Today's a special day in California and the USA. One month after the California State Supreme Court struck down a ban on gay marriage, today at 5:01 PM county clerks will begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Whenever I read about what's going on at the Justice Department I always feel like I'm reading a story in The Onion. Because no matter what they've been doing, you can bet it runs totally counter to the goal of furthering justice -- to an utterly absurd degree.

The latest reason to wonder if the Department of Justice could possibly fail more completely to live up to its name? A report from NPR yesterday that a career attorney at the department who was universally praised for her job performance was let go from her post because of rumors that she was gay.

It's a credit to our eighth-grade social studies teachers that most of us can recite the most famous line from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

But have you ever heard the rest of the speech?