Jeremy Hooper at Good As You writes:
Congressman Paul's description is completely lacking on the practical level. In truth, DOMA not only involves "protecting the states," as it were, but also involves limiting those states that do have equal marriage rights from honoring their married same-sex couples in the same way as heterosexual marriages. So while it may be consistent with his larger goal to see benefit in DOMA section 2 (the part that prevents states from having to honor other states' unions), Congressman Paul's lack of acknowledgement for DOMA section 3 (the part that prevents states that currently have equal marriage from receiving the same federal recognition that heterosexual couples currently receive) gets back to his unwillingness to focus on the here and now and instead focus on the theoretical future. In the here and now, there is inequality under the law. A member of Congress (and certainly a president) has to deal with the present bull crap, even if he thinks the odor runs deeper.
And here's a question about the legalization of drugs and liberty:
Eli Sanders at Slog writes:
As Ron Paul starts in on his heroin lecture he's basically being laughed off the South Carolina stage. Then, in just two minutes and thirty seconds, he manages to gently point out the GIANT contradiction in a bunch of small-government, freedom-first conservatives cheering for government to interfere in people's private lives.
Now, the presence of this kind of contradiction isn't news or a revelation to anyone who pays attention to politics. But it's not easy to explain the contradiction to a crowd like this, to basically tell a bunch of South Carolina conservatives that they're being unthinkingly inconsistent. Ron Paul does that, and at the end of his two minutes and thirty seconds he essentially has a hall full of Republicans cheering for heroin legalization.
