A conservative changes his mind on marriage equality

Thanks to a link from jaylake, here's an editorial in which conservative commentator David Frum admits that his fears about gay marriage have been shown to be unfounded. Since marriage equality has become the law in certain states, the dire predictions of threats to traditional marriages have not come true, plat least as shown by the divorce rates.

If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half.

Instead -- while American family stability has continued to deteriorate -- it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970s and 1980s before same-sex marriage was ever seriously thought of.

True, there has been an increase in unmarried parents, but How would it even work that a 15-year-old girl in Van Nuys, California, becomes more likely to have a baby because two men in Des Moines, Iowa, can marry?

Good for you, David Frum, for allowing the truth to influence your opinion!

Easy summer reading

Every once in a while, in between more seriously-weird reading, I indulge in a few "airport" books. "Airport" books are fat, easy reads, fast and largely undemanding, absorbing enough to be an entertaining way to pass the time (at airports, hence the name, and other places). They're great for lounging on the beach as well, or any other place you're apt to be half asleep and get sand kicked between the pages. My current pick comes to me via the fundraiser at our local branch library:

Last Scene Alive by Charlaine Harris. I'd enjoyed "Sookie Stackhouse" and so decided to take a peek at "Aurora Teagarden." Having worked in libraries, the idea of a librarian heroine appealed to me. Harris writes in an easy, friendly style with a nice combination of coziness and emotional resonance as our heroine copes with her job, her widowhood, her unwanted celebrity, not to mention an old flame and a new mystery. Not a vampire in sight, but enjoyable.

Two Temperance Brennan novels from Kathy Reichs: Devil Bones and Break No Bones. Being the pathology freak I am, I picked up the first novel in this series not long after it came out. At that time, Reichs was a fresh new voice, rough-edged and definitely not enamored of pulling her punches. I loved the mirroring of outward chaos (murder, danger, mangled body parts) and inner chaos (the heroine's struggle with alcoholism and relationships). I loved that things happened that changed her life, the sense of time being linear: trauma can be healed but never erased.

Now, many books later, I returned to the series to find much of the rawness and edginess smoothed away, as if by too many seasons of wind and rain. The books are still interesting, both in terms of the nifty tidbits of forensic anthropology and the setting/issues -- one begins at an archaeological dig and the other involves a community hysteria about Satanism. I feel comfortable with the balance of expertise and compassion that Reichs brings to her stories. But the agony has been blunted, turning tales once so dark I dared not read them at bedtime into pleasant beach-side reading. Reading two of them together also brought out a similarity of plot that I might not have otherwise noticed. Predictability is not a bad thing in a book destined for casual pleasure reading. There's still enough variation to hold my interest, the writing flows, and if I'm in the mood for hanging out with Tempe and her bones, these fit the bill very nicely.