In an earlier post, I gave you the lowdown on a charming fellow named Stephen Bing, the trust-fund-baby, mega-millionaire, lay-about who aspires to out-perform George Soros in the Dems' soft money orgy.

Well, as the Popeils like to say, "But wait! There's more!"

ABC News is now reporting that Bing has close and cozy ties to a Colombo mob family hitman, Dominic Montemarano (aka "Donnie Shacks"), whom law enforcement officials describe as Bing's "friend and business partner":

Fattest Cat
Officials: Democrats' Biggest Money Man Has Mob Connections
By Brian Ross
ABCNEWS.com

B O S T O N, July 28, 2004--As Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards arrived in Boston today for the Democratic National Convention, so did the California man who is their single biggest contributor.

He is Stephen Bing, a wealthy film producer who, with little fanfare, has managed to steer a total of more than $16 million of his money to Democratic candidates and the supposedly independent groups that support them.

"To most of the people who track money and politics, they're like, who the hell is Steve Bing?" said Chuck Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization.

Bing is perhaps best known for sparking a tabloid frenzy when he publicly expressed doubt that he was the father of actress Elizabeth Hurley's baby. (A paternity test proved he was indeed the father.) He repeatedly has refused to say why he is funneling millions of dollars to the Democrats.

. . . .

In fact, Democratic Party officials said they knew nothing about the man who law enforcement officials tell ABC News is Bing's friend and business partner, Dominic Montemarano, a New York Mafia figure currently in federal prison on racketeering charges.

Montemarano has a long criminal record and is known to organized crime investigators by his street name, Donnie Shacks.

"Donnie Shacks' main activity was murder. No question about it. That was his main function for the Colombo family and for organized crime in general. He was one of the top hit men in the New York area," said Joe Coffey, a former NYPD investigator.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Bing paid Montemarano's legal fees after his most recent scrape with the law. Montemerano's lawyer said his client was an employee of Bing's.

After a recent private lunch with Democratic vice-presidential candidate Edwards, Bing also declined to answer questions about his relationship with Montemarano.

Bing's mob connections make me wonder what he whispers in John Edwards' ear during their "private lunches."

Bing and Montemarano were such close chums that the mobster was given a staring role in one of Bing's movies, Night at the Golden Eagle, even though Montemarano doesn't seem to have had any prior acting experience. Maybe Bing owed him a "favor." (The film, like the rest of Bing's cinematic efforts, was a dismal failure.)

Around the same time Bing was trying to make Montemarano a star, Montemarano was relieving the stresses of his budding acting career by beating the holy crap out of his girlfriend. At the sentencing hearing, Bing was right there to offer the convicted mobster and wife-beater "moral support":

. . . .Colombo soldier Dominick (Donnie Shacks) Montemarano pulled out all the stops this week in a losing effort to avoid going to jail for beating up his girlfriend when she arrived home too late for her own good.

The courtroom was packed with relatives and friends, including film producer Steve Bing and the girlfriend Montemarano battered 17 months ago, but Superior Court Judge Arthur Jean ignored the show of support and focused on the events of October 3, 2001. "When you strip a woman of her clothes, throw her out of the house and kick her in front of her children, that is cruel and vicious," said Jean, who gave the aging and ailing gangster the maximum, four years.

A word of advice: Don't hold your breath waiting for the Dems to return the $16 million they've received from Stephen Bing.

On Jen's "Fair-haired, but strangely unbalanced" blog, I ran across the following lines in a comment penned by DaveSplash:

I am pro-choice. While I find abortion to be a somewhat unsettling concept, and would not want my wife, girlfriend, daughter, or sister to have one, I don't think that the government can make that decision for everyone ((italics added). It is a very personal and difficult choice to make, and a woman's privacy should be respected. She should not be taunted, threatened, or harassed because she is not ready at that time to have a child.

DaveSplash's comment about abortion is perfectly unoriginal--the same mild-sounding blather you can elicit in ten seconds from "sensitive modern males" who know better than to offend the opinions of the liberated women they want to bed down with. (Definition of a sensitive modern male: "He drives you to the abortion clinic and is less than five minutes late to pick you up when it's over.") The only thing that makes DaveSplash's opinion interesting is how well it captures the conventional, ubiquitous, "moderate" pro-choice view. For that reason alone, it enticed the following reply from yours truly:

These days that view wears the veneer of enlightened moderation, yet in 1855, a similarly "enlightened" person would have written:

"I am pro-choice when it comes to slavery. While I find slavery to be a somewhat unsettling concept, and would not want my wife, girlfriend, daughter, or sister to own one, I don't think that the government can make that decision for everyone. It is a very personal and difficult choice to make, and a slaveowner's privacy should be respected. A slaveowner should not be taunted, threatened, or harassed because he is not ready at that time to give up his slaves."

