Huckabee Is A Moran

OK, we already knew that. But in a recent interview with a College of New Jersey student publication called "the Perspective", he described same-sex marriage and civil unions as "not necessary". The full quote is even worse:

"You don't go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want who use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them."

Now personally, I have no problem with polygamy but I can see practical reasons for banning it but more to the point, Huck is just jumping on the old slippery-slope fallacy here. Incest and polygamy have nothing to do with homosexuality or same-sex marriage. Incestuous relationships are (almost) always unequal, for a start. When idiots like Huck say "where does it end?", every nation that has legalised same-sex marriage or some comparable arrangement has said it ends at two consenting unrelated adults. This isn't rocket science. People like Huck like to that if you accept one thing, you must automatically accept everything which he says must come after (most of the right does this with socialism too) but reality and legislation don't work like that. It is perfectly possible to say "yes" to same-sex marriage and then, when the sister-fuckers turn up asking to legalise incest, tell them to go to hell.

His views on same-sex raising of children are scarcely more sensible: "Children are not puppies. This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?". Oh, Mikey, the ship has long since sailed on this one. See, there's this miraculous resarch tool available called "Google" and if you used it, you would discover that there has already been an awful lot of research done into the effects on kids of being raised by same-gender parents. That research says that kids of same-sex couples grow up just as healthy and happy as kids of opposite-sex couples. Besides, if you were really concerned about kids, you would be doing more to promote the raising of children by extended families. Researchers have known for years that the single best arrangement for child-rearing, the one most likely to result in a happy, wall-adjusted child, is the extended family of parents, grantparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who all pitch in to help. There are a number of ways to encourage that. But I don't see Huck pushing them.

In the end, it's becoming increasingly obvious that one simply cannot be both Republican and pro-family. The stagnation (and in many sectors, actual lowering) of real wages has had a devastating effect on families, forcing both parents to work every hour available. I'm not a fifties-nostalgia guy, I don't think a woman's place is in the kitchen but I do think that it's pretty important to have a parent (or other member of the extended family above) at home with the kids. Exactly which parent or family member is for them to work out but yeah, I think it's important that when a kid comes home from school, there's actually someone there. A lot of conservatives claim to think the same thing but they seem incapable of taking the logical next step: That the reason both parents work these days isn't some metaphysical "career woman" demon, it's because the decent working/middle class wages of the fifties which allowed parents to stay home with their kids are a thing of the past. Since the Sixties, unions have been demonised and wages (in constant dollars) have, on average, dropped by around 13% (much more in some sectors) while prices have zoomed upward (utility bills, in constant dollars, verge on outright extortion). You think THAT might have something to do with the growing number of latchkey kids? Here, the state tried to handle that by instituting Child Tax Credit and naturally, the media have now invented the myth of women who make a career out of having babies.

Where was that concern for families during the Prop 8 campaign? Gay people married, formed families and the right campaigned to prevent more families being formed. Some even campaigned to forcibly divorce those who had already married (which would have been a legal nightmare if it had passed). Here where a bunch of morans trying to split families up in the name of being pro-family. And these morans accuse the left of being anti-family.

You cannot claim to be pro-family while also acting as a pawn of a corporate class which is raping the modern family. There exists this prevailing mythology that if you give the corporate class a tax break, they'll expand their business and hire more workers, thus aiding families. It's bollocks, a complete myth. The corporation employs the exact number of people it needs to do the work it needs, at the lowest wage it can get away with paying. If it chooses to expand, it will do so by using the existing business as security and leveraging assets and that's discounting the VAST sector of the economy that doesn't actually make anything physical in the first place. Tax breaks make no difference to what the corporation chooses to do with their business. They're nice, sure and the corporation would like to have as many as possible but they don't actually affect the way it does business. But I digress.

My point is that supporting the destruction of the working and middle class simply cannot be reconciled with a claim to being pro-family. Being pro-family means supporting a decent wage and healthcare. Corporations will not give those things if they can avoid it. They will not comply with the safety regulations which ensure the breadwinner's safety if they can avoid it (and they often can, as the disaster at Big Branch demonstrated).

For Gits And Shiggles...

I present to you, the one provable faith, the Church Of Google!

The Church Of Google homepage.

