Intolerant Tolerance. There has recently been a major backslide on television toward antihomosexual bigotry, this time in the guise of acceptance. Gay men are accepted only if they act like flaming faggots who accept being called "queer". This is akin to 'accepting' blacks only if they are content to fit themselves to Steppin Fetchit stereotypes and to be called "nigger".
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Cable station TV Land is promoting a special week in June 'celebrating' gay (and lesbian) characters on classic TV sitcoms under the rubric "Tickled Pink". Get it? Pink! Gay men are feminine, not masculine; imitation women, not real men.
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June, you see, is "Gay Pride Month" — or, as it has been renamed by some lesbians, "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month". I am the man who in 1970 coined the term "Gay Pride" as it is used today, and I am indignant about the 'special programming' some broadcasters are putting together for this month, focusing on AIDS (as tho it is indeed "the gay disease", even tho the great preponderance of people with AIDS around the world are straight) and on "lesbian and gay" this and "gay and lesbian" that. "Gay" must never be uttered without "lesbian" lurking somewhere, and gay men's manhood must never be accepted as a thing in itself but always equated with lesbianism. That's the New Homosexuality: same sex = both sexes = sexless. The raw male sexuality that really characterizes homosexuality is always to be hidden and denied.
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As part of its "Tickled Pink" promo, TV Land employs blond superfruit Carson Kressley of the odiously named Bravo series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to say he tried for a long time to twitch his nose like Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched, but couldn't. That same repulsive fruit is currently to be seen on some other promo, for an upcoming movie or TV show, in which women are talking about looking for the perfect man, whereupon he pipes up, in his best queeny accent, that he's been looking for yearssss! Another TV spot features the flamboyantly campy comic Mario Cantone acting the bitch, as 'one of the girls' in a promo for Sex and the City. A Tonight Show rerun this week showed Jay Leno sneeringly calling Budweiser Select 'by its right name, "Gay Heineken"'. And on, and on.
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No sooner had I finished this blog and told three friends about it by email, than I go downstairs to watch some TV, and find that Jay Leno's second guest is the very-queer comic "Ant", who rose to modest fame in the TV contest Last Comic Standing.* Ant pulls out his (anti)gay stereotypes, and recounts that when he was a flight attendant he once worked the first-class cabin when some European princess, whose family had bought out the entire first-class section, presumably so she would not be bothered by commoners, was being very snooty and imperious. Ant wearied of her attitude. When she remarked that in her country she was a princess, Ant retorted (he says), "In America I'm a queen. I outrank you."
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As Laugh-In mockingly quoted another 'queen', Victoria, many years ago, "We are not amused."
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Everywhere on TV, homosexuality is attacked as unmasculine, effete, effeminate. If a gay character is to be cast, do they hire a Rock Hudson, a strong, handsome, manly man with not a trace of effeminacy about him (who really was gay), or a flaming faggot (who might actually be straight)?
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The extremely rare gay roles that are not to come off as fruity are almost invariably given to straight men (like Eric McCormack of the hideous, antihomosexual pile of crap Will & Grace), who then go out of their way to tell the world that they're not really gay — because, of course, that would be a disgrace. Actually-gay actors like Sean Hayes (of that same piece of crap) camp and flame like lunatics on speed, completely out of touch with their basic, masculine nature, and don't understand themselves to be enemies of gay men.
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I'm tired of it.
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Why is there no gay TV? I recently upgraded to digital cable so get something like 140 channels, not one of which is gay! Not one. Oh, there is apparently a gay — or "lesbian and gay" (that is, heterosexual: men-and-women-together-now!) — on-demand service called "Here", but it requires a separate subscription, which I'm not about to buy. I pay quite enuf for cable, thank you, and gay programming should be part of readily available services. Do black people have to pay extra for UPN, BET, or other stations of special interest to blacks? If not, why should gay men have to pay extra for some piddling, tiny bit of programming for their interests? I don't even know if what is offered at "Here" is worth my time or is more of the same insane "lesbigay" crap that gay men have been attacked with for decades, in which one must never speak of men without also speaking of women; we must always spend all our time with women, identify with and support our "sisters", and never, never ever want to be alone with men, because that would be wrong.
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I assume that "Here" derives its name from the noxious chant, "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it." Of course, that chant is always intoned by mixed groups of men and women, because, of course, lesbians have always been called "queer". Oh, wait. That's wrong. Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer". They can't let men have ANYTHING of their own. They get their own word, "lesbian", but steal our words too. So if we call ourselves "gay", we're calling ourselves, in essence, male lesbians. If we call ourselves "queer", same thing. Never are gay men ever to think of themselves as unique, special, different in a good way. No, we are always to be subordinate to lesbian women, and ride at the back of our own bus.
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All this must change. There are so many talented gay men with infinite networks of other talented gay men in media and music, but there is no gay television, essentially no gay film (except some porn), and no gay music. The soundtrack in gay bars is all-straight, all the time. Why?
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And why do gay men consent to be stereotyped and attacked by our ostensible friends? Why do they gladly play the simpering, effeminate buffoon so agreeably, reinforcing destructive stereotypes rather than challenging them? Don't they realize they are role models from whom young boys just coming to terms with their sexuality take cues as to how to behave? Don't they realize they are pushing kids to deform themselves at least psychically and perhaps even physically, as to have themselves castrated in "sex-change" surgery, to conform to the vicious slander that they aren't real boys and will never be real men?
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A couple of weeks ago I was talking, in my favorite New York gay bar, with a South American whom my friend Don introduced me to, a guy named Gabriel, from Uruguay. He says there is a sizable gay community in Montevideo, and even a gay-friendly resort outside the city. But it is friendly only to flaming faggots. If a man walks down the street in a dress, Gabriel says, he is "accepted", because such a psychosexually castrated loser is no threat to macho Latino culture. But if two perfectly masculine men should try to walk down the street holding hands, they will encounter bristling hostility and perhaps even be physically attacked.
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Almost 36 years after Stonewall, we in the United States are scarcely more advanced than that kinky Uruguayan town. Even Hollywood-based TV accepts gay men's right to be different only if they renounce their manhood and play the role of drag-queen nellies, flaming like a barn afire.
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That's not tolerance. That is bigotry. And we must neither inflict nor consent to suffer bigotry.
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Hollywood, cut the crap. Media must stop telling gay men that they must be nelly fruits to be accepted — as harmless queers. That's not acceptance but psychological warfare against gay men's acceptance of their full, masculine nature.
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Gay men are being killed by friendly fire.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,665.)
_____________________