The purpose of the above comparison is to point out that the easiest way to deny a class of people their rights, either to life or to liberty, is simply to ignore their humanity: The defenders of slavery claimed that "negroes" were not sufficiently human to be entitled to a right to freedom. Today, the defenders of abortion claim that a child in the womb (a "fetus") is not sufficiently human to be entitled to a right to life itself.

Beginning from the argument that "negroes" were not really human like the rest of us, slavery was further defended on the grounds that ending slavery would cause hardship to slaveowners. Beginning from the argument that a "fetus" is not really human like the rest of us, abortion is further defended on the grounds that ending abortion would cause hardship to pregnant women.

Beginning from the argument that "negroes" were not really human like the rest of us, slavery was further defended on grounds that "negroes" were not capable of taking care of themselves and would have miserable lives if they were allowed to be free. Beginning from the argument that a "fetus" is not really human like the rest of us, abortion is further defended on the grounds that a "fetus" is not capable of taking care of itself and would have a miserable life if it were allowed to be born.

Beginning from the argument that "negroes" were not really autonomous humans like the rest of us, but belonged to the slaveowner, slavery was further defended on grounds that the government should not be allowed to interfere with what people do with their own property (conveniently ignoring the fact that there were a multitude of other ways the government rightly interfered with what people did with their property). Beginning from the argument that a "fetus" is not really an autonomous human like the rest of us, but belongs to the mother as a part of her body, abortion is further defended on the grounds that the government should not be allowed to interfere with what a person does with his or her own body (conveniently ignoring the fact that there are a multitude of other ways the government rightly interferes with what people do with their bodies).

If "squishily" pro-choice people like DaveSplash had lived in 1855, their ever-so-moderate slogan would have been: "I wouldn't have a slave myself, but I would never interfere with someone else's right to have one."

It is astounding to me that anyone could say that abortion is a "somewhat unsettling concept." It seems me that, depending on your concept of human life, abortion either has to be thoroughly unsettling or not at all unsettling. Either you think a baby in the womb is like a hangnail or you think that it possess at least some spark of humanity. If you believe the former, then the "tissue" can be gotten rid of without the slightest qualm, and there's nothing to be unsettled about at all. But if you believe the latter, then the destruction of that spark of humanity must be terribly unsettling even if you eventually still come down on the pro-choice side. The middling position of being only somewhat unsettled about the destruction of innocent human life is occupied only by those who, feigning virtuous moderation, wish to ignore what's at stake.

DaveSplash's reply was predictably indignant:

Adeimantus -- apparently you are simply incapable of doing anything but bashing me. Well, no big deal. Your attempt to turn this discussion to something other than what it was actually about is a nice trick (you must be a lawyer). There is nothing at all inconsistent about being personally opposed to abortion, but thinking that others should be allowed to choose for themselves. That is called freedom.

I don't believe life begins at conception. In all honesty, I'm not certain when "life" technically begins. Unlike you, I can be honest about it. I just don't know. My opinion is no more right or wrong than yours. . . .

I won't go any further with this discussion because it will get too nasty and personal. Your opinions are clearly based on your religious beliefs (emphasis added). I respectfully disagree with them. I will not bash you in such a way. By saying it is "somewhat unsettling" I was referring to the trauma one must go through in finding out that you are pregnant, and having to make such a difficult decision. I do not, and cannot know, what that would be like. The best I, as a man, can figure is that it would be...somewhat unsettling.

So, go on thinking what you want to about me or my positions. But, you are incredibly disingenious to claim that if I came down harder on one side of the argument as you frame it, then I'd be ok.

In fairness to DaveSplash, I must disclose that I have not reproduced his comments in full because the remainder lacked any substance worth repeating and was, as DaveSplash later admitted, simply misdirected. (Here's the link to Dave's full comment, so you can judge for yourself.) But I felt I should try to cure DaveSplash of the common and condescending "liberal" fantasy that opinions opposing abortion are the result of religious brainwashing. And so I replied:

Dave, I am sorry you think I am "bashing" you. What's being bashed is not you but your ideas. I have no doubt that you are a very nice fellow. I just think you have some mistaken ideas.

Your assumption that my view of abortion is based on religious beliefs misses the mark. My religion is pretty much a mystery, even to me! If getting to heaven depends on belonging to a religion, then I'll meet you in hell.

Here's the extent of my "religious" beliefs.

1. I believe in a Supreme Being who created this existence, and therefore created you and me, either directly or indirectly. I am pretty confident of this first belief, based on what seem to me to be very rational arguments, but it still remains "only" a belief.

