Jonathan Rauch - Mentions and Appearances

...Sixty years ago, the United States Post Office used its power to censor vicious speech in order to shut down the first openly gay intellectual magazine. It condemned it and said it was beyond the pale in a civilized society. Thank God the Supreme Court told the Post Office it couldn't do that, no matter how offensive the speech was, because that's what allowed gay people to use the press and the magazines and everything else to fight back...

The next Congress should be the second since 1994 when [the Employment Nondiscrimination Act] is not introduced—this time because gays ourselves have decided to move on. A country of gay spouses and parents and service members and veterans is a country of gay citizens, not gay victims. Ten years after Goodridge [v. Department of Public Health] is a good time to recognize and celebrate that change.

The fight is far from over. By refusing to override those majorities, the court green-lighted the continuation, probably for a decade or more, of state-by-state battles over marriage.

In the U.S. today, polarization is structural. Members of Congress are worried about their own campaigns over national issues — no one gets punished for standing their ground, they get punished for compromise.

I think [Mitt] Romney was done in by the fact that he could not get far enough to the center credibly enough. He had to go too far right in the primaries. And the reason for that is you have some fierce constituencies in the Republican Party that do not want the party to change.

What [President Obama] now has to propose is there's still hope for change. That it's not too late to invest in him for change. And that's a tough sell.

Foreign affairs won’t decide the 2012 election, but, if it did, President Obama would win walking away.

In a world with a single, fungible energy market, talk of U.S. energy independence (whatever that means) is a fantasy, and grousing about imported oil is little better. But there is a non-fantastic way to reduce energy vulnerability: a multinational ban on gasoline.

But we cannot assume Obama is wrong to see, in Paul's Christianity, a tradition that reasons its way toward humaneness, even when the result is to break with tradition and open a new path. If he were around today, the apostle might sound much like the president.

We are not asking, gay marriage advocates, for the right to marry everybody or anybody, just to marry somebody. We're asking to have that opportunity.