Tuesday Open Thread

Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. How is your week going? It doesn’t seem like a Tuesday to me, more like a Wednesday. I guess I’m already ready for the long weekend.

This weekend allegations that newly re-elected Wisconsin judge David Prosser had choked a fellow justice Ann Bradley. Prosser says he was only defending himself and his hands accidentally wound up on her neck. There’s been a lot of questions raised about investigation but the Dane County Sheriff’s office announced they are doing an inquiry.

The state Capitol Police Chief, Charles Tubbs, said Monday that he is turning over the case to local law enforcement.

“After consulting with members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, I have turned over the investigation into an alleged incident in the court’s offices on June 13, 2011 to Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney,” Tubbs said in a statement. “Sheriff Mahoney has agreed to investigate this incident and all inquiries about the status of the investigation should be made with the Sheriff’s Department.”

Mahoney issued a concurrent statement declaring that he has directed detectives to investigate the incident.

“Beginning today, detectives will work diligently to conduct a thorough and timely investigation,” Mahoney said. “Because this case is in the very early stages, no further information is available at this time.”

It sounds like the authorities are taking this quite seriously, as they should. I assume this is also being investigated by an ethics board. I would hope this issue of workplace violence would be a non-partisan issue but it doesn’t appear to be so. Fox News’s Greta Van Sustern was calling for Chief Justice Abrahamson to resign for not being able to keep the peace (no mention of a Prosser resignation).

I’m not sure if I can ever really warm up to David Frum. He was Bush’s speechwriter and is credited with the phrase “Axis of Evil.” I’m beginning to see him as a conservative who is getting mugged by reality. Yesterday he wrote a column for CNN called “I was wrong about same-sex marriage.”

The short answer is that the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.

Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact.

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.

I have no idea what people are putting in his coffee but he’s even formulating the issue as I hear many liberals do:

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?

The answer is it has no effect. Six states have same-sex marriages. The first state to get them, Massachusetts, has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country. Perhaps marriage equality is actually good for marriage? (I know – it’s a shocking thought).