Today in Talking Points: Special Valentine’s Day edition

A special Valentine’s Day edition of Today in Talking Points:

• Washington state Governor Christine Gregoire signed marriage equality into law on Monday. The Evergreen State is the seventh to recognize and allow gay marriage.
• The Washington Secretary of State’s Office has revised its designation of the ballot referendum against marriage equality after mistakenly assigning it a number already used.
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum faced protests as he denounced Washington’s marriage equality law during an appearance in Tacoma.
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is next up in the gay marriage debate. He intends to veto a bill establishing gay marriage in the Garden State, despite public opinion in favor.
• Abbie Goldberg and Katherine A. Kuvalanka published an article on marriage equality for the Journal of Marriage and Family. Much of the February issue of JMF is dedicated to considering marriage.
• Columnist and poet Michael Kindt considers one of the studies published in the February JMF, about marriage and cohabitation.
• What is more romantic on Valentine’s Day than rape? Well, okay, that might seem a bit crude, but FOX News commentator Liz Trotta is suffering the slings and arrows of politics and general decency after arguing that women entering the military should expect to be sexually assaulted.
• Meanwhile, in Uganda, one Simon Lokodo, the Minister for Ethics and Integrity, raided a gay rights workshop in Entebbe. Workshop organizer Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera reportedly escaped the raid and is still at large. Ugandan MPs are once again trying to increase legal penalties for being homosexual, though the death penalty is expected to be dropped from the bill.
• Two Catholic priests in Colombia are dead after allegedly hiring their own hitmen. Reports suggest one of the priests had contracted HIV, but relatives insist that the murders were part of an armed roberry, and Frs. Richard Piffano and Rafael Reatiga were not involved in a homosexual relationship.

Today in Talking Points

It’s almost like connect the dots. Of course, that’s why they’re called “talking points”:

• Politico covers the latest conservative argument, that wealth and conscience don’t mix.
• Steve Benen explains the obvious about that argument.
• And Tom Tomorrow dusts fourteen years off an old cartoon, for obvious reasons.
• Meanwhile, Rob Goodman hopes to intellectually validate equal criticism against all political players, the feelgood fallacy also known as “both sides do it”.
• And why not get some election coverage from Karl Frisch, a Democratic strategist trying to explain what’s wrong with Republicans.
• If that doesn’t do it for you, try the latest Obama-hates-Christians “war on Christmas” lament. (At least it’s not as mortifying as Rush Limbaugh’s astonishing defense of the Lord’s Resistance Army.)

Or, it’s just another day in the life. Something about decadence. Something about the fall of Rome. Something about what we do with what we are given.

“Let me say this is as clearly and as simply as I can: Republicans did not overreach. What they did is who they are. It is what they stand for. It is what they campaign on.

To claim otherwise would be like saying fish live under water because they suffer from unquenchable thirst.”

—Karl Frisch