* That show was hosted by the adorable Jay Mohr, who was born in Verona, in Essex County, New Jersey. My city, Newark, is the county seat. Ant also made a lewd remark about Willie Aames, who is to appear on a TV show Ant is associated with, about fat celebrities losing weight. I won't repeat the remark except to say that he found Aames very hot, even when fat. I know that Aames was stunning in the classic sitcom (set in New Jersey) Charles in Charge. I later saw him on one of the classic religious dramas, Insight or This Is the Life, where he still looked good but not as good.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:26 PM

 
One Bullet Dodged. The people of France today rejected the proposed new constitution for the European Union. Since that constitution cannot go into effect, by its own terms, without unanimous ratification, it is effectively rejected Union-wide. Good.
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France's leadership, along with Germany's, has long been nearly obsessed with creating a European superpower first to rival, then replace the United States on the world stage. They have resented the decline of Europe from the "glory days" of old, when European countries conquered almost the entire planet. If, divided, Europe was able to conquer almost the entire planet, what might they do if truly united?
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Let's review. European empires imposed their rule, their economics, their languages, and, in some measure, their religion, Western Christianity, upon thousands of disparate peoples all around this planet. Europeans eager to retake the world stage ignore or trivialize the violence that the colonializing project required, the suffering of hundreds of millions under the colonial yoke, and the loss of many ancestral cultures inundated by outside influences.
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They also dismiss the fact that European colonization also brought black slavery, as Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and, most particularly, Portugal moved tens of millions of people from Africa to populate their New World colonies and labor in their fields. An unknowable, but large, fraction of the people kidnapped from Africa died on the voyage to America.
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Africa itself was reduced to colonial rule rather late in the game, and for much of the continent, the colonial period lasted scarcely more than one normal human lifespan, 60 to 80 years. The after-effects, however, persist.
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Much of sub-Saharan Africa's ruling elite continues to immerse itself in the culture and economics of its former overlords. They have embraced neo-colonialism, in the Lomé Convention, which ties African (and some Caribbean and Pacific) economies into the European Union. European companies and governments gladly do business with kleptocracies on kleptocrats' own terms, reinforcing economic unfairness, governmental corruption, and political repression across much of the continent.
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European militaries (but especially France) regularly intrude on one side or another of local conflicts, not always to the good.
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But perhaps worst, much of the continent's ruling and cultural elites still speak French and Portuguese, look to the metropolitan countries from which those languages sprang, and teach those increasingly useless languages to their children, wasting enormous educational resources they cannot afford on languages that can do little to advance their most basic interests. Africa needs modernization and democratization. It needs English, and especially American English.
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Europeans haven't learned from their own history, that overreaching weakens, not strengthens.
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They have enlarged what used to be called and conceived of, modestly and sensibly, as a Common Market, and reinvented it into an aspiring superstate in which all its constituent cultures would somehow meld into a new "European" identity, cohesive and universal. Such a project was dubious even when the core six countries — France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — created the Common Market (formally, "European Economic Community"). Between them, they spoke four major languages, from two language families, Romance and Germanic, plus a number of minor dialects.
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The superstate project became more dubious when the Common Market started adding other countries, and other languages. At first, all the new members were Western Christian, and all the languages were Western European. More recently, however, the renamed and reconceived "European Union", with its new sense of self-importance and new mission, expanded into Eastern Europe.
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It admitted members who not only speak Greek, Slavic languages, Baltic languages, and Ural-Altaic languages, but also some that adhere to Eastern Orthodox churches. And all of them have linguistic and religious minorities, including a significant admixture of Moslems.
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Then the EU opened negotiations to admit Turkey, 70 million Moslems. That seems to have been a step too far.
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The heart of the project, France, snapped, and its people said, "That's enuf for now."
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Are the current 25 members of the EU going to find a way to create a superstate, even without a common language? Will the millennium-long division between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity become as trivial as the Catholic-Protestant split is for many modern Europeans?
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Will the EU continue to enlarge under its current rules? If so, will that enlargement revive superpower ambitions, or will the "Union" be so dilute and riven by divisions that any chance it might have had of challenging the U.S. for world primacy has vanished?
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I suspect that the European-superpower project never stood a chance, at least not without a common language, and France would never permit the EU to adopt the obvious choice of common language — English — first because its overweening pride in its own language would not permit that humiliation and second because an English-speaking EU would be unlikely to see the English-speaking U.S. as its worst enemy.
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Major powers seem to need enemies to justify aggressive behavior toward others. We have Iraq, Afghanistan, and Islamism, for the moment. We face China in the not-so-distant future. We don't need Europe snapping at our heels.
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In rejecting a tighter structure for the European Union, the people of France have made a worthy contribution to world peace and proved again that they are a good friend to the American people. Merci bien.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,657.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:04 PM

 
Gulag, Guantanamo. Both begin with GU. Coincidence?
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But seriously, folks, Amnesty International aroused the ire of rightwingers this week in comparing the Guantanamo prison camp to the Soviet gulag. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post today on one rightwinger's reaction:

Surely John Podhoretz understands that in talking of moral outrages, comparisons are to the essence of a wrong, not to relative numbers. So when Amnesty International compares the unlawful U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo to the Soviet Gulag, or abortion opponents call U.S. government connivance in the abortion industry our Auschwitz, quibbling over the numbers affected is moral relativism, something conservatives are supposed to be indignant about. We are supposed to obey our Constitution, which provides very plainly that anyone arrested for any crime is to be formally charged or released, and if held to have a "speedy trial" by a jury of his peers, with "compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel". If we refuse to abide by our own Constitution, as in so many other ways, "the terrorists have won".