The Psychopathology of Ayn Rand

You've probably heard of Ayn Rand. Most people have these days. She was the author of such inexplicably widely-read "novels" (really, barely-disguised political diatribes) as "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". Her books are currently enjoying something of a boom among those who misguidedly believe they would be in the self-righteous community of "Atlases" at Galt's Gulch. The novels themselves are of only passing interest, being long, melodramatic and mediocrely written. Rather, it is the "philosophy" at the core of the novels which bears attention.

Hear ye, hear ye, I come to bury Rand, not to praise her. While numerous conservative thinkers (and, oddly, Neil Peart) have lauded Rand as a philosopher, few academic institutions include Rand or Objectivism as a philosophical discipline. Conservatives, such as Chris Sciabarra, tend to believe that the academic left decries Rand due to her anti-communist, pro-capitalist slant. Like much of the witterings of conservatives who presume to know what the left things, that presumes firstly, more power than the academic left has had in decades; secondly, assumes that the left was universally pro-communist and anti-capitalist, something which has never been true and thirdly, that Rand was saying anything worth studying. She wasn't. Rand's "philosophy" was the same defence of endless greed which mankind has been engaged in for eternity, the same attempt to place a moral cover on pure selfishness that has long been pursued by any number of exploiters down the centuries. Nietzche was, and is, pilloried for saying "God is dead", Rand is lauded for effectively saying "the self is God". There is nothing new here, save perhaps for the self-delusion that allows so many professed "Christians" to adhere to a philosophy that glorifies greed and athieism. There is also a cult-like deification of Rand by her followers and "swarming" of those who dare criticise her which reminds one very strongly of Scientology (and Glenn Beck followers but that's another matter).

There is another name for those who hold that the only proper moral consideration is the happiness of the self; for those who view empathy and compassion as weakness; who view selfishness as the only virtue: Psychopaths.

Contrary to popular belief, the psychopath is not automatically violent. Rather, the psychopath is defined by a near-complete lack of empathy. Robert Hare (who created the widely used "Hare Psychopathy Checklist") describes psychopaths as "instraspecies predators" who use a combination of charisma, manipulation, intimidation, sexuality and violence to satisfy their own desires. The more human qualities of conscience, empathy, remorse or guilt are either completely absent or extremely limited. It must be repeated that the psychopath is not necessarily violent. Indeed, many are not because their lives have never placed them in a position where violence was the only means to satisfy their desires. Many businessmen (and therefore, many politicians) profile as psychopaths because they exhibit the core characteristics or some section thereof. Ayn Rand should also be considered a psychopath.

Hare's checklist lists certain personality factors as indicative of psychopathy. The average person will perhaps exhibit one or, at most, two. The psychopath will exhibit all but on or two. In no particular order, these items are Glibness/superficial charm. After her writings became popular, Rand collected around herself a group of cultists who virtually worshipped her. However, shallow affect, the psychopath's charm is only ever superficial. As one comes to know and understand the psychopath more fully, the charm which initially attracted one to them is revealed as only skin-deep. In this, Rand was entirely textbook. She was described by most who knew her best as a bitter, friendless child who grew into an equally bitter and acidic woman. Grandiose sense of self-worth would certainly fit Rand. A woman who names her beliefs "Objectivism" out of a belief that any reasoning person who observes the objective truths of the world would necessarily come to full agreement with her would probably qualify. The fact that her little cult were required to memorise her works and discounted as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" if they asked questions simply seals the deal. Her sincere belief was that thinking freely would automatically lead to total agreement with her views. The ruthless policing of her cult would also qualify her under the Cunning/manipulative qualifier. Patholigical lying is one that Rand is probably innocent of. So far as we know, there is no reason to believe she was a pathological liar. Lack of remorse or guilt and Callous/lack of empathy could be described as "Ayn Rand syndrome". These two qualifiers are really the core of her books, philosophhy and worldview. In one of her books ([i]The Fountainhead[/i]), her "hero", Howard Roarke, blows up a housing project he designed when a minor alteration is made and then orders the jury to acquit him (the fact that, as an architect, Roarke was presumably contracted for his work and therefore, it wasn't "his" anymore piddles all over the supposed respect for property too). In Atlas Shrugged, her ode to the super-rich which imagines them going on strike against progressive taxation, Rand describes the rest of the world (without whom, let us not forget, the super-rich would be unable to make anything) is such niceties as "savages", "refuse" and "immitations of living beings". When one of the strikers engineers a train crash (because they don't just strike but commit acts of terrorism too), Rand makes it clear that she believes the murdered victims deserved their fate because they supported progressive taxation. A stewing hymn of Nietzchean will-to-power, misanthropy, failure to understand economics, feudalism and sexual politics verging on the obscene, Atlas Shrugged is full of this stuff. Her heroes spend their time both insisting that they are the heroic producers (and without labour, what are they producing exactly?) and bemoaning that others do not worship them as such. In her spare time, Rand was an admirer of serail killer William Hickman (I'll spare you the details of his crimes save to say that they were brutal even by serial killer standards), describing him as "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy"; "other people do not exist for him and he does not see why they should" was her evaluation of his crimes and Rand considered this worthy of praise. Finally, on the personality factor, there is Failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. Since our record of Rand's life isn't fully detailed, it's difficult to say how much she satisfied this one. Certainly, when her lover Nathaniel Branden found another partner, she blamed him rather than herself or her increasingly poisonous views. We shouldn't sympathise with Rand as injured party too much here, she was herslelf married to someone entirely different and cruel enough to carry on the affair without regard to discretion. Indeed, if the only duty of the superman is to please himself, Brendan was acting according to Rand's ideals and she should have applauded him. She once said the the USA should be a "democracy of superiors only" with "superior" being defined as "rich". One scarcely needs to point out that such a system wouldn't be democracy at all but oligarchy and interestingly elitist for all her followers claim to despise elitism.

