{"id":809,"date":"2009-07-09T20:17:07","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T01:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2009\/07\/09\/political-politicians"},"modified":"2009-07-09T20:18:10","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T01:18:10","slug":"political-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2009\/07\/09\/political-politicians","title":{"rendered":"Political Politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kudos to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/local\/massachusetts\/articles\/2009\/07\/09\/mass_to_challenge_us_marriage_law\/\">Martha Coakley for challenging the Federal Defense of Marriage Act<\/a>. I wonder how Justice responds when they&#8217;re asked to defend a statute that the Administration has said should be repealed. Perhaps with a tepid defense.<\/p>\n<p>What I don&#8217;t understand is those who criticize Coakley by claiming that her motivations are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wbur.org\/2009\/07\/09\/doma-challenge\">&#8220;purely political&#8221;<\/a>. What&#8217;s up with that? Aren&#8217;t politicians supposed to act politically?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, we do want our elected officials to have some backbone, particularly to resist popular outbursts that might have bad policy consequences. (Obama&#8217;s effective neutralization of the &#8220;Buy America&#8221; stimulus bill provision is a good example). But here we have a politician taking a strong stand for the rights of a long-disenfranchised minority group; if her motivations are &#8220;purely political,&#8221; then let&#8217;s elect more politically-motivated politicians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kudos to Martha Coakley for challenging the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. I wonder how Justice responds when they&#8217;re asked to defend a statute that the Administration has said should be repealed. Perhaps with a tepid defense. What I don&#8217;t understand is those who criticize Coakley by claiming that her motivations are &#8220;purely political&#8221;. What&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,28,8,4],"tags":[131,66,132],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}