The right wing never thinks about the innocent accused of crimes, nor ever puts themselves in the place of someone wrongly accused and mistreated by a police authority. It's time they did. How would John Podhoretz like to be arrested for assisting a lawful government in resisting foreign invasion, then hauled off to a prison camp where he is never charged with anything but held without trial for years at a time? I'd like to see that. Maybe then he wouldn't trivialize the injustice we are doing to foreign fighters — mind you, if any other country did that to our soldiers, he'd be livid — and the violence the Bush Administration is doing to the Constitution.
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(Responsive to "Amnesty's Idiocy", column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, May 27, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,656.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:56 PM

 
First Among Failures. I was unable to get to sleep tonite (it is now well past dawn), and equally unable to find anything of interest on cable TV in English. So I dallied at a Spanish news broadcast on Telemundo (one of the United States' two Spanish-language TV networks, this one owned by the same owners as NBC, the other owned by interests titely aligned with Mexico's national broadcaster, Televisa). It seems there is some kind of controversy/power play in Puerto Rico's legislature, now dominated by "estadistas" (statehooders, that is, advocates of making Puerto Rico the 51st State of the United States), aligned against the anti-statehood, pro-"Commonwealth" governor.
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The former governor, physician Pedro Rosselló, did something or other to secure his power in PR's Senate, which required him to be on a cellphone, possibly to Senator Kenneth McClintock-Hernandez ("KMH"). My Spanish is so crappy that I couldn't really follow the several sequential news reports, but it seems that the former Governor is contending for Senate President against KMH. It's not really important, because the Puerto Rico statehood movement, of which both Rosselló and KMH are members, is dedicated to failure.
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In summer 1967, as a callow youth of 22, I paid my own way to fly to Puerto Rico for the first of its modern status referendums on whether to become a State of the Union or independent country, or remain a "Commonwealth" (colony) "freely associated" with the United States. Since my Spanish then was even worse than my Spanish now, I was able only to hand out leaflets under the palm-tree icon of the statehood party in Rio Piedras, a 'boro' of Greater San Juan much as Queens is a boro of New York City. (I was then residing in Manhattan, so was comfortable with that concept.)
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The statehooders lost that election (and have lost every single referendum since then, but not by wide margins the last couple of times) only because they refused to pose the question to voters in the starkest of terms: Given a choice only between statehood and independence, which do you want? Instead, the statehooders have insisted on offering the Puerto Rico electorate the choice of refusing to choose between the only permanent resolutions ultimately available to them, but instead permitting them to put the question off indefinitely by voting for "Commonwealth" (in Spanish, "Estado Libre Asociado", which translates to "Free[ly] Associated State").
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Given the choice of not choosing, the winning margin of Puerto Ricans have chosen not to choose. What a surprise!
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I have in the past written to two statehood-party governors, Carlos Romero Barceló and Pedro Roselló, to say that they will always lose as long as they content themselves with offering Puerto Ricans a choice to refuse to choose, so Puerto Rico's leaders must instead insist that any referendum ask only about the two ultimate choices: statehood or independence, fish or cut bait! Both governors replied that they felt it indispensable to democracy that they offer instead a three-way choice that included the two permanent statuses plus the neither/nor, refuse-to-choose option "Commonwealth". I warned them plainly that as long as they allow voters the option to refuse to choose, they will always lose. They ignored me. And they have always lost to the option to refuse to choose.
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Romero Barceló wrote a kind letter saying he recognized my long interest in Puerto Rico's status, but he refused to alter the estadistas' longstanding policy of refusing to ask Congress to cut off "Commonwealth" and thus force Puerto Rico to make the stark choice between statehood and independence alone.
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Rosselló merely said that he felt it was necessary to offer Puerto Ricans a full range of choices.
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I denounce Romero Barceló, Rosselló, and every other member of the statehood movement leadership as imitation statehooders, frauds, and cowards. They don't really want statehood. They want personal importance. But what kind of importance is it to be a big frog in a small pond? What conceivable importance does any failure have?
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Third Worlders love to feel important. They love titles and uniforms and status in the community. Unfortunately, they care much less about results than they do about status — not Puerto Rico's status: their own social and political status. It is, alas, enuf for them to be chief of staff of this or president of the Senate of that than to make any substantive and transformative change in the condition of their people. Self-vaunting seems to be the main concern of too many officeholders in Puerto Rico.
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At least the "Commonwealthers" don't aspire higher. They are content to be little people in charge of a little island. Same with the independentistas. But the statehooders? They're supposed to have higher aspirations.
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Let me challenge the estadistas, then: You fought the good fite, sort of, but failed? — again and again? when you could have won? That makes you not a hero of democracy, for offering people the option to refuse to choose, but an IDIOT for refusing to demand they grow up and make a choice!
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Americans who believe in equality may have to take the statehood issue AWAY from Puerto Rico's own "leaders" and make it a mainland issue. Colonialism, no matter how colorfully and ingeniously disguised, is still colonialism.
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Puerto Rico is a colony, period. All attempts to make colonialism look nice by putting it into fancy dress as "Commonwealth" are bull. As Gertrude Stein, looking at Puerto Rico's unending inequality in the American system, might have put it, "A colony is a colony is a colony."
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Hispanics (or, today's favored term, "Latinos") are the Nation's largest minority, having surpassed blacks several years ago, but they don't have anything like the power in Congress that they should have, because many are fairly recent immigrants who haven't yet taken U.S. citizenship, so cannot vote. OLD citizens, Puerto Ricans (who were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917), refuse to elect people to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. So we have the bizarre reality that those who want representation cannot get it, and those who could have representation won't take it!
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There are 2 Hispanics in the U.S. Senate, this despite the fact that Latinos comprise the Nation's largest minority. And 2 is the most there have ever been. Before the current Congress, there were none:

39.9 million [is]
The estimated Hispanic population of the United States as of July 1, 2003, making people of Hispanic origin the nation’s largest race or ethnic minority. Hispanics constitute 13.7% of the nation’s total population. (This does not include the 3.9 million Hispanic residents of Puerto Rico.)

