Hitch

How can you not love a man who writes like this? And aside from the offhand beauty of his prose, look at his metaphors from the old days of the Cold War and the fortified border between West and East - how easy it is to find yourself suddenly, one day, on the other side of that stark frontier, having to make do in an alien land. God spare him so he can write some more.

More separation, please

Regarding yesterday's judicial overturn of California's Proposition 8, a facebook friend asks, "Why do religious people refuse to accept the SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE?"

If the separation of church and state is the issue, then let's well and truly separate them.  Let religion keep marriage, which it's had far longer than any state has existed, and let the state keep its laws off our sacraments and come up with its own relationship-defining contracts.

Even Jefferson's wall of separation was formulated in terms of a restriction on the actions of the state.  Nowadays, the restrictions seem to work only in the other direction.  Let religion so much as peek over Jefferson's wall and say something about the state's stuff, and we have screaming, shouting, demonstrations and lawsuits.  Meanwhile, the state is free to come and go as it wishes, plundering and regulating whatever it touches.

Grab it