Collins, Cohen and Kristof

La Collins writes about “Las Vegas Envy,” and says with the economy the way it is, becoming “the Las Vegas of same-sex marriages” began to sound like a good deal for states.  Mr. Cohen gives us “France on Amphetamines,” and says Nicolas Sarkozy has transformed French relations with the United States, NATO, Israel and Mediterranean neighbors. He’s the most important European leader of the moment.  Mr. Kristof’s column is titled “Prosecuting Genocide,” and he says we should applaud the International Criminal Court’s decision to seek an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for committing genocide.  Here’s La Collins:

You’ll remember that Massachusetts was the first state to legalize gay marriages, thanks to a court ruling in 2004. Everyone was not thrilled. There were petitions and attempts to pass constitutional amendments. Mitt Romney, who was evolving from liberal Republican governor to desperate Republican presidential candidate, declared his determination to keep Massachusetts from becoming “the Las Vegas of same-sex marriages.”

He grabbed hold of an antique law barring marriages of out-of-state couples whose own states would not let them be wed to make sure that nobody gay snuck over the state line in search of matrimony.

This week, the State Senate voted to repeal the law that Romney liked so much. We would tell you about the dramatic debate, except that it happened on a voice vote with no objections. The bill now goes to the House, which is also expected to pass it.

What changed? Well, with the economy the way it is, becoming the Las Vegas of anything whatsoever began to sound like a good deal. California has been raking in money from weddings of out-of-state gay couples since a court made same-sex marriage legal there.

In Massachusetts, a study commissioned by the state, with the optimism of such studies everywhere, predicted that getting rid of that old law could create hundreds of jobs, millions in tax revenue and tons and tons of local business for hotels and restaurants and party planners. As an advocate predicted reasonably, when a gay person decides to come to Massachusetts and get married, “most won’t come alone.”

The repeal was also about racial justice. In a year when we’ve been arguing about whether women or blacks deserve a presidential nominee more, it’s good to remember that when one discriminated-against group is lifted up, everybody tends to rise. The law against marrying out-of-staters was originally passed in 1913 during a national outcry over the black boxing champion Jack Johnson’s marriage to a white woman. Massachusetts did not ban black-white unions, but the state wanted to make sure that it did not turn itself into the Las Vegas of interracial marriage. Now this kind of thinking is seen as repulsive. As a result, gay Americans benefited.

After four years, same-sex marriage has also begun to feel normal in Massachusetts. It’s not something that comes up in conversation much anymore. There is no greater force against bigotry than the moment when something becomes so routine that you stop noticing it.

One state lawmaker who had originally supported a constitutional amendment against gay marriage changed her mind and voted against it when the measure went down to a final defeat in 2007. She told Pam Belluck of The Times about one of her older constituents who had nagged her to get rid of same-sex unions then turned around and lobbied her to keep them. A gay couple, she said, had moved into her neighborhood: “They help me with my lawn, and if there can’t be marriage in Massachusetts, they’ll leave.”

My 83-year-old mother, who I have always thought of as conservative on matters like sex, has a home helper, Joe Wallace, who is gay. To say they hit it off would be a deep, deep understatement. It gradually became clear to my siblings and me that there were any number of activities that my mother would rather do with Joe than with us. Shopping, for sure. Having late-night telephone discussions about taking pills was another. Also preparing for bridge parties.

“Joe made menus,” my sister informed me.

My mother has begun to make inquiries about whether anybody is interested in taking her to the next Cincinnati Pride Alive Parade.

Back in 1970, when Americans were still adjusting to the Supreme Court ruling that people of different races had a constitutional right to wed, someone suggested to President Richard Nixon that same-sex marriages would be next.

“I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000,” Nixon rejoined.

Nixon was a little early, but extremely prescient, especially when you think of the other things people predicted for our current era: flying cars, self-cleaning windows, 20-hour workweeks. An early 20th-century novel depicted New York City circa 2000 as “one huge garden, pierced here and there by slender towers or giant cupolas.”