So WITH PR, there are about 44 million Latinos in the United States, but only 2 Hispanic U.S. Senators: 2%. Were Puerto Rico, that little island, admitted to the Union as a State, the number of Hispanic U.S. Senators would double, overnite. But Puerto Ricans are content to let there be only 2 U.S. Senators for 44 million Hispanic Americans. They don't care that PR is the only place from which additional Hispanic Senators are likely to derive in the near future. They don't care that Puerto Rico could as well add 6 Hispanic Representatives to the House, on a base of 24 (of 435 total) — an increase of 25%, which would still leave Hispanics seriously underrepresented. Puerto Rico's politicians seem not to care that their fellow Latino citizens are grossly underrepresented and have almost no one to defend their rights and champion their interests. That is detestable.
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Puerto Rican statehooders have an obligation to face the fact that a majority of Puerto Ricans will continue, for the foreseeable future, to refuse to choose between statehood and independence as long as they are permitted to cast such a gutless and useless vote.
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Statehooders must admit that the decades-long indecision over status and endless, destructive rancor over status keeps Puerto Rico from focusing on its most basic issues, such as education — in what language? — and economic development (to what end? creating a successful part of the larger U.S. economy or creating the base for an independent country?). All Puerto Ricans need to understand that Puerto Rico's perpetually unsettled political status (a) dissuades potential investors from sinking large amounts of money into an economy that could be cast out of the U.S. tariff and currency area at any moment and (b) prevents Puerto Ricans from adopting plans consistent with long-term goals — because Puerto Rico has no idea what its long-term political and thus economic affiliation will be.
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Puerto Rico's political (and, thus, economic) status is not a side issue. It is the most central of all conceivable issues. Unless planners can know exactly what Puerto Rico's political future holds, no one can plan for anything. Uncertainty is a worse enemy of Puerto Rico's future even than independence.
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In October of 2000, I created a presentation for the Internet (c. 17,000 words and many illustrations) on Puerto Rico's endless indecision, called "Puerto Rico: Three Futures, One Unending Past". It appears on the Internet at http://members.aol.com/XPUS2/PR.html, and has been described by a Puerto Rican university student thus:

This is the best and only article I have ever read that actually puts everything into the right prospective with Puerto Rico. I want to thank you for all the research and work that you put into this article and I sincerely hope that all Puerto Ricans get to read this article. I consider this of the utmost importance and feel that you are a true blessing to make these facts known. Thank you for again for having the courage and conviction to put this together for all Puerto Ricans everywhere.

(Forgive the tiny errors in English. Puerto Rico's first language is Spanish.)
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Puerto Ricans are worried that if they make their island a state, it will eventually lose its Spanish language — tho no one can make Puerto Ricans abandon Spanish if they choose to retain it, and English is fully as Puerto Rican a language as Spanish, since it has been spoken on the island for over a century, and the original inhabitants of "Borinquen" spoke Indian languages, not Spanish at all.
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Fear of losing their culture (whose characteristics I address in that presentation) may paralyze Puerto Ricans, but it shouldn't paralyze the United States Government.
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If Puerto Ricans cannot decide, Congress and the President must act, to force Puerto Rico to choose: statehood or independence — fish or cut bait! If Congress ends "Commonwealth" and compels Puerto Rico's voters to choose statehood or independence, with no third option, it is almost certain that Puerto Rico will become our 51st State, and in so doing dramatically increase the power of Latinos and the poor to influence public policy for the entire Nation.
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What on Earth are they waiting for?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,653.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:20 AM

 
Attack! Under the headline "N. Korea Won't Rule Out Pre-Emptive Attack", the Associated Press reports that the North Korean government stated publicly yesterday that it is thinking of making a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States:

"The United States should be aware that the choice of a pre-emptive attack is not only theirs," the North's official news agency quoted the state-run newspaper Minju Joson as saying. "To stand against force with force is our unswerving method of response."

The instant Washington heard that, it should have put into motion plans for a pre-emptive strike against North Korea as soon as it can be coordinated, to destroy the entire North Korean government.
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If a tactical nuclear strike against the presidential palace would suffice, do it. If only a full-scale nuclear attack on Pyongyang and every suspected nuclear installation is likely to suffice, killing millions of North Koreans, do it.
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International scientific observers believe that North Korea has several nuclear weapons, and missiles capable of reaching the U.S. West Coast. I have relatives on the West Coast, and both California and Washington State are of great economic and technological importance not just to the U.S. but also to world civilization. We cannot just sit around and wait to see if the evil monster Kim Jong Il, who has killed over a million of his own people thru famine and repression, will attack us at a time and for a reason of his own choosing.
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Saddam Hussein was never a threat to us. Kim Jong Il is. It's time to destroy him and every North Korean who would defend him.
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Yesterday's announcement that North Korea might launch a first strike against the United States is the equivalent of a declaration of war, and just as Manuel Noriega's bellicose remarks were treated as a declaration of war, Kim Jong Il's bellicose declaration should be regarded as a declaration of war, and met with immediate and overwhelming force, before his generals know what's happening.
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When the stakes are catastrophically high, you don't gamble but act decisively. If it comes down, as it may well, to a couple of million North Koreans dying or a couple of million Americans, I have no difficulty choosing. Does George Bush?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,649.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:31 PM

