I had a chat last night with Andrew Sullivan (we go to the same gym and bump into each other occasionally in the attached “Health Bar”) and he mentioned that I was the person whom Michael Kinsley had mentioned in his Sunday column in the Washington Post. When Kinsley was editor of The New Republic, I met him at a cocktail party (it may have been their 75th anniversary party, which I wrote up for the Wall Street Journal, or maybe it was someplace else) and I proposed to him the idea of an article on allowing gay people to marry. He said that it sounded interesting and I ought to take a crack at it. I started to do my research into the history of marriage and all that and came to the conclusion that I preferred (utopian that I was) to promote separation of state and marriage rather than legal equality within state marriage. So I didn’t write the piece. (I’ve since been convinced to change my mind on the matter.) Kinsley discusses in his article that he later turned to “a young writer named Andrew Sullivan.”
But none of that is important. What’s important is that I am now famous, as the opening lines of Kinsley’s column show:
Sometime during the late 1980s, some guy (I don’t remember who) from some conservative think tank (CATO? Hoover?) asked me at some Washington reception whether the New Republic, where I worked as the editor, would be interested in publishing an article advocating gay marriage. It was the first that I had heard of the idea.
“Some guy”…..I’ve read those words over and over.
Actually, I wasn’t working at the Cato Institute (I think that I was either editing the newspaper Dollars & Sense for the National Taxpayers Union and doing graduate work in philosophy at Catholic University or working at the Institute for Humane Studies) and the Cato Institute isn’t conservative (as my colleague David Boaz recently informed Kinsley), but again, none of that matters. I am now famous.
(Full column here.)
Update: I wrote a note to Michael Kinsley “outing” myself as “some guy” and got back a very gracious note.
Congratulations on your new found fame! Just remember us little people who knew the name Palmer before this monumentous event…
Congratulations Dr. Tom! Bask in the glow while you can…I hear it only lasts 15 minutes. 🙂
So being Chief Exec. of Cato University wasn’t enough for you? That’s a fame qualifier in my book.
Congrats, Tom. It’s amazing how ideas like that can move and have lasting consequences… I imagine, actually, that you’ve have done quite A LOT of that during your career so far – will do even more. I’m sure you don’t even know all the ways you’ve changed peoples’ lives for the better – or caused them to think about ideas in new ways.
Tom–I certainly know who you are. As long as we’re making corrections, as you of course know, but so many others do not, it’s the Cato Institute, not the CATO Institute. It’s not an acronym (though some have speculated about that). It was the pen name of the great English libertarian popularizers Trenchard and Gordon. When will the savvy pundits get it?