One doesn't need to work very hard to diagnose Rand. Her life and writings paint a vivid picture of psychopathy so clear and obvious that it is only surprising so many miss it. She was a phonomenally damaged woman for whom one can feel an element of pity (an emotion that disgusted her) even while aware of how terrifically dangerous she and her philosophy was and are. Rand herself died alone except for a hired nurse. Her deranged views had driven away anyone who might have been close to her. Like L. Ron Hubbard, however, her lunatic ideas have spawned a cult that would turn all of us into happy little psychopaths; a cult that includes many of the world's foremost economists, politicians and rabble-rousers (Beck again, although "intellectual terrorist" might be more appropriate). Like George Orwell, Rand imagined a dystopian world characterised by the powerful's exploitation of the powerless. Unlike Orwell, Rand wanted to live there.

The Republican Reality Gap

Ann Coulter once said that liberals "take a perverse joy in lying", that liberals actively enjoy telling untruths. She was, of course, wrong about liberals (as she would have difficulty even understanding a thought process so different to her own) but I am increasingly of the opinion that her remarks were correct if applied to conservatives (projection, in other words). How else can one explain the warped version of reality which so many conservatives carry around in their heads? I'm not talking about subjects which reasonable people can disagree on, like the existence and disposition of god(s) or the merits of direct democracy. Those are issues without clear answer which reasonable people can have a discussion about. I'm talking about believing and not just believing but vehemently defending beliefs which are provably, factually wrong. Believing something which is untrue would be understandable if it were done out of ignorance but such people, when exposed to the facts, will vehemently attack or dismiss them and often the messenger as well. In an individual, this would be considered mental illness (and in the case of some, such as Glenn Beck, that would be an accurate description) but the mental health community is understandably reluctant to label whole swathes of the public as crazy. If someone believes they are being followed by a man-eating hedgehog, you can just give them a heavy stick and a chair to stand on and let them get on with it but when a whole section of the public is holding beliefs which are no less crazy, those beliefs somehow become an accepted part of the public dialogue. For example:

- Fascism is a left-wing ideaology
I think it was Goldberg who started this one. Since the end of WWII, fascism has been identified as a right-wing (right-fringe, really) ideaology. There has never been any significant doubt about that. It's only fairly recently that some conservatives have decided that everything unpleasent is teh fault of the left and so, fascism must be a left-wing ideaology. Partly, this is based on the mistaken belief that state control of everything was the aim of communism, rather than the result of communism being unworkable in the real world. It's the same mentality which claims that because I dislike legal abortion, child molestation and homosexuality, all those things must be caused by the teaching of evolution, which I also dislike. One can find the same mindset in those who tout that the Weather Underground proves that the left is more likely to be violent while forgetting, for example, Timothy McVeigh. It's rewriting history, stealing history really, for use as partisan political points. And while we're on the subject:

- Obama is a socialist/communist
This one is based on a misreading of history so obvious that it must have been deliberate. To claim that Obama, a wimpish moderate in any sane world, is socialist in any way is not just wrong but outright insane and yet, it persists. And it persists because most people don't actually know what "socialism" means. They don't understand that when socialism says "communal ownership of the means of production and distribution", it means ALL the means, not just an interest or equity in a few firms which would otherwise have collapsed. But the right-wing media machine doesn't like that reality and so, they endlessly promote the lie that any communal ownership of anything is automatically socialist. Part of me wonders if this societal case of the fallacy of the excluded middle is the result of decades of Cold War rhetoric or simply the decades of propoganda on behalf of capitalism or if there is even a difference between the two.

- Republicans have been better for minorities
There are two strands to this one. The first is based on a very selective misreading of history. There certainly was a time when Republicans were the better party for minorities, that's inarguable. The Democrats, pressured by a group of conservative Southern members known as "Dixiecrats" were rotten for minorities for some time. But this reading of history ignores everything that's happened since integration, when the Dixiecrats almost universally defected to the Republican party. Since then, the Democrats have (overall and in general) been better at minority rights. And minorities know it. There was a time when black people almost universally voted Republican, seeing it as the party of Lincoln. These days, better than 90% of black people vote Democrat. Which brings us onto the second strand of this argument. This strand holds that minorities typically vote for Democrats because Democrats give them more "government hand-outs". Now, firstly, let's remember that it was Bill Clinton who ended welfare as an entitlement program (for which, I don't think he's been criticised enough) but secondly, notice the inherent bias and racism in the allegation. It assumes that A) government can never do anything good and B) that black people will vote for Democrats because they're all lazy work-shys who depend on "government hand-outs". Sometimes, for those less overt with their racism, some vague theory about a "culture of dependence" will be added.

Those are just three examples of what could be dozens. Indeed, so devoted are conservatives to their alternate universe view of reality that I could write a book on the subject (and may yet do so). To be a conservative, it seems, is to be a conspiracist; to believe that there exists some secret cabal of leftie elites constantly rewriting the world in their favour (at which, the leftie responds "have you seen us? We can't even keep a radio station running"). This is what psychologists call "projection", the seeing of one's own faults in others and it is agravated by the conservative trend toward "purity" i.e. calling oneself a Republican means accepting all these points wholesale or we'll call you a RINO and make you a non-person in the party. A whole faction of the populace believes that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are left-fringe radicals (and "left-wing radical" now means anything to the left of Bush who really was a radical) and if you call these people crazy, which would seem the obvious reasponse, they start screaming about Stalin labelling people insane and protesting their patriotism (every kook, crank and domestic terrorist in American history has proclaimed their patriotism). You cannot reason with these people because they have left reason entirely behind. Rather, their allegiance to this talking point version of reality is closer to that of a religion or cult, their accusations of liberals worshipping Obama as a messiah just more of their endless projection (and nowehere is this more true than of Glenn Beck's acolytes who swarm liberal publications whenever an article is unflattering of Dear Leader). The conservative model is well established by this point: Lie about something until you convince a small portion of the populace, force publications to label well-established facts as controversial and then shout "teach the controversy!" and rely on social pressure to do the rest.

So, how can they be beaten? I'm honestly unsure. Education would be an obvious point but children spend far more time learning the talking point reality at home than they do learning the reality-based version at school and the textbooks of those schools are now largely drawn to Texas standards and already corrupted anyway. Conservative control of the media is now so pervasive and so entrenched that we should expect no help from that quarter either. I wish I had an answer but every future I envision ends up with the USA accepting a version of reality entirely at odds with the one the rest of the world accepts.

Just Occasionally, It's All Worthwhile...

