The Philadelphia Inquirer

To borrow a phrase from the poet T.S. Eliot, it's likely that the gay marriage issue will impact the 2012 presidential race not with a bang, but a whimper.

Barack Obama's seven historic words ("same-sex couples should be able to get married") would have been unthinkable just eight years ago, and that's the point. Full equality for gay people is the new normal. It's the majority sentiment in the polls, a trend that will only strengthen with time. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

There has been much commentary, these past few days, about how the president's remarks were politically risky, especially in an election year. I disagree. Obama felt comfortable coming out on gay marriage after calculating that such a stance carried little political risk.

PHILADELPHIA -- The super PAC supporting Mitt Romney's presidential bid has accepted more than $1.2 million from federal government contractors, in apparent defiance of campaign-finance regulators.

The contributions, reported by the Restore Our Future political action committee over a nine-month stretch ending in February, came from firms in fields such as energy, engineering and health care. They represent businesses with federal contracts totaling more than $244 million, according to government records.

Our highly social species has been behaving strangely of late, and this has been noted in a flurry of recent hand-wringing articles wondering whether technology is changing our nature. The cover of the Atlantic asks whether Facebook is making us lonely, and the New York Times bemoans "The Flight From Conversation."

The authors observe what many of us have experienced: Friends invite us to get together only to spend the time texting other friends or tweeting. Everywhere, people are ignoring those in their physical vicinity so they can hold court with acquaintances farther away.

One unlikely source of insight into this bizarre situation comes from our cousins the monkeys. In his new book "Games Primates Play," evolutionary biologist Dario Maestripieri makes the case that people are using technology to do what comes naturally to the human species -- not to converse but to compete for status.

In the dining room of their 18th-century Chadds Ford farmhouse, a Jamie Wyeth painting depicts a pastoral scene but a slightly chaotic one -- his wife, Phyllis, in the midst of their farm animals.

Hilary Rosen, the Democratic strategist who has been savaged recently for targeting Ann Romney and supposedly maligning motherhood, was merely guilty of saying precisely the right thing in precisely the wrong way.

Mitt Romney is happy about what happened; he continues to milk the skirmish, especially in social media. Whittling Rosen's CNN remarks down to one errant phrase -- "his wife has never actually worked a day in her life" -- is good politics, because Romney needs to win over women voters, and what better way than to conflate Rosen's 11 words into a general Democratic indictment of all stay-at-home moms?

PHILADELPHIA -- Among the many renewable energy sources -- wind, solar, hydroelectric, biofuels -- there is one to which we all contribute that has not yet managed to attract the romantic advocates who have embraced other forms of green energy.

We're speaking about the gray river of warmth flowing right beneath our feet: sewage.