It is very possible that we’ll be having a number of depressing discussions about gay rights over the next several months. Just this week we learned that California is going to have a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would bar same-sex marriages. And John McCain was unable to come up with a clear position on whether gays should be allowed to adopt.

But the forces of history are only on one side here. There’s going to be a long-term happy ending. Although I’m afraid we’ll never get those giant cupolas.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

A few decades back, when we were young, Joni Mitchell sang of “sitting in a park in Paris, France” but dreaming of California because “I wouldn’t want to stay here; it’s too old and cold and settled in its ways here.”

Through the big sleep of the Mitterrand and Chirac years, Joni could have come back and written the same lines. France changed, because everything and everyone does, but a remote, monarchical president continued to preside over a country more alarmed than charmed by modernity.

That was before Nicolas Sarkozy, who never saw a habit he didn’t want to overturn, became president 14 months ago. Now we have another beautiful singer, who happens to be his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, strumming these lines to him on her new album:

“I gave you my body, my soul and my chrysanthemum/ For I am yours/ you are my lord, you are my darling/ you are my orgy/ you are my folly.”

Old and settled in its ways? I think not. America’s first lady may love her man, but not like this. France has stepped out of hibernation on amphetamines.

Now I know there’s a view of Sarkozy as a Bonapartist Caligula, consumed with himself, brooking no dissent, petulant to the point of puerility and governing in such perpetual motion that he will only see the wall he’s condemned to hit when it’s too late.

True, Sarkozy is not Saint Augustine, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. I don’t like his attempt to subjugate the media — Le Figaro now fawns to a point that’s cloying and his control-the-message TV machinations are shameful. I also think the president should open his mind to Turkish membership of the European Union.

But this man is a tonic to his country and the most important European leader of his time.

In the space of a year, he has transformed France’s relations with the United States, Israel, its North African neighbors and NATO. On the domestic front, he has got a Socialist leader to confess he’s also a liberal, a word long so taboo to the French left because of its free-market associations that embracing it was worse than admitting incest.

Let’s take international matters first. Sarkozy’s Mediterranean Union summit — a kind of Club Med Bastille Day bash — had its share of vapid ostentation, but was significant for several reasons.

It got the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in the same room, drew the latter out of isolation and signaled a new European awareness of how its identity has become inseparable from societies across the “mother sea” that have sent so many of their Muslim sons and daughters northward.

At a deeper level, here was the European Union taking the initiative in its neighborhood rather than in the familiar fallback reactive mode where critiquing the United States masquerades as policy. The Union for the Mediterranean is a near-empty shell but an important impulse for Europe to think big.

I was gratified that a communiqué said this new venture will be independent from the E.U. enlargement “accession negotiations.” That was a message to Turkey. Thinking big and excluding Turkey from the E.U. is oxymoronic.

Sarkozy has reached across oceans as well as seas. By breaking political taboos about America, and burying Gaullist posturing by announcing France’s return to NATO’s military command, he has given France greater room for maneuver. The new French diplomatic mantra is: join the club to gain more independence.

U.S. mistrust of France is now in eerie abeyance: universalist France has its day in the sun.

Because you can’t build a Europe that’s divided toward the United States, as Iraq illustrated, his pro-Americanism has aided E.U. cohesiveness.

In the same way, his warmth toward Israel has given France the room to emerge as a credible Middle Eastern intermediary.

At home, where he’s unpopular in the polls but less so around the dinner table, Sarkozy has circumvented the 35-hour week by slashing taxes on overtime, freed up universities, downsized the state functionary community (and mentality), spurred small businesses, cut public spending and set in motion a radical reform aimed at creating a 21st-century army.

By comparison, Gordon Brown in Britain, he of Heathcliffian moodiness, and Angela Merkel in Germany, she of grand coalition paralysis, look second-tier.

As for the Socialist pretender and Paris mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, he put “Audacity” in the title of his recent book, nodding to Barack Obama, and called himself a Socialist liberal, nodding to Sarkozy’s transformation of the French debate: an interesting trans-Atlantic ideological conflation.

