Compassion deficit

Today's New York Times offers a superb editorial on the efforts of the president and others in his party to exploit, for the purpose of rallying the party's base, the New Jersey court decision on civil unions for gay people:

If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction. Congressmen who trust their careers to gay staffers vote for laws to enshrine second-class citizenship for gays in the Constitution. Gay appointees and their partners are treated as married people at official ceremonies and social gatherings. Then whenever an election rolls around, the whole team pretends it’s on a mission to save America from gay marriage.

Add to this the revelations in David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith, of the demeaning way in which White House types were said to refer to the religious right, and the moral bankruptcy of the whole G.O.P. enterprise appears in full.

Your blogstress takes this occasion to saunter out on a limb with a guess that the Times's punchy, unsigned essay is the work of editorial page editor Gail Collins, who plans to step down from that post in January in order to write a book. The Times pooh-bahs assure us that she will return the following year as a columnist on the op-ed page.

And check out Kuo's blog, J-Walking. Fascinating.