A Big Legal Eagle and A Big Web Thinker

Theodore Olson's pedigree is rock-solid conservative: present at the birth of the Federalist Society, a board member of American Spectator magazine, a stalwart in the Reagan administration, and solicitor general under George W. Bush, who he represented in the 2000 Florida recount. His wife, Barbara, was aboard that plane that hijackers crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

So you could hear the necks snapping from the whiplash when Olson announced he'd be going to federal court to defend same-sex marriage in the challenge to the constitutionality of Proposition 8, California's same-sex marriage ban. He is a believer in marriage as a fundamental human and constitutional right, and in this, in court, he's joined his old adversary David Boies, who headed Al Gore's challenge in the 2000 recount.

Olson joined me on the program to talk about how he think the case has gone, with his witnesses testifying both about the emotional and social damage inflicted by a same-sex marriage ban, and about the constitutional protections the U.S. Supreme Court has extended to others who found their way to the altar blocked.

Testimony has ended, and Judge Vaughn Walker will be hearing closing arguments some time next month. [We spoke yesterday to the attorney arguing for the constitutionality of Proposition 8.] You'll be hearing from him again here as the case wends its way toward the Ninth Circuit, and eventually to the Supremes.

We ranged through President Obama's call to repeal ''don't ask, don't tell,'' and a collection of studies about whether there are differences in how same-sex couples and single parents bring up children compared to heterosexual couples [answer: none, really].

And I could have spent an hour or two with Jaron Lanier. His is a big name in the early conceptual work on the World Wide Web, but in his book, ''You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto,'' he makes a great case that the ''wisdom of crowds'' on the Internet is not always wise, that the idea of ''free'' on the Internet is destroying artistic creativity and expertise -- but that it can be fixed. This is one smart, big thinker, and I hope we can hear from him again.

[Actually, I did hear from him immediately afterwards, outside the studio: he'd brought one of his hundreds of musical instruments with him, a Laotian bamboo mouth organ called a ''khene.'' He played me a tune, and reminisced about the time he took it to Caltech, where he and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman tried to figure out some trick of the reeds that kept them always in tune. What did I tell you? A fascinating guy!]

Guest host David Lazarus is here Friday, with the head of the Hemlock Society, talking about Montana judges ruling that physician-assisted suicide is legal in the Big Sky State.

-- Patt Morrison