 
Nukes on Hold. The Senate has compromised on the "nuclear option" of ending the right of a minority to filibuster judicial nominations, permitting cutoff of debate for some of President Bush's judicial nominations in exchange for preserving the right to employ the filibuster in other cases (as in the biggest matter, nominations for the Supreme Court).
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The problem is at least twofold: (1) in a democracy, should the minority ever have the right to block the majority? and (2) should unelected judges have lifetime appointments?
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As to (1), I'm tempted to say "No. Majority rules." But, despite the best efforts of the Framers of the Constitution to protect minority rights, Congress and other legislatures regularly act to violate even the most basic rights of minorities, and only the courts protect us from dictatorship.
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If a militant majority packs the courts, there are no protections left to minorities, and we risk total dictatorship by the majority. Republicans think that's just fine, right now, because they are temporarily in the majority. But Democrats have been the majority before and will be the majority again, especially if we bring in more states (e.g., Puerto Rico, Central America, various parts of Canada), since pretty much nowhere else on Earth is as backward as the present-day South. Will Republicans then be so eager to see the majority trample them underfoot? I suspect they will not, but will want the ability to filibuster to prevent being stomped half-dead.
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As for (2), nobody is happy with the courts of this country, and we need to rework the Constitution as regards courts.
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(a) All judges should be elected, in partisan contests in which the two major parties are required to name different candidates, as would give voters a real choice.
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(b) No judge should hold office for life, but only for a limited term, at most 10 or 12 years. 12 years was the term limit that conservatives said they wanted to impose on Congress in Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" in 1994, but now that that period is almost expired, some are backtracking.
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Still, 12 years might be an appropriate term limit for Supreme Court judges. Lesser judges might have shorter terms, which would provide another layer of protection to our liberties, in giving lesser courts and the Supreme Court different perspectives. District courts might have 8-year terms, with 1/4 being elected each two years. Circuit Courts of Appeals could have 10-year terms, with 1/5 being elected each two years.
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(c) Any decision of any court should be overrideable by a supermajority of the legislature, acting with or without the executive, be it a state legislature and governor, or Congress and the President acting by 2/3 vote or the state legislature or Congress acting alone, without the governor's or President's assent, by 3/4 vote. The courts are the only organ of government that cannot presently be overruled, a very serious hole in our system of "checks and balances" that must be filled.
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Until such corrections to the court system are made to the Constitution, however, it is incumbent upon Congress to exercise caution and show good faith and respect to the minority, whichever minority that might be.
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I seem to recall that a very large proportion of the people who now dominate Congress are from states that were once a minority that felt so threatened that they attempted to secede from the Union, and which started an open war against the Federal Government. The majority did not consent to have traitors defy the laws and make war against the Nation, but retaliated and held the Union together thru massive force, dealing a crushing blow to large portions of the very region that today, if temporarily, dominates Congress.
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Now, oddly, many of the same states that tried to secede in the 1860s seem adamant on forcing different states to contemplate secession.
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Let's make them rethink their position.
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I propose that progressive forces in Congress create a "mock Congress" of the "Blue States of America", to meet "in exile" in Washington but outside the Capitol or outside Washington altogether, say, in my city, Newark, New Jersey. In that mock legislature, the Representatives and Senators of the Blue States would propose, debate, and pass long-delayed, desperately needed legislation to provide universal healthcare, outlaw usury, restore humane bankruptcy protection, protect the environment, and on and on across the progressive agenda. Media covering these sessions could show the public what this country might look like if progressives were in charge.
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The mock Congress could also issue publications to outline the resources left to the rump-United States if the Blue States of America actually seceded, or even just coordinated a tax boycott. Could the South and Midwestern Bible Belt keep this country running on their own money? or are they able to pursue their extravagant politics only because Blue States keep pouring money into parasitical Red States?
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What if the Democrats and other progressives just left town one day and didn't come back? Would the rightwing Republicans be able to raise a quorum (50% plus one) and conduct business as tho they were the whole Congress? If so, the Democrats could disown everything the Republicans do as not the Nation's will, and urge defiance at every level, from withholding tax payments to withdrawing state militias (the National Guard) from the federal military structure, to outrite secession.
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The Constitution says that less than a majority of each House could "compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide" (Article I, Section 5). But what if all the progressives left the country for, say, a mock Congress in Toronto? How are the Republican rightwingers still in Washington going to compel attendance of people outside U.S. jurisdiction? And if they expel all absent members as one of the "Penalties as each House may provide", surely they risk an actual secessionary movement.
+
Moreover, what if the "Government-in-Exile, Blue States of America", in Toronto, starts discussing actual secession and merger with Canada into a new country, say, the "United States of Canada"? There has been talk to this effect on the Internet. See, e.g., from the Blue side: http://www.democraticwings.com/democraticwings/archives/politics/001171.php and http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/archive/index.php/t-3599.html. From the Red side: http://www.bestwriters.com/good/ and http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=5652. There's even a map: http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/images/04new_map.jpg.
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But there's been no discussion of how this would all start. A Mock Congress and withdrawal for a time of Democrats and other progressives from Congress could shake people up and make them realize that without the Blue States, the U.S. would be a backward, poverty-ridden hellhole scarcely better than the Third World.
+
Nothing else seems able to stop the extremist talk and behavior of neo-Confederates in Washington and Southern state legislatures. Let's out-Confederate them and start talking Northern secession, so they might appreciate how dangerous the disaffection in the Blue States is.
+
If the Democrats can't do anything to stop the rightwing juggernaut, why should they continue to sit in Congress and share the blame?
+
If you can't stop their program, don't share the room. Get out, so the Nation can see that the Republicans are solely responsible for everything. If they do a good job, they should be happy to take all the credit. If, however, the Nation goes into profound division, disruption, depression, etc., as unwise and unfair laws take effect, the Democrats will be able to say "We had nothing to do with it. This is what you get for electing Republicans. If you're not happy with the results, vote Democratic next time."
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The Bible Belt thinks itself all-powerful and entitled by God to crush all opposition. The Republican Right thinks the liberal/progressive forces in this country are too weak and gutless to do a thing about it. Maybe if the Democrats and independent or moderate Republicans leave town for a month of debates in Newark or Toronto, the remnants of the national government will understand how dangerous the path they have set us upon really is.
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(I have wanted to talk about the relative cost of American and British elections for several days now, but more urgent matters keep arising. In due course.)
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,645.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:37 PM

 
CAFTA or Statehood? All the arguments for a proposed free-trade agreement with Central America are better used as arguments to bring Central America into the Union as one or more new states. Had this been done in the 1840s (when some Central American countries made inquiries) and 1860s (when President Grant tried to bring in the Dominican Republic), the entire region would be prosperous Sunbelt states today, contributing to our wealth and security instead of endangering both.
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But free trade without statehood is a bad deal all around. It would be bad for U.S. workers, who would be undercut by cheap labor in our near neighborhood. It would be bad for Central Americans, who would not be protected from economic exploitation and environmental devastation. CAFTA no! Statehood si!
+
(Responsive to "CAFTA: New Front in Freedom Fight", column by Peter Brookes in the New York Post, May 23, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,636.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:16 PM

 
Overreaction. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post today in response to a column about Newsweek's Koran-flushing booboo.

Commentators on Newsweek's apparent error in saying interrogators had flushed a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo have missed the most basic point: people are not responsible for irrational and extreme reactions to what they say. President Fox of Mexico likewise said something that produced overreaction. He had the good sense to disown any responsibility for that overreaction. So maybe a Koran was not flushed down a toilet (I was wondering how you flush a book down a toilet to begin with). Maybe it was. Who cares? Moslems have really got to grow up and stop behaving like lunatics. As for those 17 fanatics killed in violent demonstrations, good riddance. The more dead fanatics, the happier the world.

(Responsive to "Market Failure", column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, May 20, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,630.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:06 PM

 
Putting that Genie Back in the Bottle. Today's evening newscasts are talking about new progress in cloning technology, occasioned by an advance in South Korea. The pretense of some observers is that we have to give in to the worst possible uses of this technology, and are incapable of limiting its use.
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If some people want to create clones of existing human beings, to grow as other children do and become adults just like anybody else, should we object? I don't see why. There's no moral issue whatsoever there, any more than in any other form of reproduction.
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Should we permit "scientists" to create a human life for the express purpose of destroying it to create benefits to others? Surely not, any more than it would be proper to let a baby be born just to slit its throat and chop it up for parts, or to grab any one of us off the street and chop us up for parts for people we do not know and do not want to die for.
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If some people are so eager to chop up one person for the benefit of others, they should volunteer their own bodies. So let me pose this challenge to them:

If you are so adamant about helping sick people, put yourself on the sacrificial chopping block — now, before your natural death, not after you've already died from an accident or gotten so old that your organs aren't usable — so we can distribute your organs and cells of all kinds to other people. You have the right to do that. Prove your sincerity. Die for others. If you're not willing to die for others, however, you cannot properly even advocate that any innocent person die for the benefit of strangers.