2. I have no idea how much, if any, role the Supreme Being plays directly in everyday events on this earth. But I do think the Supreme Being had a plan when he set this top spinning. Unfortunately, the workings of that plan are far beyond my comprehension. But I think I see little pieces of the plan everywhere I look, in the veins on a leaf and in the smile a baby makes when it farts.

3. I believe the Supreme Being is good and his plan is good. This belief is based not so much on theoretical arguments but more on my actual experience of the goodness of life itself. (Some days, I do have my doubts.)

4. I also believe, with less confidence, in the immortality of the human soul. I pray that I will get to see my mom again some day, but maybe I believe in the immortal soul because I am too weak to accept that she is gone from us for good.

5. I believe that we are morally obliged to do good things and to make beautiful things as much as we can and to learn as much as we can about life because the Supreme Being put in us such wonderful abilities to think, to love, and to create. I am not sure this is a religious belief, though it is informed by my belief that the life the Supreme Being gave me is good and beautiful, so I probably ought to try to spread the favor so far as I can.

Beyond that, for me religious things are a complete mystery. If you can extrapolate my views on abortion out of the five beliefs listed above, then go for it.

No, I am not so arrogant as to say I "know" when life begins. I never said I knew the answer to that question. But I do have some "beliefs" about it. Notice the difference between the word "know" and "believe."

I know the difference between "knowing" something and "believing" something. I know that when we lack knowledge, such as on the question of when life begins, then we should proceed with great caution, erring always on the side of life, especially when that life (if it is life) is the life most innocent, most vulnerable, and most unable to protect itself.

So if I believe there is a rational possibility that a fetus is a human life, then that belief, though it is only a belief, is in that instance as compelling as if I possessed divine knowledge itself.

On judgment day, (and here I use the words "judgment day" only metaphorically lest you think I am a religious kook), it will not be sufficient to say:

"I really didn't know for sure if those fetuses were living human beings or not. Since I wasn't positive about whether they were human beings or not, I figured it was acceptable if other people wanted to go ahead and kill off millions of them, just so long as I didn't dip my own hands into the blood. So keep in mind, I never killed any fetuses with my own hands. . . . Well, okay, maybe I did fight against the people who were trying to stop the slaughter. But I gotta tell you, I was 'somewhat troubled' about it the whole time."

I'll let you know if DaveSplash comes up with a reply, if it's worth sharing. (But don't feel sorry for DaveSplash that his views are being represented unfairly in a forum where he has no means to defend himself. He can post a comment below if he so wishes. And he has his own blog, aptly titled "that dave guy," where he can be as nasty to me as he likes.)

(Thanks, Jen, for hosting my dialogue with Dave.)

NEWS FLASH: Al Gore will be speaking tonight at the Dem Convention.

Nobody seems to care . . . but the occasion provides all the excuse I need to move this lovely photo back up to the top of the blog.

Reports are that the Dems are under strict orders to tone down the Bush-bashing:

Democrats are scrambling to tamp down former Vice President Al Gore and firebrand Howard Dean before they step to the convention podium, worried they may embarrass John Kerry with red-meat anger and excessive Bush bashing.

The Democratic National Convention and Kerry campaign staffs are working feverishly to rewrite, polish and tone down speeches submitted in advance of today's convention opening bell.

. . . .

Attention - and fear - is mostly focused on Gore, who kicks off the convention with a primetime speech tonight but has rankled some party leaders with his recent conversion to throaty, vicious attacks on Bush.

Gore rankled Kerry when he endorsed then-front-running Dean early in the primary season. Gore, who remains bitter after losing the hotly contested, controversial 2000 presidential race, is one of Bush's harshest critics.

. . . .

For speakers, the memo went out - literally - weeks ago. Kerry convention organizer Jack Corrigan wrote speakers a three-page memo outlining the "clear message" Kerry wanted to send from the convention.

All drafts were submitted for review, changed and rewritten with the no-negative rules heavily enforced. Among the guidance offered: "Criticism of Bush is allowed, but only as a subtle or indirect dig when comparing Kerry's vision to Bush's record. Red meat won't be served at this convention."

How disappointing. I was so much looking forward to watching a Michael Moore-style hate-fest. What's the point of tuning in if nobody is going to compare Dubya to a chimp, or at least call him a shrub?

