Ann Friedman argues that we shouldn't describe the debate over gay marriage as part of the culture wars:
We'll continue to lose until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights a civil-rights issue situated firmly within the context of other civil-rights struggles, not an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy. (To a lesser degree, the same goes for abortion rights.) "Culture" implies we are comfortable with different parts of our country and different groups of people seeing this issue differently. It implies that there is no absolute right or wrong -- just two sparring factions -- and that we'll simply have to wait for the rest of the country to come around. Culture changes slowly. This is something I've heard a lot in the wake of the passage of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. "History is on our side! Don't worry, the demographic trends are with us!"
Paul Waldman points out that conservative talk radio and TV hosts are going to have a lot more to complain about in the next few years:
Over the last eight years, many conservatives, particularly the radio and television hosts who enjoy such loud and lucrative megaphones, have been forced to navigate some difficult rhetorical waters. When your side controls the White House, the Congress (as it did until two years ago), the judiciary, and the business world, how do you argue that you're part of an oppressed group being held down by The Man? It isn't easy, but they did it nonetheless. The "elite" they bellowed at day after day is not those who actually hold power. It's obscure college professors, Hollywood actors, the city council of a town you don't live in, and nonprofit organizations who advocate for things like poor people or the environment or civil liberties. That's the source of your problems, they would say, and that's who you should be mad at.
And Gershom Gorenberg writes about a house in Hebron that has become the lastest flashpoint in the debate over Israeli settlements in the West Bank:
The House of Dispute is a long, rectangular, four-story building on the east edge of Hebron. The street-level rooms are built as storefronts, facing the road leading to the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba. Upstairs are living quarters. As I write, the people living in those quarters are settlers who moved in one night in March of last year.
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--The Editors