Society would have the right to kill vicious criminals and chop their bodies up for parts for decent people — tho we would have to follow recipients very carefully to see if there is some biological taint.
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We don't really know what causes a lot of behaviors. Criminality, and especially murder, is regarded by some people as so deviant as to be in itself a form of madness. Where does such madness or deviant behavior start? In a healthy brain? a diseased brain? In the DNA of the individual, any organ? We don't really know. Perhaps in transplanting organs from, for instance, serial killers, we would be transplanting a genetic predisposition to violent crime. Probably not, but I'd want to watch very carefully what happens to people who receive organs from executed criminals.
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What society does not have the right to do is to offer me or any other innocent person to be chopped up for parts, nor even put pressure upon us to sacrifice ourselves. It doesn't matter if that person is 60 years old or 5 days old.
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The fact is that any human clone could, with the proper environment and a little bit of luck, grow up to be a complete human being separate from every other, including his or her sole parent.
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A clone is no more a part of its parent than any other child is part of its parent. You cannot morally kill your son or daughter to steal his or her heart, liver, kidneys, or any other part. Nor can you kill anybody else's kid to steal their parts.
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The morality is clear — to moral people. A lot of people don't like to deal with the harsh clarity of morality. They like to fudge to their own advantage. Different people can rationalize away different levels of immorality. Some won't accept so much as "sampling" a single cherry in a supermarket. Others see no problem with eating bunches of grapes without paying; or cheating on taxes; or shoplifting a sweater they can't afford; or raping someone who won't consent to sex; or killing somebody who ticks them off.
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Not every moral issue has black-or-white clarity, but some do. Killing the unborn, no matter their age, is one that is crystal clear, no matter the rationalizations that various stupid or morally lazy people may offer.
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So what can we do to protect children from being created for the express purpose of being chopped up for parts? Are we helpless against advances in technology? To argue we are, is to argue that no technology can be controlled, so all should be legalized for everyone. We do not take that attitude toward nuclear proliferation, do we?
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We seem to think that some things are so wrong and so dangerous that we have to control them. Nuclear weapons are one. Cloning technology to create babies for the express purpose of chopping them up for parts is another.
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The mere fact that you are physically or technologically capable of doing something does not mean you have the right to do it. Nor does it mean that society cannot stop you.
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The whole issue is easily solved. Simply declare that any "scientist" who creates a human being and then willfully destroys him or her has committed murder, and the punishment is death — an automatic, unappealable death sentence to be carried out by chopping that scientist up for parts! That would bring all this child-menacing "science" to a stop: a dead stop.
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And about that genie-in-the-bottle comparison. It was
possible to get the genie into the bottle in the first place, wasn't it?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,629.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:11 PM

 
Paradoxes of the Republican Revolution. The Republicans are taking their slim majority entirely too seriously, and attempting to saddle the Nation with unpopular judges for decades, change the rules of the Senate permanently, trap people in usurious debt forever, and otherwise ride roughshod over the sensibilities of the minority as tho they are the permanent majority and minorities have no rights.
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That is not our tradition.
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The Democrats chose to lose the last election by going out of their way not to discuss debt or bankruptcy "reform" (revolution), presumably because the only way to show the Nation how vicious the Republicans are and how disastrous their rule would be, was to let them win and enact their program.
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Democrats visualized a Nation trapped in war, debt, and cultural division, so filled with strident disaffection and desperation that the electorate would shake its head "What have we done?" and turn against the Republicans for a generation.
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The Republican Revolution is filled with contradictions. For instance, "conservatives" are intent on reforming the rules of the Senate ("the world's greatest deliberative body") to reduce its power to make the Nation think twice, largely for the sake of putting women onto federal appellate courts. Think about this. Is putting women in charge of society, over men, a conservative value? or a Radical Left, Communist value?
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The United States didn't even give women the right to vote until 1920. Now the Republican Party's "conservatives" are aggressively promoting the idea that women should dominate the courts of the United States. That's a conservative, family-oriented value? dragging women away from their families and putting them over men? What about all those female soldiers in our military? Is teaching women to kill men, women, and children a conservative value? Is taking military careers away from men and giving them to women, putting women officers over men who have no choice but to obey or be court-martialed, even shot for mutiny, a conservative value?
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Republican social conservatives are fiscal radicals, racking up the greatest budgetary deficits in the history of the Nation. In the past 24 years, the only surpluses the federal government has run were under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
+
Reagan more than tripled the national debt; Bush the Elder added almost another third. So after 12 years of Republican "conservatives", the national debt had quadrupled.
+
Bush the Younger took the greatest surplus in the history of the world and turned it into the greatest deficit in the history of the world — in 8 months.
+
Check the figures yourself at the U.S. Treasury website, http://www.treas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/fed-debt.shtml.
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The national debt for the first year (1981) that Ronald Reagan, great hero of "conservatives", held office, was $994,845 million. When he left shortly after the end of 1988, it had risen to $2,601,307 million, an increase of 261%.
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Then Bush the Elder took office thru 1992, and continued the profligate spending of the Reagan years. In 1992, the national debt stood at $4,002,123 million ($4.002 trillion). In 1981, the first year of the Reagan Administration, the national debt had been $994,845 million. 12 years of "conservative" rule had quadrupled the national debt.
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By contrast, in the first year of the Clinton Administration (1993), the Nation suffered a national debt of $4,351,403 million. Burdened by the legacy of the Reagan Revolution's tax cuts for the rich, which Clinton could not/did not reverse, the national debt rose over eight years to $5,686,338 million in the year 2000, an increase of only 31%. And at the end of the Clinton years, even without restoring the tax levels before Reagan's Plutocratic Revolution, the Democrats had turned a huge deficit into a huge surplus. Damned liberals!
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The debt has continued to grow less quickly since the Democrats left office, but last year's deficit was the largest in history.