Yes, Kerry might be embarrassed by a "redmeat" convention, but not exactly for the reasons the Dem spinners suggest. The real reason for reining in Gore's recent penchant for over-the-top rhetoric is so that Kerry's vapidities won't seem all the more somnambulistic by comparison. The best way to prevent the country from noticing on day four that John Kerry talks and thinks like one of the undead is to bore their brains into lukewarm slush on days one, two, and three. Even Bill Clinton's speech will probably turn out to be nothing more than a slow, dull, self-indulgent stroll down mammary . . . I mean . . . memory lane.

So instead of a Michael Moore-style hate-fest, it looks like the Dem's will give us a John Kerry-style bore-fest. Either way, one of Al Gore's personalities could fit the bill.

[UPDATE] It looks like Gore got the memo. Tonight in Boston it was boring Gore, not fiery Gore. His heart didn't seem to be in it. (Gore used to be able to put his heart into being boring.) Nothing like his nutty, angry MoveOn performance a couple of months ago. When he tried to fake having sense of humor about Florida 2000, it came across maudlin.

Thank God for the electoral college.

Mirroring the controversial and purportedly homophobic language of California Republican Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger (who called his opponents "girly-men"), Democrat Senator Max Cleland used a heterophobic slur in his criticism of President Bush today.  Speaking in a conference call with reporters, Cleland said Bush had taken the nation to war in Iraq because Bush wanted to “be Mr. Macho Man.” 

"Macho" is an adjective describing one who demonstrates "machismo," or an exaggerated sense of masculinity.  The term "macho man" was coined by the openly homosexual musicians, the Village People, in a song that parodies men who self-consciously adopt heterosexual mannerisms and styles.  "Girly-man," which was coined on the NBC television program Saturday Night Live, refers to men who appear to be homosexual.

Bush is a heterosexual.

We call upon Senator Kerry to denounce Cleland's use of such divisive and hurtful language and issue an immediate and unqualified apology.

Does the AP even bother with fact checkers?  I'm beginning to doubt it.
 
In this story, the AP relates the claims of the "town historian" of Derry, New Hampshire, who has connected John Kerry to the old sod. 

Derry town historian Richard Holmes said he's traced Kerry's lineage to an Irish immigrant believed to have introduced the potato to America.

Numerous publications have stated over the years that Kerry is Irish-American, which could help in Massachusetts, the most Irish state in the nation. Kerry said he's always corrected the misstatements.

....

James McGregor led a group of settlers from to New Hampshire in the early 1700s in search of political, economic, cultural and religious freedom. In 1720, according to local history, McGregor also planted the first potatoes in North America.

Now I'm no whiz-bang professional journalist, but I spot two glaring errors in the paragraphs above:
 
First, as I learned in the third grade (public school--in rural Texas, mind you), the potato is native to the Americas, so it would be bloody difficult for Kerry's putative ancestor to have introduced them.  And while I lack the vaunted training in research to be had at Columbia J-school, it only took me about 30 seconds with Google to discover a reference to potato farming in North America that predates Mr. McGregor by over a hundred years:

Kaishúcpenauk a white kind of roots about the bignes of hen egs & nere of that forme: their tast was not so good to our seeming as of the other, and therfore their place and manner of growing not so much cared for by vs: the inhabitãts notwithstanding vsed to boile & eate many.

Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). 
 
Second, and more importantly, Kerry hasn't "always corrected" errors regarding his heritage--indeed, he's made some misstatements of his own.  This Slate article details several, including a March 18, 1986, declaration Kerry made on the floor of the Senate:

For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans …

and this statement he made in 1984:

As some of you may know, I am part-English and part-Irish. And when my Kerry ancestors first came over to Massachusetts from the old country to find work in the New World, it was my English ancestors who refused to hire them.

Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that whether Kerry's long-dead ancestor invented the potato or whether Kerry has a drop or two of Irish blood matters one whit to whether he should be President (though potatoes have been an issue before, and whether Kerry lied is surely interesting).  But whether it matters or not, it would be easy enough for the AP to check out.  Who knows?  If the AP were scrupulously accurate with regard to printing minor factual claims that are easy to verify (or discredit), perhaps they'd be more believable when they publish major claims that are harder to check up on.  But such trivial details might distract them from their hagiography.

You won't hear a John Edwards stump speech in which he neglects to mention his lifelong struggle as a "champion of regular folks," the theme he set when he announced for the Democratic nomination two years ago:

I run for president to be champion, to be a champion for the same people I've fought for all my life, regular folks. They're people like my own family, where I was the first to go to college and my dad worked in a textile mill all his life, where my mother's last job was working at the post office; to the people I went to school with, the people I grew up with, the families that I represented for almost two decades as a lawyer, and exactly the same group of people that are the reason I ran for United States Senate.

I think these people are entitled to a champion in the White House. Somebody who goes to work every day seeing things through their eyes, and who provides real ideas about how to make their lives better, not somebody who's thinking about insiders or looking out for insiders.

