurant reservations, but part of that, it always seemed to me, is to make up for what he has asked of her. He has asked a lot of her, as many male politicians do ask of their spouses, and to his credit, he knows it. But I still wouldn't describe an arrangement like theirs as post-feminist. I wonder if any political marriage can be, because the demands are just so great and the need to be away from home is relentless. But maybe I have a different definition of post-feminist? Maybe Hanna is thinking kind of a post-feminist reality, and I am thinking post-feminist ideal?

You could even argue, at least by the terms that I seem to have set, that among high-profile political couples it is the Palins who have one of the more post-feminist marriages, at least if you measure this by shared duties, dual careers, and the image of the husband jiggling the baby while the wife is at the podium.

Tags: marriage, Michelle Obama, post feminism, Sarah Palin

Hanna, I am the product of the “simpler” '50s dating culture. My parents were young, hot for each other, met their families' requirements of looks (her) and potential earning capacity (him), and married at ages 19 and 20. Their union produced four children, lasted 20 years, and was a nightmare for all concerned. So I do not share David Brooks’ nostalgia for a time when dating had ‘guardrails.' I dated for decades in the pre-cell phone era, and it wasn’t technology that gave me an ironic, contingent feeling about my adventures. One of my male friends once said to me, “Sometimes I think you deliberately go on bad dates just so you have a story to tell.” Also, one doesn't have to do more than read Jane Austen to understand that it’s not the advent of SMS technology that make males and females circling each other strike poses, make harsh, comic judgments, and wish for someone more appealing.

Yet I am interested in another effect of modern technology that Brooks doesn't get into: the phenomenon of simultaneously dating and reporting on the experience. So, you young, single XXers—is it true you run to the ladies room to text and tweet your way through the evening? I understand the desire, but isn’t it better to let the evening simply unfurl without having to judge it minute by minute for your forum?

Tags: courtship, dating, David Brooks, texting

Sometimes I wonder if male columnists write columns just to piss off their daughter’s friends. In David Brooks’ case, his dissection of modern dating habits is less annoying than Michael Gerson’s similar attempt, because he is less scolding and more anthropological. And because I am closer to his age than his daughter’s, I will admit—with some fear of my fellow DoubleXers—that I found it intriguing.

Brooks does his research at New York magazine’s online sex diaries, which he admits is not a representative sample. What he discovers is a new mating market which operates something like an e-Bay auction, where buyers are, up to the last minute, searching for a best deal on a lay. I’ve had friends newly on the dating market, so I’ve seen some of this in action, and I do find it kind of amazing. Most interesting to me is the creation of a texting persona—almost a literary persona—always somewhat ironic, flirtatious, and almost never honest or hurt.

This doesn’t mean, as he says, that we need medieval chivalry, or Bruce Springsteen to keep us in check. I, for one, can’t stand Bruce Springsteen. I think there must be new rules here and Brooks and I just haven’t figured them out. I can see, for example, how this resembles in some ways dating from the '50s, with everyone angling and protected. But I’m not sure. Anyone with more experience want to explain?

Tags: courtship, dating, David Brooks, texting

I gave birth to our first child in a downtown Manhattan hospital, and from the moment they insisted on putting my name and my name only on our son's wristband, the assumption was clear: mother's baby, father's maybe. My husband might be around for tomorrow's baby-care class, or he might not. I was the one they were after—and new research shows that that attitude increases the chance that I was the only one they were going to get.

A piece in today's NYT suggests that many of the agencies set up to support families with small children may claim to be family resources, but are effectively women's centers, staffed and set up for mothers, not parents. On the one hand, it feels like an excuse—men skip the parenting classes at a family resource center not because they'd rather watch the World Series (generally also the choice of their father, and his father before him), but because the walls are pink—but it also makes sense. Parents of young kids are often vulnerable and insecure about their abilities—and if the supposed authority figures are suggesting, in ways great and small, that this is mom's job, then who is a hesitant young dad to argue with them?

The meat of the reported study lies in the need for engaging both parents in supporting one another's nurturing and discipline style, an effort that benefits from getting both partners in for regular group discussions of parenting issues (which my local YMCA called a "mom's group"). But you can't have a supportive discussion if you're not there, and part of the effort to get dads in should include outfitting offices as though dads were already in—dads in the pictures in the lobby, Car and Driver magazines on the tables, and letters addressed to both parents. It's one of those small shifts that could make a big difference.

Tags: parenting