For that fiscal year, the government recorded a $412 billion deficit, the largest ever in nominal dollar terms, although not as large as some of the deficits of the 1980s [the Reagan-Bush years] when measured against the size of the economy. * * * Wall Street analysts reduced their deficit forecasts this week, from around $400 billion to around $370 billion. In nominal dollar terms, that would still be the third-highest deficit on record.

Who pays the national debt? Taxpayers. Who receives the payments? The rich, because the rich own the debt. We don't really "owe ourselves" the money. The whole of society owes only the owners of the debt instruments (Treasury bonds and the like), and essentially only the rich own such instruments, tho some bonds are in pension funds. The national debt is essentially a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.
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The rich have objected to a progressive income tax because it is a redistribution of wealth — from the rich to the rest of us. They are pushing for a "flat tax", by means of which they who make more can keep more — and the rest of us will have to take up the slack — by pretending it would be "simpler" and "fairer". They are hoping that the uneducated losers who have given the Republicans their (temporary) majority can be fooled all the time.
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After all, Lincoln, the first Republican President, warned only that you can't fool all the people all the time. Today's Republicans are pretty confident they can fool most of the people all the time.
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The rich, for whom the Republicans are agent, don't mind a regressive redistribution of wealth, from the rest of us to the rich. You see, "class warfare" is okay with Republicans as long as it is one-sided, in the form of regressive taxation and debt service, in which the rich are constantly aggressing against the rest of us. That's never to be called "class warfare". But if the rest fite back, that is "class warfare", and we should be ashamed of ourselves for promoting 'class hatreds' and 'divisions'.
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Dividing society on the basis of religious/heathen, Christian/Moslem/Jewish, "born again"/benighted, heterosexual/deviate, Amuricans/furriners, etc.? Well, that's just fine. But we mustn't divide the Nation into economic classes and promote the notion that the rich are taking over everything, so must be stopped.
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The Republican Revolution is premised on the idea that while the Nation is distracted and divided by irrelevancies such as gay marriage, the rich can crush everyone under their heel and render everyone into wage slaves and debt slaves who will be so scared of losing their jobs that they will take cuts in pay and benefits and take over all tax responsibilities from the rich so that the rich can live in mansions while the rest of us will beg to be their butlers and maids. Of course, they won't want to see the hovels the rest of society lives in, so the poor will have to commute an hour or more to get to the gated estates where they will work as slaves. And all the while they are miserable and crushed by debt, the fear they have of losing their job and home will be displaced onto homosexuals and atheists and illegal aliens — anywhere but where it belongs: the rich. Because if ever people wake up to see they're being played for fools, they will crush the rich, impose steeply progressive taxation to level the playing field, pay off the national debt to the rich with taxes taken from the rich themselves, outlaw usury, demand good jobs with good pay and good benefits, and make this country what it seemed, around 1920, it was going to be: a classless society in which people of all kinds could live and prosper together. That is The Great Republican Nitemare.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,624.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:31 PM

 
Friendlier Quarters. The New York Post is campaigning against expansion of the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, adamantly opposing most especially any financial aid from the government of the State of New York. The UN has made plain that if it cannot renovate and expand its present complex, it will have to consider relocating its headquarters elsewhere.
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I sent the following emailed letter to the Post's editor today:

Zionist Jews and rightwing jingoists may want the United Nations to move to Geneva, Paris, or Brussels, but the bulk of Americans are proud that the United Nations chose the United States for its headquarters, and we don't want it to move elsewhere. If New York doesn't want the UN meeting alongside the East River, I'm sure my own city, Newark, NJ, would be very, very happy to have the world meet alongside the Passaic.

(Responsive to "U.N. Scheme Risky for N.Y.", op-ed piece by Anne Bayefsky in the New York Post, May 17, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,624.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:24 PM

 
Multiply by 12. The numbers of dead out of Iraq are appalling in their absolute form, but to get a sense of what such numbers mean to Iraqis, Americans need to multiply by 12 to understand what those numbers would be if the same kinds of violence occurred in the United States, because the U.S. has 12 times the population of Iraq.
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So take 400 dead in Iraq this past week and multiply by 12 to see what that would be here. You can do this in your head. First, multiply by 10: 400 x 10 = 4,000. Then, double the original number: 2 x 400 = 800. Then, add the two results: 4,000 + 800 = 4,800 dead Americans in a week. That's 2,000 more than died in the WTC and Pentagon attacks on 9/11.
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In lite of these horrifying numbers, what should we make of claims by the Bush Administration that we are winning the war on terror in Iraq? Judge for yourself.
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Each time you hear news reports of the number of dead or injured in Iraq, multiply by 12. 38 found "executed" in one morning (murdered, actually, not executed; they did not deserve to die for crimes), multiply by 12: 10 x 38 = 380; then 2 x 38 = 76; + 380 = 456 people shot in the head in one day here.
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If this is winning the war in Iraq, I'd hate to know what losing would look like.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,622.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:57 PM

 
Rewrite Problems. Shakespeare may never have blotted a line, but most writers write once and rewrite several times. Sometimes the approach changes but the grammar doesn't follow. That may be what happened to a headline of an Associated Press story hilited on Netscape.com today: "Tsunami Rebuilding Effort Face Obstacles". That is a block-copy quote. I did not retype it.
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Word processors empower us to make only the changes to written text while leaving the remainder as it was. That's a great convenience but also a danger. In the olden days (when I was young), there were no word processors. If you wanted a neatly typed final document, you either had to type it once and leave it as it first came out, or retype the entire page, during which retype you would likely catch shifts in grammar, and conform the entire phrase. Because there were no spellcheckers nor grammar-checking programs, publishers also employed proofreaders and copy editors to review every writer's manuscripts.
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Now, however, spellcheckers and grammar checkers give us false confidence that the final text we produce is error-free. Guess again.
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Everybody makes mistakes, and it's always a good idea, especially in important documents, to have a second pair of eyes — or third, or fourth — review any important text. But a lot of professionals, even lawyers, who should know to have someone else look at what they have written, think they can do their own work and finalize it themselves. Who needs a secretary, or proofreader, or copy editor?
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When I worked as a word processor for lawyers, I caught innumerable errors that would have gone out to courts and adversaries if the document hadn't gone thru me. If the Associated Press, the world's largest organization of professional journalists, can make a glaring error, anyone can. Employers who stint on secretaries and proofreaders run the risk of epitomizing the adage "Penny wise, pound [dollar] foolish."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,622.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:33 PM

 
"In God We Trust"? The Associated Press reports today that:

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower judge's dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the slogan written on the Davidson County Government Center in Lexington, N.C.