So, I have this thing set up to email me when I get a comment. Mainly, I do this for spam-filtering services. You know the kind of thing; fake rolexes, boner pills, that kind of stuff. This morning, I'm sat here reading news and just pondering the idea of hitting the hay when an email drops into my inbox telling me that someone has commented on an old post (this one, if you're curious: http://ebonscave.blogspot.com/2009/10/ever-get-feeling-you-just-cant-win.html ). "Odd", thinks I and open it. THIS is the message I find:

Man, you are a freaking monster!
If you want to see what happens to humans when they stray from God and indulge their perversions, look into the mirror.
There are not enough psycotrophic drugs in the world to quiet the monsters in your head.
Know this:
God does NOT hate because you are a sick perverse queer liberal, rather you ARE a sick perverse queer liberal BECAUSE God hates you.
Get help and not from those Tools Of Satan at the DUmp!

There is only one possible response to this: BWA-HA-HA!

This comes from "Anonymous" (because apparently, when you're an obnoxious Christian crusader, you don't have the guts to even use your handle) who apparently thinks that a tirade of abuse from him would make a real impact on me (and no, Anon, reproducing your mail to mock you is not the same thing) and it has; it's massively brightened up my day. Not as amusing as the guy who sent me a formal anathema (I have that printed and pinned to my wall) but pretty good all the same.

See, I'm not usually someone who likes to divide the world into "types". I have a little more respect for the wonderous variety of humanity than that. But there is a certain type that I know well and loathe; self-righteous ultraconservative bigots and I figure that if they hate me, I must be doing something right. It's kind of like Hitler cussing you out (pardon my Godwins), you automatically know you're on the right side. Now, some Christians like to point to lines like that and sarcastically say "oh, how tolerant of you" but firstly, that's just playing word games and secondly, not to go all schoolyard on you, but he started it.

But, my dear Anon, you did get one thing right. I AM a tool of Satan. Matter of fact, I'm a worshipper of Satan, I willingly pledge my service to the lord of darkness and shadows and unlike your god, mine doesn't forbid sorcery. Are the shadows around you getting a little deeper, Anon, can you smell something odd? That's brimstone, my sweet little zealot. I should run to bed if I were you. Snuggle yourself up and pretend you don't feel anything unusual. Go on. We couldn't think any the less of you than we do already.

The United States Died Today

The ramifications of yesterday's Citizen's United decision are difficult to comprehend. In one fell swoop, in a decision which relied on no precedent or legal rule, the Supreme Court of Justice Roberts destroyed any and all limits on corporate financing of campaigns. No, it's too big. Let's walk back a little and take a brief look at how we got here.

In a decision in the nineteenth century, a no less misguided Supreme Court decided that corporations were, in certain important respects, persons and thus entitled to some of the protections laid out in the United States Constitution. Too much ancient history for you? OK, perhaps you'd feel better if we only went back about thirty years. It was about thirty years ago that the public began to be fed an endless diet of anti-union propoganda. Not coincidently, that coincided with the rise in Washington of a class of politicians who believed Ayn Rand was right; that corporations should be entirely unregulated. My opinions on Rand are fairly irrelevent here (although I believe she may be the most evil woman in history) but what that led to was a systematic dismantling of the limits on corporate activities that had been put in place after the Great Depression (also caused by corporations). Those politicians, in union with a media almost completely controlled by the right-wing, preached that the corporation was your friend and the public, so forgetful, so endlessly trusting, believed them.

Perhaps you would say that, since today's decision was made by judges, not politicians, that political movement is irrelevent. Sadly, that's untrue. Judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Congress. Because of that, the only judges considered for selection are those whose worldview matches that of their selector. President Reagan would not have even considered a judge who was pro-choice, for example. Confirmation is a little more complex but, given the Republican minority's effective current veto power (via their unprecedented lockstep filibuster on absolutely everything and no, wingers, the Democrats were nowhere near this bad to Bush) can be worked around. Bush just went with recess appointments (and it's unclear whether that was even meant to apply to judicial nominations). The lifetime appointments given the Supreme Court justices were originally meant to insulate judges from political pressures. In reality, they've done exactly the opposite and simply given a lifetime term to any justice's political biases.

