The Case Against 8/HBO P remiering on Monday, HBO's The Case Against 8 is an intermittently moving bunch of essentially mindless goo. Yet that's unlikely to seem very relevant to marriage-equality supporters who want to enjoy a victory lap. Few modern American political stories are as happy-making—and, let's hope, prefatory—as the Supreme Court's 5-4 thumbs-down on California's homophobic Proposition 8 on June 26 of last year, so why not celebrate? A year after the fact, however, any documentary worth viewers' time ought to aspire to more than providing birthday candles for us to blow out. That "us" is, of course, exclusionary, something you'd hardly guess from co-directors Ben Cotner and Ryan White's simple-minded assumption that everybody tuning in will share their euphoria. Don't misunderstand my own POV, because I did and do. I just don't think it would have killed the filmmakers to grapple a bit with the heretical notion that not every supporter of Prop 8—which passed with seven...

Robert Dafford/RobertDaffordMurals.com Opening panel from Robert Dafford's Wall to Wall mural for the City of Paducah. I t's nice to know that Lurleen Wallace became a lake eventually. I've always felt sorry for onetime Alabama governor George Wallace's first wife, who was dying of cancer when her term-limited hubby—yes, Mr. "Segregation now, segregation forever" his own self—got her to run in his stead, with a broad wink to the populace, in 1966. But I hadn't thought of her in years until the sign reading "Lake Lurleen State Park" popped up on Interstate 59 amid the Tuscaloosa exits. As a friend later said, there's something pre-Raphaelite about that watery destiny. Fond as I am of the statue of a windblown, prematurely spry young George H.W. Bush adorning I forget which terminal of Houston's airport, you just don't get these grace notes when you fly someplace. Credit a niece's wedding in Louisville for my first serious jaunt in some time on the great American road. On my way up from...