It uses as authority for its absurd and bigoted ruling that:

"In God We Trust" has appeared on the nation's coins since 1865 and was made the national motto by Congress in 1956. The motto also is inscribed above the speaker's chair in the U.S. House of Representatives and above the main door of the U.S. Senate chamber.

"In this situation, the reasonable observer must be deemed aware of the patriotic uses, both historical and present, of the phrase 'In God We Trust,'" Judge Robert King wrote. The court said the inscription would be unconstitutional if it served a religious purpose.

That is both idiotic and dishonest. If Congress adopted as our national motto "There Is No God", would that be merely patriotic? or a powerful interference with religion by putting a stigma upon believers?
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In the year 2050, the U.S. is expected to have 420 million people, but India will have become the world's most populous country with nearly 4 times as many people as we. What if by then India has overtaken us technologically and militarily, a war erupts between our two countries, and India crushes the U.S., takes over our territory, and establishes Hinduism as the combined nation's official religion — tho it permits non-Hindus to follow their nonofficial religions without too much interference? Will Americans be content to have their religious views held in official contempt? Or will they want a separation of temple and state so they feel equal to other Indians?
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In 1789, the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and sent it for ratification by the states. Approved in December 1791, it reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that the wording is "establishment of religion", not "establishment of a particular religion". It forbids government to take sides in any controversy over religion or irreligion whatsoever.
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The national motto the Founders selected, as entrenched in the Great Seal of the United States approved by Congress on June 10, 1782, is in Latin, "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One"). That brilliantly encapsulates what they were trying to do, create one nation and one people out of many states and groups, including many religious denominations, deists, agnostics, and atheists.
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Deism is "belief in a God who created the world but has since remained indifferent to it." (Random House Unabridged Dictionary) That is, they believe that there is a God but He merely established the laws of the Universe and does not interfere with their workings as to intervene in human affairs or respond to prayer. Many of the Founding Fathers were deists, and it would have struck them as absurd to "trust" in a God who pays no attention to human affairs.
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The fact that Congress approved "In God We Trust" as the national motto in 1865, after we had lived perfectly well without it for 89 years, shows not that it is constitutional but only that Congress defied the Constitution and the courts did nothing. That odious motto wasn't added to paper money until 1957 — after 181 years without it) — starting with the one-dollar bill and gradually extending to all other bills. Again, the legislature defied the Constitution.
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It is precisely because the Framers of the Constitution knew that it is in the nature of man to trample the rights of others that cautious men insisted (a) on a written constitution (that requires a supermajority to amend) and (b) that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution to safeguard the rights of the minority.
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The original thinking of many of the Framers was that it is enuf to build in checks and balances on the powers of government to keep everyone's rights safe. Wiser heads prevailed. They knew that unless supermajorities were required for certain types of actions, the passions and posturings of the moment could produce dictatorial misrule by the majority. They tried to prevent such abuse but failed.
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The Constitution and Bill of Rights are only words on paper, and any government can defy those words at any time. If Congress, the President, and Supreme Court are all inclined to defy the Constitution and Bill of Rights, by a simple majority or by turning a blind eye to violations, they can effectively render the Constitution null and void. They've done that on lots of things.
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When did Congress last declare war? World War II, December 8, 1941. In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war. Implicit in this was denial of the right to wage war without a declaration of war by Congress, but since the Constitution does not explicitly require a formal declaration of war, the Executive Branch has again and again made war against people near and far without restraint. What is the big deal about declaring war? If Congress is behind a given war, why doesn't it simply declare war, as the Framers intended?
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The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights says that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Isn't that cute? So quaint, so needless and irrelevant, so void as a matter of practical effect. Does the Fourth Amendment permit everyone who wants to board an airplane or enter a government building to be searched by government agents? Plainly it does not. But who cares what the Constitution says? It was written a very long time ago, in a very different age with very different problems. That it doesn't permit what we do every day means nothing. We will pretend to be obeying the Constitution even as we shred it.
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I resent the implication that I am not a patriot if I am not religious and do not trust — whatever that's supposed to mean — in "God".
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I am the 11th generation of people who have lived on this continent, since well before the creation of this Republic. My people were here, at latest, in 1642. One of my ancestors served as a private in the Continental Army that, with the indispensable help of our first and best friend France, threw the British out of our country. I am eligible for both the Sons of the Revolution and the Holland Society (a patriotic society of "descendant[s] in the direct male line of an ancestor who lived in New Netherland before or during 1675"), and I am acutely aware of the unique contributions of the United States, and especially its Constitution, to world history and civilization. I co-founded a political organization, the Expansionist Party of the United States, to extend the benefits of that Constitution widely by bringing new areas into the Union. But I adamantly reject the suggestion that because I am nonreligious, even antireligious, I am somehow less than "American".
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How insecure — and insincere — are believers that they find it necessary to shout from the rooftops that they believe and trust in God? Jesus warned us about such people, in Matthew 6:5-6:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I accuse the rightwingers who demand that the United States inflict religion — their religion, of course, not anybody else's — upon everybody, of hypocrisy and impiety. Their religion is a show, not real. If they are unable to be devout unless everyone around them constantly reassures them of the rightness of their views, they are not believers at all, and should just admit that religion is a load of crap, a crutch for the perpetually weak of mind and character.
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When they can answer three questions to the satisfaction of all doubters, then they will have the right to insist that their religion be given specially exalted status by government:
+
(1) Why do terrible, horrible things happen to good people?
+
(2) If Adam and Eve were the only human beings at The Beginning, and people reproduce sexually, then isn't it inescapable that the human race is the product of incest? And
+
(3) What kind of monster would create a system in which to live, one must kill? Why do we have to kill animals or plants just to survive? Why can't we eat rocks or sand and flourish, as plants effectively do?
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I do not accept the idea that the human race is bad, so all people, even the just and innocent, deserve to be punished. Nor do I accept the idea that kill-or-die is a really good way to model the universe. So I do not trust in God, not to the tiniest degree. But I am at least as good an American as the most ostentatious hypocrite or privately pious believer in the Nation.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,622.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:33 PM