(Full disclosure: I've been happily hitched since 2007, and I wouldn't hesitate to "renew" my marriage license under such a scheme. As for divorce, my parents split when I was 3 years old -- a move that, on reflection, was in everyone's best interest.)

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

Reactions to the crashing of a White House state dinner have run the gamut from A (for alarm at the security breach, such as it was) to Z (zingers aimed at arrivistes Tareq and Michaele Salahi).

The idea that someone would assault the president with silverware strikes me as improbable. In fact, that scenario reminded me of the state-dinner scene in "Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear," in which Leslie Nielsen's dimwitted detective commits mayhem against Winnie Mandela. As for the tastelessness of the national home invasion -- well, social climbing is as American as cherry pie.

Another angle: Should the leader of this country be holding invitation-only fancy-dress affairs at all? A friend reacted to outrage over the crashing with this populist post on Facebook: "This is an outrage. The next thing you know, the public will be thinking it's THEIR government."

I don't think Obama should follow Andy Jackson's example and invite the rabble to trudge through his house. On the other hand, this is not a monarchy, and so a little restraint and republican virtue might be in order. Black tie shouldn't be optional at a state dinner in a democracy -- it should be forbidden. Then maybe the crashers would stay away.

1) I was struck traveling on Wednesday by how many uniformed soldiers clotted my planes and the airports, and how young they were. (A couple of reservists were carrying skateboards.) It put faces to all the TV talk about our "brave young men and women in uniform." Not in itself an argument about Iraq/Afghanistan, but a human factor I'm sure President Obama considered during his "dithering" over more troops.

2)  Watching "CNN Heroes" out of the corner of my good eye, I again marveled at the Zen-like paradox behind tributes like this. Good Samaritans do good things with no thought of recognition, so then we recognize them.

3) As a fan of regional differences, I was thankful this morning to see (and hear) that the staff at a Starbucks in my home town of Pittsburgh seemed less haughty and less pretentious than their fellow baristas in D.C., NYC and L.A. No Steelers jackets though.

The Wall Street Journal has published on its website the text of the proposed 10-point checklist for determining whether a Republican candidate is orthodox enough  to benefit from the party's endorsement and fund-raising.

The affirmations issues are quite a mixed bag. Some are perennial and cosmic, such as: "We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership." Others are micro-specific and could be obsolescent by the time they are proposed to the Republican National Committee in January.  Take: "We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare." In January, they  might have to change "oppose" to "opposed."

And, even if you're a true-blue conservative, is legislation opposing "card check" as a way to organize unions as big a deal as abortion or the right to keep and bear arms? Presumably not, but all of the propositions are weighted the same. As George W. Bush said of Al Gore's economic proposals, this is fuzzy math.

-- Michael McGough

Lou Dobbs is not ruling out running for president. But if the past is any guide (remember presidential candidate Joe Biden?), he may be willing to take second place on the ticket. Palin-Dobbs, anyone? The only condition that Lou might impose on the deal would be for Palin to show ID if she came to the GOP convention through Canada.

-- Michael McGough

The New York Times reports that conservatives  have been drawing up a 10-point checklist -- to be printed on litmus paper? -- against which the Republican National Committee should measure prospective GOP candidates.

There's nothing surprising about the contents of the proposed creed (for example, opposition to government funding of abortion and President Obama's "socialist agenda"). Nor is the idea of a conservative loyalty test. It was implicit in the muscling by true believers of a Republican nominee for a House seat in New York who didn't toe the ideological line.

Never mind that Democrats captured that seat after the withdrawal of the scorned RINO (Republican in Name Only). Conservative Republicans increasingly seem willing to sacrifice electoral success on the altar of philosophical purity, and moderate Republicans are increasingly are an endangered species. That's good news for Democrats, but bad news for those of us who believe that a modicum of diversity in both parties is conducive to compromise and good government.

But back to the surprising thing about the proposed Index of Acceptability: the fact that 70% is a passing grade. Answer seven questions right and you get an endorsement and funding. Get six right and you flunk.  ("Bummer! I messed up that abortion question. Maybe I can do something for extra credit.") If too many candidates fall short, the party may have to start grading on the curve.

-- Michael McGough

America's Roman Catholic bishops aren't completely obsessed by abortion and gay marriage. My former colleague Ann Rodgers, one of the best religion reporters around, reports in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that bishops have been battling over whether to approve a retro English translation of the Mass with more traditional (and, critics charge, more stilted) language.

The new/old language won out at the recent bishops' conference. So now when the priest says "The Lord be with you," the congregation will reply "And with your spirit," not "and also with you," the current, clunky and inaccurate translation of the response I learned as an altar boy: "Et cum spiritu tuo." Like W.H. Auden, I believe that you can combine conservatism in liturgical language with more progressive political view.

Conservatism is cool even when it leads to technical language. Take the line in the Nicene Creed in which, in recent years, Jesus has been described as "one in being with the Father." Now he will be described as  "consubstantial with the Father." Abstruse? Perhaps. But truer to the Latin rendering of a Greek theological distinction that once led to violence between Christians. Confusion can beget a look into church history.

Even archaic non-theological language can be a spur to education. When Christians used to say that Christ would return to judge the "quick and the dead," parents could explain to their bewildered children that "quick" referred not to marathon runners but to those who were living, who had been quickened in their mothers' wombs. The lesson could then turn to the expression "cut to the quick."