Ah, now we can get to the ramifications of the decision. Keith Olbermann did a good job of scratching the surface in his special comment yesterday but, given the time limits of his medium, he could go only so far. Let's start with these: A lowering and eventual abolition of corporate taxes and, shortly thereafter, of taxes on the rich who run those corporations. How about the abolition of minimum wage laws? From now on, your salary will be whatever the corporation decides to pay you. Think you can go to another corporation and get paid better? Good luck. With corporations in control of Congress, expect ever more incentives to move jobs overseas. You're going to be competing for jobs with ever more people and if you won't take that job for fifty cents an hour, there's someone who will. Oh yeah, your taxes are going to go up as well. With the lowering and elimination of corporat tax and taxes on the wealthy, the money has to come from somewhere and it's going to come from you.

Oh, you think the politicians wouldn't go that far? Sorry, you will now choose your politicians from a pool of candidates funded (and therefore, vetted and approved) by the corporations. The corporations now control whether your politicians get elected and that means that politicians will do whatever the corporation demands. From now on, you don't have a senator from California, you have a senator from Aetna or Wellpoint or... Well, pick a corporation.

The dream of the corporations is and always has been to have a class of people rich enough to buy their crap and a much larger class poor enough and desperate enough to work for pennies to make their crap. So you can kiss any form of healthcare reform goodbye. If you get sick, tough luck, you're fired and out to starve in the gutter. Any and all forms of employee protection will go. You will now be employed for as long as the corporation wants you, at whatever wages they want to pay. Forget workplace safety laws, forget employer funded healthcare. Forget the enviroment too. The corporate sector has always resisted enviromental protections and now, they're in a position to do something about it. Forget same-sex marriage, some red meat thrown to the evangelicals while the corporations take over. Reproductive choice will go the same way and, since the corporation always wants to lower wages, ever more people competing for ever fewer jobs is always in their interests. Forget banking reform too, there are few corporations more powerful. Credit card reform is the same story. Oh, and forget consumer protections as well. So your drugs may or may not work anymore. Expect more wars, expect a draft or "national service" because the corporations that manufacture bullets and bombs and all that fancy equipment are still corporations, after all.

Think I'm being too alarmist? Perhaps. But look up the position of the average person during the Great Depression, or the Dark Ages or any age where those with the gold ruled openly. Your wages have already stagnated for years. Now, with nothing to stop them, they're going to start falling. Expect the few remaining rules on media ownership to be swept aside as well. The corporations need to control those to control you, to keep you distracted.

So who can you turn to to save you? Sorry, there's not much better news here. A Supreme Court decision, through the doctrine of stare decisis, establishes enforceable law for all courts within US jurisdiction. Through the principle of judicial review, any law passed by Congress will have to be compatible with this decision or it will simply be overturned, either by the Supreme Court or by a lower court with no choice but to follow this precedent. You could try for a Constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court can't overrule that but the chances of getting a Constitutional amendment through Congress with the current Republican veto are nil and if you think a lter Republican Congress will do so, you're dreaming. The Republican party has become the political arm of the business lobby and, through the right's control of the media, has managed to convince much of the populace that that's a good thing.

Enjoy your remaining time to complain about this on the internet as well. Because Net Neutrality will shortly become a thing of the past. And if you think "the people" are going to rise up and institute a revolution, forget it. History shows us that revolutions only happen when people's basic needs are threatened or removed and even then, it's only fifty-fifty. Bread and circuses. If the bellies of "the people" are full and they have, say, American Idol to distract them, they may grumble but, chances are, they won't do anything about it. They'll go to the polls every few years and cast their vote for the corporate-approved shill who sounds slightly better than the other corporate-approved shill. The people of Germany didn't rebel against Hitler, nor did the people of Rome rebel against Nero. Until the food stops coming, there will be no revolution and even if there was, who do you think makes your guns and bullets? I can make ammo, as can a lot of firearms hobbyists but the gun you need to fire them comes from those same corporations and, incidently, the chances are fairly good that you'd be too busy fending off the poor bastards now starving in the streets to take up arms against the corporations.

Amid all the accusations of socialism and communism the right has been throwing around lately, it seems that fascism has snuck in by the back door (shh, don't tell the wingers, they think fascism was a left-wing ideaology). Mussolini, the original fascist leader, once said that fascism should more properly be called corporatism as it represented the union of state and corporate power. "The people" or, as I like to call them, "the mob" may not know this because their education has been woefully limited and they have been lied to their whole lives but corporate control of the political sphere is the very definition of fascism. There might not be tanks in the streets (as people seem to believe fascism requires) but it's fascism all the same. You now live in a fascist country.