Edwards' formulation, "the regular folks versus the insiders," is but a dumbed-down reprise of the same appeal to class conflict Al Gore invoked in his "the people versus the powerful" speech at the 2000 Democrat Convention:

Whether you're in a suburb or an inner city, whether you raise crops or drive hogs and cattle on a farm, drive a big rig on the interstate or drive e-commerce on the Internet, whether you're starting out to raise your own family or getting ready to retire after a lifetime of hard work, so often powerful forces and powerful interests stand in your way, and the odds seem stacked against you, even as you do what's right for you and your family.

. . . .

I've taken on the powerful forces, and as president, I'll stand up to them and I'll stand up for you.

. . . .

And that's the difference in this election. They're for the powerful. We're for the people.

There's no question that as a plaintiff's lawyer John Edwards has been the champion of at least several dozen "regular folks" who were unfortunate enough to sustain a personal injury that provided the handsome lawyer an opportunity to collect his even more handsome 33% to 50% contingency fee cut (plus expenses) out of their multi-million dollar jury awards. As to whether he's a champion of many "regular folks" who haven't been severely brain-damaged, the jury is still out. What is clear is that Edwards has long been the chosen champion of a small handful of extremely rich folks, whose contributions have made up the bulk of his soft money funding.

You probably already know that an ungodly amount--more than $9 million--of Edwards' financial support in his run for the Democrat nomination came from lawyers on the plaintiff's side of the bar. (That $9 million equals almost half of the total contributions to Edwards' campaign.) So you might be surprised to learn that the single largest soft money contributor to John Edwards' PAC was not some rich plaintiff's lawyer, but was an interesting fellow man named Stephen Bing.

Through his company, Shangri-La Entertainment, Bing funneled some $900,000 of soft money into John Edwards' Leadership PAC. Okay, the $900,000 in soft money that Bing gave to Edwards' PAC might seem like small potatoes since we've all heard about George Soros' pledging whatever it takes of his untold millions to MoveOn.org's holy war to defeat George Bush. Well, in the neck-and-neck race to be number one in soft money contributions to left-leaning "527 Groups," Soros is currently running behind Stephen Bing, who had ponied up $8,086,273 as of July 5.

At the risk of digressing too far from my main subject, I need to say a quick word about "527 Groups," which have become the depository for Stephen Bing's soft money largesse. When McCain-Feingold restricted political parties' access to soft money, the Democrats seemed to have painted themselves into a corner. Yes, the lefties had always self-righteously claimed that soft money was corrupting the political process, yet the not-very-well-publicized truth was that for years the Democrat Party had been living off soft money from unions and limo liberals. By contrast, the Republicans had always done better at raising hard money contributions, which are restricted to a few thousand dollars per individual. Success at raising hard money depends on having a huge number of "grass roots" supporters, each of whom gives a relatively small amount. They style themselves as the party of the people . . . er . . . I mean "regular folks," but the Democrats could never match the GOP when it came to the real grassroots work of raising hard money a few hundred or a few thousand bucks at a time. Instead, the Dems specialized in soft money because it only took a handful of limo liberals like George Soros and Stephen Bing to overflow the coffers with unlimited soft money millions. But then McCain-Feingold's reforms put an end to the national political parties directly raising and spending soft money.

So to get around McCain-Feingold's soft money restrictions and to give rich liberals like Bing and Soros a new place to send their soft money, the Democrats latched onto something known as "527 Groups" (named for Section 527 of the IRS code). MoveOn.org serves as a fairly representative example: Just like the Democrats, MoveOn styles itself a "grassroots organization," but of the $8,667,812 that MoveOn's 527 has raised so far this election cycle, $6,072,777 (70%) came from just three individuals, George Soros, Peter Lewis, and the good Mr. Bing.

Both John McCain and Russell Feingold have gone on record saying that the way the 527 Groups use soft money violates McCain-Feingold. However, after wrestling with the issue for many months, the Federal Election Commission, which has responsibility for writing the regulations to implement McCain-Feingold, never could decide what to do about 527 Groups. So in early May, the FEC punted and decided to postpone action on 527's until after the 2004 election. The New York Times editorialized thusly:

In a shameful decision that will unleash a fresh torrent of unregulated donations to pollute the presidential election, the Federal Election Commission has declined to control the new "shadow party" attack groups that are evading the campaign finance law. The commission voted on Thursday not to rein in puppet Democratic operations that are already spending scores of millions in big unregulated donations from unions and fat-cat partisans. (my italics)