Now that the Vatican has invited restive Anglicans to bring at least some parts of their majestic Book of Common Prayer with them when they cross the Tiber, the "regular" Catholic Church has to worry about non-tone-deaf believers switching  to the new church-within-a-church. The new/old liturgy approved by the bishops could be a bulwark against such defections.

-- Michael McGough

I met Tim Russert only once, before a "Meet the Press" debate between two Senate candidates from my home state of Pennsylvania. Russert was engaging, impressively au courant with Keystone State politics and, well, a nice guy. I also admired his work, and I was sad when he died before his time. (You never hear about someone dying at his time.)

Still, I cringed at the excessiveness of his obsequies. Journalism has a long, and appealingly human, tradition of providing a little nicer send-off to colleagues than someone in another business might receive. That's why newspapers give their own printers and truck drivers suspiciously long obituaries. The over-the-top eulogies for Russert were a species of this phenomenon, but that didn't make them less bizarre. I like to think that Russert, looking down, would want to interrupt his media mourners in mid-gush just the way he called politicians on their prevarications.

But at least that's over now -- except that it isn't. Tomorrow the Newseum (I know, it's a goofy name for an interesting resource) will unveil a new exhibit: a re-creation of Russert's office at NBC News, complete with his desk "stacked high with research material, books and handwritten notes, illustrating the rigorous preparation Russert put into each show" and "mementos of his beloved Buffalo Bills." What, no Rolodex?

This has just a whiff of the medieval Catholic practice of venerating relics of the saints, which probably would amuse Russert -- and, I hope, embarrass him.

Maybe it's because I'm a long-ago high school newspaper editor, but I was shocked and appalled (nobody is ever shocked but not appalled) by a New York Times report that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- "widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values" -- insisted on reviewing and tweaking an article about his appearance at a private school in New York. The student newspaper at the Dalton School published a tantalizing editor's note saying: "We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints."

Then I read the Times article again and discerned some shades of ethical gray. It's true, as Frank D. LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center said, that "in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech." But apparently Kennedy's purpose wasn't to vet the article as a whole but to reconsider the felicity of some of his phraseology.

It wasn't clear whether he made this request in advance. But if he did, and the agreement was confined to allowing him to polish his prose, I'm less shocked but still somewhat appalled. My own practice as a reporter was to refuse at the outset to show my completed story to an interviewee. As for quotes, I never would allow someone to retract or rephrase an answer because of second thoughts about its political effect.

But I made an exception when I did a series of interviews with prominent intellectuals. One law professor, in explaining his constitutional philosophy, used an analogy in reference to the Constitution. He later called me to suggest a different analogy that he said more precisely made his point. I let him change it, because the whole purpose of the piece was to let him present his thinking in his own words.

The difference here is that the Kennedy story was an account of an event at which an audience heard the justice's original words. That tips the scales of journalistic justice. Kennedy said what he said; if he wanted to correct it, he should have written a letter to the editor.

Actually, there's a precedent. Last year the court ruled that the death penalty couldn't be imposed for rape. Writing for the court, Kennedy cited as proof that the penalty was cruel and unusual the fact that, while 26 states and the federal government, had the death penalty, "only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for the rape of a child." After the decision, a blogger pointed out that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed the death sentence in the rape of a child, a fact the court had overlooked

The court added a footnote rectifying its omission -- but it didn't blot out the original language.

--Michael McGough

It was a blow to Roman Catholic liberals when the Vatican announced last month that it would welcome, en masse, conservative Anglicans who share the pope's opposition to female clergy and traditional views about homosexuality. But there was a silver lining for liberals: The fact that in welcoming married Anglican priests to the fold, Pope Benedict XVI was perhaps opening the door to married priests within so-called Latin Rite Catholicism. (Eastern Rite Catholics, who recognize the pope's authority but follow rites similar to those of Eastern Orthodoxy, do ordain married men, though Eastern Catholics in the United States were pressured to conform to Western practice so as not to "scandalize" their Irish Catholic neighbors).

But the publication this week of the decree implementing the overture to Anglicans suggests that the slope to married Catholic priests isn't that slippery. After saying that married former Anglican priests could be ordained as Catholic priests, the "Apostolic Constitution" stops short of adopting the Anglican practice of routinely ordaining men who want to become priests.

While authorities of the new church-within-a-church will abide by "the discipline of celibate clergy in the Latin Church, as a rule," an "ordinary" (a bishop or former Anglican bishop) may also ask the pope for permission to ordain married men "on a case-by-case basis." This could be a face-saving way to perpetuate the Anglican tradition of a married clergy without saying so, or it could be a warning that married Anglican laymen will be ordained only rarely. Either way, the new Anglican body within Catholicism will not have the autonomy enjoyed by the Eastern Catholic churches.

The more stinging rebuff to Roman Catholic advocates of married priests is this rather mean-spirited provision of a companion document: "Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate." In other words, if you left the Catholic Church and now want to return alongside other Anglican priests, you are treated worse than an Anglican priest who never belonged to the Catholic Church in the first place.

Perhaps the purpose of this provision is to prevent married Roman Catholics who want to be ordained as priests to pretend to convert to Anglicanism so that they can go back through the revolving church door and be accepted as married Catholic priests. But how likely is that? And if the church is willing to incorporate Anglican traditions that don't violate Catholic doctrine (as opposed to a mere regulation like mandatory celibacy), why not treat the new Anglican Rite exactly as the Eastern churches are treated? The only justification for that inconsistency is to stifle discussion about ending mandatory celibacy for Roman Catholic priests.

-- Michael McGough