Let me put this in simple terms so that it cannot be misunderstood: The American experiment is over, it failed. Government of, by and for the people is done. Legislators are now for sale to the highest bidder. Government is now (as Olbermann brilliantly said) of the people, by the corporation, for the corporation. If you want to know what the future looks like, read some William Gibson or the rulebook for the roleplaying game Shadowrun (although, sadly, you won't get the magic). You have, generously, five years to destroy this monstrous decision, to save your country and the dream of America. If this decision is not overturned, cut down or otherwise circumvented, your entire way of life is over.

Get to work.

"Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go / I owe my soul to the company store" ~ Johnny Cash

More lies from Prop 8 trial.

The majority of this article was written way back when same-sex marriage was initially legalised in California. With the current court battle over the constitutionality of the ban on same-sex marriage and the anti-marriage side's odd decision to drag homosexuality itself into the dock, it seemed like a good time to revise and reprint this article.

“The judges overturned the will of the people” ~ It is not the job of the judicial branch to uphold the wishes of the majority. There is a very good reason why very few states and virtually no civilised nations elect judges and that is because it would open them to the same pressures as politicians face. Judges are deliberately insulated from the political process to ensure that they don’t have to follow “the will of the people”. The judges were asked to rule on whether the state’s ban on same-sex marriage conflicted with the state constitution’s ban on discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. They decided it did. making that decision was their only responsibility. Not enforcing the will of the people, not following the prevailing political winds, simply stating the law as they understood it. If the judiciary’s only function was to rubber-stamp “the will of the people”, there would be little point having them. The judicial branch is independent to guard against the tyranny of the majority, not to enable it. UPDATE: If the current case leads to the decision that the ban is unconstitutional, then we can expect to see this argument and the one below used ad infinitum by the right but it still doesn't change the fact that it is not the judiciary's job to enforce the will of the people. Not least because "will of the people" is so often so close to "whim of the mob".

“Activist judges / legislating from the bench” ~ The phrase “activist judges” has only ever meant “a decision I disagree with”. Of the seven judges who made this decision, six were appointed by Republicans and California currently has a Republican governor, not the kind of people normally slandered with cries of judicial activism. As anyone who has ever studied law knows, it is utterly impossible for a judge to avoid legislating from the bench. In any case at all (except Bush V. Gore), the decision establishes a legal precedent. By the principle of stare decisis (roughly “the court stands on it’s previous decisions”), that precedent then has the force of law to all lower courts unless and until it is overturned, thus establishing law and thus, legislating from the bench. That is how the legal process is supposed to work. It is, in a very real sense, the essence of what judges do. Further, the cry of activism can only ever have any weight (beyond the previously mentioned “decision I dislike”) if a decision is made without firm legal reasoning. In this case, the legal reasoning was entirely sound. The wording of both the State Constitution and the marriage act were exceedingly clear and the court also drew on the decision made in Loving which established the right to marriage as a fundamental right. That is a well-reasoned, well-thought out judicial opinion. UPDATE: Not much to add to this one as the above comments still hold true but an additional point should be made. Laypeople often believe that judges have a great deal more lattitude in their decisions than they actually do. In fact, judicial decisions are constrained by a legal doctrine called stare decisis. Stare decisis is legal shorthand for the principle that similar cases will be decided in a similar manner (mutatis mutandis, obviously). What that means is that courts are divided into strict heirarchy. If, say, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals renders a decision, every court in that jurisdiction below them is obliged to render the same decision in same circumstances. This was part of what caused the Ricci case which got Justice Sotomayor in such trouble. Standing precedent (i.e. a case which established the policy of how a particular point of law is treated) said that tests which produced a disproportionate response could be thrown out, even if the disproportionate response was unintentional. Justice Sotomayor rightly applied the existing precedent in that case and kicked the case up to the SCOTUS so they could revise the precedent (which they duly did). The point here is that judges do not make their decisions by consulting a Magic 8-Ball. The law is a complex system of competing precedents, rules of procedure and presumptions. When the layman doesn't understand how that system works, the correct response is to ask for an explanation, not scream "ACTIVIST JUDGE!".

