Creation Stories: Stanley Hauerwas, Same-Sex Marriage, and Narrative in Law and Theology

When I think about--members of my own staff who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together. When I think about--those soldiers or airmen or marines or--sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf--and yet, feel constrained, even now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is gone, because--they're not able to--commit themselves in a marriage ... At a certain point, I've just concluded that--for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that--I think same-sex couples should be able to get married. (1) President Barack Obama I INTRODUCTION On June 24, 2011 New York became the most recent, and largest, state in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage. (2) More recently, and perhaps importantly, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, after a very public "evolution" on the subject. (3) Even more recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held that the Defense of Marriage Act violated the Constitution. (4) Along with the recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denying a rehearing of its decision invalidating California's constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage, a seismic shift has occurred in the gay marriage movement. (5) In some quarters, the successful push to legalize same-sex marriage is seen as the culmination of the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality. (6) The success of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage might be understood as the ratification of the LGBT equality movement's goal of making the lives of LGBT individuals less foreign to those within the larger political community. (7) The translation of LGBT lives to the larger public has been one of the most significant strategies of the mainstream LGBT equality movement. Advocates for LGBT equality have argued that eradicating prejudice against LGBT persons rests on the LGBT community's ability to undermine stereotypes of LGBT persons held by the straight community. (8) Narrative has been a central mechanism by which advocates of LGBT equality have sought to undermine stereotypes about LGBT people because of its capacity to draw others into participation in, and identification with, the LGBT community. (9) The turn to narrative is not unique to the movement for LGBT equality. In the areas of gender and race, proponents of progressive social reform have turned toward narrative as a way of providing a framework through which the experiences of "outsiders" might be understood by "insiders." (10) Advocates who have sought to highlight issues of racial and gender inequity have enlisted narratives through which the experiences of racial and gender hierarchies might be understood. (11) The commitment to narrative also represents an intellectual challenge to the capacity of abstract principles such as anti-discrimination, equality, or accommodation to embody the specificity of the experience of individuals who live without the presumptions that attend life as a male, as a white person, or as an able-bodied person. (12) Narrative challenges the capacity of legal or doctrinal categories to dislodge dominant, prejudicial perspectives and presumptions. (13) The recourse to narrative serves the twin goals of demonstrating the "outsider" status of certain identity categories and experiences, (14) and deploying the "outsider" perspective to undermine the dominant position of the "insider" perspective as it relates to the distribution of societal goods--including nonmaterial goods. (15) Within the academic community, the use of narrative had special significance in the work of a subgroup of progressive legal scholars, who had grown disillusioned by the limits of even transformative legal and social change. These scholars, whose work ranges across gender, (16) race, (17) and sexuality, (18) deploy narratives to call into question the success of commitments to formal equality in the contexts of race and gender.

Competition between Pressure and Gravity Confinement in Lyman-Alpha Forest Observations

A break in the distribution function of Ly$\alpha$ clouds (at a typical redshift of $2.5$) has been reported by Petitjean et al. (1993). This feature is what would be expected from a transition between pressure confinement and gravity confinement (as predicted in Charlton, Salpeter, and Hogan (1993)). The column density at which the feature occurs has been used to determine the external confining pressure, $\sim 10 {\rm cm}^{-3} {\rm K}$, which could be due to a hot, intergalactic medium. For models that provide a good fit to the data, the contribution of the gas in clouds to $\Omega$ is small. The specific shape of the distribution function at the transition (predicted by models to have a non-monotonic slope) can serve as a diagnostic of the distribution of dark matter around Ly$\alpha$ forest clouds, and the present data already eliminate certain models.Comment: 10 pages plain TeX, 2 figures available upon request, submitted to ApJ Letters, PSU-jc-

The Kinematic Composition of MgII Absorbers

The study of galaxy evolution using quasar absorption lines requires an understanding of what components of galaxies and their surroundings are contributing to the absorption in various transitions. This paper considers the kinematic composition of the class of 0.4 < z < 1.0 MgII absorbers, particularly addressing the question of what fraction of this absorption is produced in halos and what fraction arises from galaxy disks. We design models with various fractional contributions from radial infall of halo material and from a rotating thick disk component. We generate synthetic spectra from lines of sight through model galaxies and compare the resulting ensembles of MgII profiles with the 0.4 < z < 1.0 sample observed with HIRES/Keck. We apply a battery of statistical tests and find that pure disk and pure halo models can be ruled out, but that various models with rotating disk and infall/halo contributions can produce an ensemble that is nearly consistent with the data. A discrepancy in all models that we considered requires the existence of a kinematic component intermediate between halo and thick disk. The variety of MgII profiles can be explained by the gas in disks and halos of galaxies not very much different than galaxies in the local Universe. In any one case there is considerable ambiguity in diagnosing the kinematic composition of an absorber from the low ionization high resolution spectra alone. Future data will allow galaxy morphologies, impact parameters, and orientations, FeII/MgII of clouds, and the distribution of high ionization gas to be incorporated into the kinematic analysis. Combining all these data will permit a more accurate diagnosis of the physical conditions along the line of sight through the absorbing galaxy.Comment: 34 pages including 14 postscript figures; Accepted by the Astrophysical Journal; URL http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/cwc/pubs.htm