Saletan approves of “lifestyle conservatism,” but when it comes to defining that term, your mileage may vary, given that for Saletan it includes support for same-sex marriage. In a Thursday piece, Saletan asserted that conservatives ought to accept that two-person marriages, whether hetero- or homosexual, fit into the “tradition” and “enduring institution” of matrimony.

“Republicans are right to worry about redefining marriage,” wrote Saletan. “But their decision to draw the line at sexual orientation was a profound mistake. They thought homosexuality was a lifestyle. In reality, the only lifestyle at stake is marriage itself. By locking gay people out of that institution, Republicans disserved their party’s mission: a well-ordered society.” The real enemy, he claimed, is a “lifestyle liberalism” that condones “polygamy,” “infidelity,” “promiscuity,” and “cohabitation.”

Although labeled as “The Great Debate,” a Reuters story about the necessity of drastic change to avert “the climate apocalypse that has already begun” was anything but a debate.

Slate Magazine’s Bitwise tech columnist David Auerbach wrote that June 18 Reuters column with the dramatic headline: “A child born today may live to see humanity’s end, unless…” He promoted Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner’s claim that humans could be extinct in 100 years because of “overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change.”

In a Tuesday post for Slate, lefty pundit Marcotte explored the religious right’s fascination with (and perhaps exploitation of) the Duggar family and how it might change in light of the Josh Duggar sexual-abuse scandal. “The Duggars' [religious] extremism elicited admiration and maybe a little envy among the ranks” of Christian conservatives, Marcotte commented, “but perhaps now Republicans will learn a lesson about the dangers of embracing religious extremists.”

Marcotte thinks the GOP’s affinity for the Duggars exemplifies the religious right’s misogynistic race to the bottom: “Just as urban liberals compete to see who can eat the most organic food and libertarian types race to see who can have the most polluting truck, Christian conservatives compete to see who can deny women's autonomy the hardest.”

On Tuesday, I wrote that "Every day seems to bring in at least one new example of alleged journalists who are really propagandists insisting that what is obviously false is true."

Today's entry into that category will be extremely hard to beat, and may well stand as one of the worst attempts at an argument ever made by a leftist hack. Before I excerpt William Saletan's column at Slate and his attempt to describe it in detail, I'll ratify the observation in the column's current top comment: "So during WWII, Japan said they were at war with the USA. The USA agreed. So that means we were 'sounding a lot like Japan'?"

Mark Joseph Stern argues that a crucial shortcoming of John Strand’s play The Originalist is its out-of-date portrayal of Scalia as “a principled conservative, a brilliant and complex man who resists partisan classification.” Nowadays, however, Scalia’s “ideology…looks less conservative than Republican…Twenty years ago Scalia was the unpredictable justice, the renegade who thought both flag burning and corporate campaign contributions deserved free-speech protections. Today he looks a lot more like the Fox News justice, ruling however the Obama administration wishes he wouldn’t.”

Stern also doesn’t buy that the “hard-line anti-gay” Scalia would knowingly hire a lesbian to clerk for him: “Would the same justice who unapologetically compared gay Americans to drug dealers, prostitutes, and animal abusers really be so tolerant in his personal life? Of course not. The Originalist wants us to imagine Scalia as a lovable contrarian and a warmhearted grump whose judicial opinions often lie worlds away from his real-life habits. There is simply no evidence that this portrayal is accurate.”