Hurrah! Hooray! for the New York Times, which deserves credit for calling MoveOn, American Coming Together, Media Fund, and the Joint Victory Fund exactly what they are. But as far as I know, the Times editorial hasn't raised a blush on the face of any Democrats, who proceed apace with their soft money orgy. MoveOn, with its $8 million in soft money receipts, is a middling example compared to America Coming Together ($19 million) and the Media Fund ($15 million). Foolishly presuming that the Democrats who pushed for passage of McCain-Feingold's reforms would actually abide by those reforms, the GOP got a slow start in the 527 race. So of the top ten largest 527 Groups, all lean left, with the exception of the Club for Growth, with its relatively modest $3,667,948 in receipts. The upshot is that, through 527 Groups, soft money is now being used to influence elections more directly than was permitted even prior to the passage of McCain-Feingold.

Sorry for the digression. Let's get back to Stephen Bing, the patron saint of Democrat soft money.

No, Bing's not a rich plaintiff's lawyer. And he's not one of those leftist dot com millionaires who had the good sense to cash out early. Bing's career has been so multi-faceted that it is hard to say exactly what he is. For the moment, let's just try to think of Bing as one of John Edwards' "regular rich folk."

According to Mother Jones magazine, Bing came by his money the old-fashioned way: "he inherited it." His gramps was a New York real estate tycoon through whom Bing has already inherited, or stands to inherit, hundreds of millions of dollars--maybe even a cool billion--when pops and a rich uncle or two kick off. In a family with that kind of dough, you can well imagine how confusing it must have been for a young man as regular and folksy as Stephen Bing to figure out what to make of his life.

Fortunately for Mr. Bing and all the other regular folks, America is still the great land of opportunity where anyone who has the right work ethic and a willingness to expend large amounts of capital can find steady employment as a playboy. And so it came to pass that by constant dedication to the highest standards of his chosen craft, Stephen Bing swiftly rose to the upper echelons of the playboy profession. He won his success despite a devastating physical disability under which he suffers even to this day. Yes, the world has only recently discovered that in his late youth Stephen Bing was afflicted with an ever-worsening chronic condition, an occupational handicap that would have shattered the professional aspirations of any playboy of lesser means: a hairy back.

Notwithstanding the triumphs of his early career as a playboy, Bing soon apparently began to feel he had something more to offer the world, something in addition to the use of his Bel Air mansion for "sex romps between movie executives and call girls." The problem, of course, was that the working life of a playboy entails satisfactions that a man of Stephen Bing's moral depth could never in good conscience forsake.

If only there were some honorable avocation into which he could channel the overflow of his efforts, while still making regular contributions to his established profession. Yes, thank God, right here in America in a magical place called Hollywood a trust fund baby in possession of a half a billion dollars can, with just a couple of short phone calls to the right people, vindicate his otherwise totally wasted Ivy education and ascend to the trusted position of Movie Producer and Screenwriter. And so Bing set to work producing films and penning screenplays, some of which he might have actually written all by himself.

A June 22, 2002, article in The Scotsman (sorry, no free internet link available, but you can get the article from Lexis) summarizes Bing's life history at this moment in our story:

STEPHEN Leo Bing was born on 31 March, 1965, to property heir Peter Bing and his wife, Helen. Bing senior inherited his fortune from Grandpappy Bing, another tireless grafter in the dangerous world of real estate. Peter has been a benefactor of universities, including Stanford, one of the great Ivy League establishments, though his generosity failed to benefit his son and heir.

That's not to say young Steven did not receive the best education money could buy, at the prestigious Harvard school in Los Angeles, before he enrolled at Stanford. But "Bing Wing" or not, he flunked out after a year and a half. The scholar's life was not for him, though in that brief period, his buddies recall he had shown himself a keen student of movies and of beautiful women - and of movies with beautiful women in them.

He began to dabble in screenwriting, acting and producing, but in truth was often just a financier for the talented, beautiful crowd he immersed himself in. His credits are few, and usually derided - from television series (he wrote for the sitcom Married ... with Children) to movies. His 2000 remake of Get Carter, which replaced Michael Caine with Sylvester Stallone as the male lead, was lambasted in the press.

"He calls himself a writer, yet not many people have seen him writing," one Hollywood observer said. "It's more like he spends all his time studying obsessively how to get women and keep all his relationships alive at once."

Still, at least he enjoyed some success in that area. Introduced by James Caan, for a while he was a regular at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, and hanging out with friends like Kiefer Sutherland and Rob Lowe, he fast established a rakish reputation as a man about town.

Indeed, according to one former lover, Tracy Richman, Bing was a "sexual predator" and began to mark out some celebrity notches on his bedpost. There was Farrah Fawcett - 18 years his senior - Uma Thurman, Naomi Campbell and Sharon Stone (with a gracelessness we have since come to expect, Bing was to deride Ms Stone's abilities as a lover).

