My answer to the whole same-sex marriage controversy has been just to get the government completely out of the business of recognition of marriage. As it turns out, quite a lot would have to change to do that, more than most folks (including me) realized. Here and here goes into the many ways the government recognizes marriage. Just some are: income tax rates; taxation on health insurance; Social Security, Medicare, and disability benefits for spouses; taxation on estates; immigration and citizenship rights if one spouse is a citizen; ability to make medical decisions for an incapacitated spouse; and those are just a few of them. Getting government out of marriage would be a thorny, if not well impossible task.
I finally found an article I'd been looking for for a while, its a David Halberstam piece which appeared in Esquire magazine in 2001 titled "Clinton and the Generals". It goes into detail of how the uneasy relationship between the Clinton administration and the military led to two mishandled interventions in Somalia and Bosnia. The article also pretty much soured me on Wes Clark getting anywhere near the instruments of power; while not as one-sidedly negative on WC as I remembered, there's still a lot of troubling myopic aspects to how Clark handled Bosnia which come through. This article was later expanded into Halberstam's 2002 book War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. I would love to have seen Halberstam extend his analysis into Bush II-Iraq.
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tagryn