“Will you take me as I am?” Joni also sang. Faced by nonstop Sarko, the world and France have little choice. Over all, that’s a good thing. Lovely Joni should check out unsettled France. It’s a blast. Ask the Première Dame.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Many aid workers and diplomats suffered a panic attack when the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought an arrest warrant this week for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for committing genocide. They feared that Mr. Bashir would retaliate by attacking peacekeepers and humanitarian workers.

But instead of wringing our hands, we should be applauding. The prosecution for genocide is a historic step that also creates an opportunity in Sudan, particularly if China can now be induced and shamed into suspending the transfer of weapons used to slaughter civilians in Darfur.

If China continues — it is the main supplier of arms used in the genocide — then it may itself be in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Article III of the convention declares that one of the punishable crimes is “complicity in genocide”; that’s the crime that China may be committing if it goes on supplying arms used for genocide, even after the I.C.C. has begun criminal proceedings against the purchaser of those weapons.

Beijing seems unabashed. Incredibly, China and Russia are acting as Mr. Bashir’s lawyers, quietly urging the United Nations Security Council to intervene to delay criminal proceedings against him. Such a delay is a bad idea, unless Mr. Bashir agrees to go into exile.

Still, China does care about its image. Beijing supplied arms to Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia but later distanced itself from the Khmer Rouge as international criticism grew. China also supported Slobodan Milosevic until he was indicted, but then almost immediately let him hang out to dry.

One test of China’s attitudes will be whether President Bashir is welcomed at the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony next month. (If President Bush is not careful, he may find himself seated at the ceremony between Mr. Bashir and Robert Mugabe.)

If Beijing reacts to Mr. Bashir the same way it did to its other war criminal pals and suspends arms transfers, then there is real hope for Sudan. If Mr. Bashir feared losing his weapons and spare parts, he would be willing to make significant concessions that would make a peace deal more likely — and ultimately an enforceable peace agreement is the only way that Darfur can recover.

According to United Nations data, 88 percent of Sudan’s imported small arms come from China — and those Chinese sales of small arms increased 137-fold between 2001 and 2006. China has also sold military aircraft to Sudan, and the BBC reported this week that two Chinese-made A-5 Fantan fighter aircraft were spotted on a Darfur runway last month. The BBC also said that China is training Sudanese military pilots in Sudan.

Likewise, Human Rights First, in a report on Chinese weapons sales to Sudan, suggests that Chinese engineers supervise arms production at the Giad industrial complex outside Khartoum. Chinese military companies have also helped set up arms factories outside Khartoum at Kalakla, Chojeri and Bageer.

Instead of lashing out in reaction to the prospect of an arrest warrant, Mr. Bashir may be forced to take the opposite tack: He may become more cooperative.

Mr. Bashir first used brutal methods — militias and a proxy invasion of a neighboring country — in his long war against South Sudan. He didn’t pay a steep price, so he adopted the same scorched-earth policy in the Nuba Mountains. When he again went unpunished, he quite rationally adopted the same measures to suppress insurgency in Darfur.

Now, finally, we have a stick that has Mr. Bashir alarmed, and that gives us leverage. So far, Mr. Bashir is responding by trying to win support from the African Union and the Arab League, and that may restrain him from killing and raping too many aid workers and peacekeepers in the coming months. It may even induce him to cooperate with the U.N. in permitting more peacekeepers.

Unfortunately, the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, who quite properly denounces abuses when suffered by Palestinians, has chosen to side with Mr. Bashir rather than the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed in Darfur. If Israel bombed some desert in Darfur, Arab leaders might muster some indignation about violence there.

A final thought: this prosecution for genocide offers a hint of historical progress.

Throughout most of history, genocide was simply what happened to losers in a conflict. In the Bible, if we are to take it literally, there are cases when God gives a nod to genocide (“Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation — men, women, children, babies”). Such divinely sanctioned ethnic cleansing reflected the norms of war for much of history, finally beginning to yield in the last couple of centuries.

Now this prosecutor’s pursuit of a head of state suggests that human standards truly are changing — and that is a prerequisite for ending genocide itself.