Menage a trois?

I haven't blogged about L'affaire Ensign because Republican hypocrisy on marriage and morals is not earth shattering news. But this is getting surpassingly strange.

The son of the couple at the center of the sex scandal that has engulfed Sen. John Ensign was being paid by National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2008 at the same time his mother was having an affair with the Nevada Republican.

Both Doug and Cynthia Hampton were already working in senior positions for Ensign when their son Brandon Hampton was hired to do “research policy consulting” for the NRSC in March 2008.

The younger Hampton, 19, was paid $5,400 before he left the Ensign office in August last year, Federal Election Commission records show.

That means during March and April 2008, three members of the Hampton family were working for Ensign. Both Doug and Cynthia Hampton stopped working for Ensign at the end of April 2008.

According to people familiar with the matter, Ensign’s affair with Hampton took place between December 2007 and August 2008.

Must have been some strange dinner table conversations at that home.

Priorities to be avoided

I understand the basic fairness of this issue, and I fervently hope this is something an Obama administration can take on in the future, but I find myself strongly disagreeing with Greenwald on this one:

That's what repeal of Section 3 of DOMA would enable -- treating opposite-sex and same-sex couples exactly equally. That's all it would do; it would not re-define "marriage."

Given Obama and Biden's clearly expressed stance, it's a bit difficult -- at least for a rational person -- to argue that these issues are politically radioactive and that Democrats would lose power if they went near them. And, as indicated with the link above, majorities favor civil unions and the equal granting of rights to same-sex couples. Thus, those who come and slothfully repeat what they hear from their TV -- "oh, this would kill the Democrats politically if they did this" -- without citing a single piece of evidence are making claims that have no empirical support and are negated by the evidence that is available. It's not 1994 any longer.

Greenwald, I believe, is naive if he thinks the politics of this is not hard. Yes, the tide of civil union equality and same-sex marriage is undeniably heading in the right direction even with the crushing reversals in several states this week, most notably in California. And no, this isn't 1994 anymore. But for Obama to take this up as an issue early on in his administration might make this 1993. That's when the Clinton administration decided to take on in the first few months of taking power the issue of gays in the military. Not only did that make an already distrustful brass distrust Clinton even more, it gave social conservatives something to wrest themselves from the depressed slumber they'd been in through the 1992 election.

Look, the world -- and the global economy -- are, almost literally, in flames right now. DOMA is a disgrace, but I'd like to see Obama and the Democratic Congress get some stuff done that helps all Americans before heading down a path towards reigniting a culture war tactic that would be leapt upon by Obama's opponents and GOP obstructionists.

Because, trust me, whether majorities of Americans believe in the basic fairness of civil unions or not, before you could say "Barack Hussein Obama," this would be whipped up into an issue that was pleasingly absent from this election season, the specter of the gay married terrorist.

I think this puts it well:

The passage of Proposition 8 and the gay marriage bans in Arizona and Florida was a dark cloud on an otherwise joyous week. The idea that the legal and moral rights of some our citizens were stripped away by bigotry is, to borrow from the fundamentalist playbook, an abomination. But as The Very Rev. Scott Richardson, Dean of the St. Paul Cathedral in San Diego, an ardent opponent of Proposition 8 who holds out hope the ban will eventually be reversed, told me yesterday, "As sad as I am about Prop. 8, the perspective I have, the whole world is impacted by the presidential election. Our whole world is different now. The gay pride issue, the equal rights issue is really important. But I want to keep it in some perspective around the other issues addressed on Tuesday."

Fortunately, but not surprisingly, I think the Obama administration has other plans with which to lead early next year.