Alas, we might never know how great an artist Stephen Bing could have become if his mortal frame were not so over-burdened with the daily drudgeries of a playboy's labors, which seemed to sap vital energies that he might otherwise put into his art. But it would be wrong to say that all Bing's films have been entirely forgettable. His Chuck Norris Missing in Action trilogy shall ever remain the preeminent example of Viet Nam War Movie kitsch. Bing wrote the screenplay for all three pictures in that series, the first of which the New York Times described as:

One of a string of Ramboesque films dashed off in the '80s, Missing in Action is yet another entry that attempts to exploit the lingering public bitterness over the outcome of the war in Vietnam. Colonel Braddock (karate champion Chuck Norris) travels to Vietnam on a mission to recover lost POWs. A former POW himself, Braddock has the saavy and bad temper to kill droves of communists at a time, not to mention the inclination. Together with former war comrade M. Emmet Walsh, he sets off for the POW camp where Americans are supposedly still held. Of course, there are lots of nameless, faceless Asian communists, and of course, every one of them dies in violent fashion. The chop-socky, shoot-em-up, explosion-a-minute action quickly wears thin. Missing in Action is a crass, dopey film that ultimately fails to connect with anything interesting in the realm of fact or fiction.

Yet Bing's noble experiment in film-making has not been an unmitigated failure. One of his more notable movie-making successes came when the Democrat-controlled State of Hawaii granted his production company, Shangri-La, a $13 million tax credit for making a $50 million dollar film, even though the fruit of that labor turned out to be an "inert movie with few laughs" and "a big waste of talent." If Bing hands the Dems another $5 million to go with the $8 million he's already given to their 527s, he will have fully repaid the Hawaii favor. And I expect he will return the favor, since "regular folks" have to look out for each other.

While Bing's artistic endeavors seduced no critics, life in Hollywood brought other consolations which fit in nicely with his previously well-established career as a playboy: The foray into the celluloid world put him on a path to achieve his greatest public triumph: an eighteen month celebrity love affair with model/actress Elizabeth Hurley. Upon learning that he had knocked Hurley up, Bing promptly ditched her, contested paternity, and publicly questioned Hurley's feminine integrity. Hurley reportedly refused Bing's request that she have an abortion, and DNA tests ultimately confirmed the child was his, whereupon his sister complained bitterly that Bing had been "snookered into being a parent".

In their commentary about the affair, celebrity media moralizers went so far as to suggest that Stephen Bing, though fabulously wealthy and properly liberal, was a sleezeball. But in the more enlightened climes left-wing celebrities inhabit, Bing's demonstrated propensity to treat women like crap established his credentials as a leading figure in Democrat politics.

To avoid issues of polygamy and bisexuality, proponents of gay marriage implicitly assert that the number "2" is the magical element of marriage, beyond which one need look little further. For example, David Brooks would define marriage as an "exclusive commitment" of 2 persons without regard to the partners' sex.

That definition, an "exclusive commitment of 2 persons," is incomplete. For there is nothing about the number 2, in and of itself, that makes an "exclusive commitment" of 2 persons deserving of special social status not accorded to an "exclusive commitment" involving three or more persons of whatever sex for whatever purpose. Society's granting the special social status of "marriage" to exclusive commitments of 2 persons, while denying that special status to exclusive commitments of more than 2 persons, can be justified only to the extent that the limitation serves some social good that is not served by arrangements involving a greater number. So one must ask, "Exclusive commitment for what purpose? What is the social purpose served by society's granting special status to exclusive commitments of two persons that is not as well served by exclusive commitments of three or more persons?"

In the Western tradition, the answer has been that the social good served by the institution of marriage is the procreation and well-rearing of children. Indeed, this is the only social good sufficient to distinguish marriage from other formal and informal social arrangements such as loyal friendships, monogamous sexual relationships, business partnerships, intellectual collaborations, or exclusive social clubs. Thus, marriage--as a social institution--deserves its special status apart from other "exclusive commitments" only so long as it remains grounded in the procreation and rearing of children.

To preserve the special status of the number 2 with regard to the "exclusive commitment" of marriage, society must take children into account. Children are a naturally cohering end of marriage. As the fruit, the focus, and the beneficiaries of a couple's joined efforts, children secure the bonds of marriage. And marriage in turn serves and protects children. Society must resist the complacent inclination to formally accept as "marriage" whatever arrangement two (or more) persons of whatever sex happen to want to receive that designation, beginning with the vague notion that marriage is "an exclusive commitment of 2 persons."

As a husband who is father to a stepchild only, I happily admit that a childless couple can have a successful marriage. Yet the prospect of the shared blood relationship created through generation of children is the only distinctly sustainable reference point for marriage generally. That is why it still strikes most of us as odd and even unnatural when a married couple announces they don't ever want to have children. If marriage is to remain a social institution deserving of special status, the example of the heterosexual couple with naturally conceived children must remain directly accessible to view as the reference point for all marriage. Homosexual marriage, because by nature it cannot produce offspring, weakens marriage by severing it radically from its fundamental social and natural grounding.

And yet the centrality of children to the question of gay marriage has been largely ignored in the current debate: For several years, Stanley Kurtz has been making strong and sensible arguments against gay marriage. Yet too often even Kurtz fails to emphasize the essential connection between marriage and children. For example, in an article last year, The Libertarian Question, though Kurtz does mention children and procreation, he does not say much about the symbiosis between marriage and children. His discussion of how homosexuality undermines the traditional taboo against non-procreative sex touches on this central issue, but approaches the central question via a circuitous route that emphasizes a tenuous negative argument (i.e., that the taboo on non-procreative sex protects marriage by discouraging adultery) while overlooking the positive, direct and obvious arguments (e.g., that procreative sex is at the core of the social status of marriage; that child-bearing strengthens marriage; that marriage protects children, etc.). I am pleased to see that in his most recent writing, Kurtz has returned children to the center of the argument:

Marriage is not meant solely, or even mainly, for husbands and wives. Marriage exists as a public institution because children need mothers and fathers.

Not surprisingly, in his article advocating gay marriage, David Brooks barely mentions children. The one time he does get around to mentioning children, Brooks writes dismissively of heterosexual relationships: "Men and women shack up for a while, produce children and then float off to shack up with someone else." Brooks seems to think that, because too many couples no longer perceive the link between child-bearing and marriage, we should accept gay marriage, which even further weakens that link. Other than that strange statement, Brooks has nothing to say about how children fit into his concept of gay marriage--because they don't fit into it.

Without resort to adoption or artificial methods of reproduction (which raise a host of other issues), homosexual unions must, by their nature, remain childless, and therefore are inconsistent with the natural and social grounding of marriage. Many, such as David Brooks, want to dismiss arguments about nature as "biological determinism." They would point to the example of a faithful yet barren heterosexual couple that adopts children and ask, "Is the bond between this barren couple who have adopted children less strong than one between a now-divorced couple with children they naturally conceived together? Cannot homosexual marriages with adopted children produce equally strong bonds?" As to a particular couple, one cannot say, but speaking generally (and putting aside terribly difficult problems created if the decision to have children becomes more commonly a process of selecting and manufacturing rather than begetting) it seems clear that the arrival of a child a couple conceived together strengthens the marriage bond more immediately and more naturally than the arrival of an adopted child. Now this might strike some as a harsh conclusion, but society should not ignore or minimize these problems of "flesh and blood."

Yes, "flesh and blood" can be transcended, and when "flesh and blood" is transcended, then you have something beautiful and rare. Yes, barren couples with adopted children can transcend the absence of a flesh and blood connection with their children, forming bonds with each other based on something deeper than "mere" shared flesh and blood. But such transcendence of nature's "mere" flesh and blood can readily occur only if society maintains the grounding of marriage in nature, rather than if society dismisses nature as "biological determinism." Nature provides the beginning point, the stable ground, and the support above and from which one elevates the ordinary human experience. In that sense, transcendence of nature never requires one to lose sight of the natural reference point. A barren heterosexual couple that adopts is reaching for a result toward which nature points them, but fails to complete. A barren heterosexual couple adopts children because they want what nature points them toward, what a fruitful heterosexual couple has naturally. The heterosexual couple that procreates naturally still supplies the reference point by which a barren heterosexual couple orients itself when adopting children. But no homosexual couple will ever bear children naturally, and it would be ludicrous (in more ways than one) to suggest that procreative heterosexual marriage could ever be a natural reference point for homosexual unions.

If homosexual marriage--which cannot generate children naturally--becomes more commonly accepted, the status of the procreative heterosexual marriage as the natural and social reference point for marriage becomes less accessible to view. If, to accommodate homosexual couples, an "exclusive commitment between two persons" is accepted as the vague reference point for marriage, then children will lose their status as the special end sought and served by marriage generally. When children lose that status, then the number 2 does indeed become an arbitrary limit. As it degenerates into "an exclusive commitment" for whatever purpose, duration, and number of persons of whatever sex the contracting parties happen to choose, marriage begins to lose its meaning.