“Now people will be able to marry children/dogs/box turtles” ~ First off, there is no evidence whatsoever that gay people abuse children any more frequently than hetero people and a certain amount of evidence suggesting exactly the opposite. Secondly and more importantly, marriage is (shorn of the religious connotations) a state-sanctioned contract. Children cannot consent to a contract, nor to sexual intercourse so when one is asked “where do we draw the line?”, the appropriate answer would probably be “at people who are able to give consent”. While we’re on the subject, animals are also judged unable to give consent so leave that one at home too. UPDATE: This one is still true as well. Despite the pro-8 side's constant attempts to hammer it into the public mind, there is still no credible evidence that gay people abuse children any more than straight people.



“They’re free to marry someone of the opposite sex, like anyone else so same-sex marriage is a special right” ~ There is a reason the phrase “one size fits all” appears in no known constitution or bill of laws anywhere. If you wish to apply that argument, one can as easily shut down every church except the Satanists, not our fault if you choose to be something different or we could enforce vegetarianism, not our fault if you like a steak. Quite apart from the absurdity of the argument, it becomes rather more sinister when you flip it around: If the government can say I only have the right to marry a woman, why can it not say I only have the right to marry some women? Or this woman? Or this aardvark? A reasonable argument can be made for limiting marriage to two people out of sheer practicality and the need to maintain a tax base but beyond that, allowing the state to decide which people can marry sets a dangerous precedent. UPDATE: This one is still around, although people are becoming more aware of how absurd it is. The "special rights" argument is still ridiculous. If same-sex couples get the right to marry, it won't be limited to gay people. You, average straight person, will have the right to marry Bob from the office if you want to as well. What, that's still a special right because you wouldn't want to? Welcome to the gay couple's current position.

“Marriage has always been between a man and a woman” ~ So was child labour, so was miscegenation, so was slavery. Everything is “always” until we decide it’s something else. The satirist Terry Pratchett once described tradition as “the name we give to something daft we’ve been doing a long time”. His point was not that tradition is inherently a bad thing but that holding a tradition simply because it had always been a tradition was absurd. Until quite (shamefully) recently, it had “always” been legal to force sex upon one’s wife. And then the world grew up and realised that was foul and changed it. Humanity is not static, what was done does not have to continue to be done. If humanity had stuck with what it had “always” done, we would be eating our meat raw and living in a tree. Respect the last by all means but don’t be a slave to it and, when necessary, be willing to learn from it’s mistakes. UPDATE: Since Rick Warren was stupid enough to insist that marriage had been "one man, one woman" for "five thousand years", it's worth debunking that. For most of human history, polygamy was the rule, largely to cope with epidemic child mortality rates. In certain cultures, polygamy is still the rule. For example, Islam allows a man to take four wives (many Muslims do not do so but the option is clearly allowed by the Qu'ran). Then, in the western world, marriage became an exchange of property. The groom purchased the bride from the bride's father. In ancient Egypt, incest was common among the ruling class. In fact, the current arrangement of one-man and one-woman as relative equals is quite recent. Further, many cultures have or had same-sex marriage or local equivelant. Same-sex unions were recognised in ancient Greece and Rome at various times, parts of China and various parts of Europe. The emperors Nero (who was admittedly insane) and Elagabalus (who wasn't) both married men. While records from this period are patchy, the practice was evidently widespread enough that the Roman emperor Constantinius II felt the need to outlaw same-sex unions in 342ad. Finally, one only needs to look at the Sacred Band of Thebes (who also destroy the argument against gays in the military). The Sacred Band were an elite force of around 300 men in the 4th century Theban army. What made them unique was that the entire force consisted of around 150 bonded gay couples. The rationale was that, while a man may abandon his comrade, he would fight through hell to protect his love. It worked. The Sacred Band defeated a Spartan army three times their size at the battle of Tegyra. The one time they were defeated, at the battle of Chaeronea, they had to be massacred almost to a man. The Theban army, outmatched by Macedonia's invention of the phalanx, broke and fled the field with it's allies but the Sacred Band refused to surrender. They held their ground and fell where they stood. The only members of the Sacred Band taken as prisoners were those too injured to fight on. When Phillip II encountered the corpses of the Sacred Band (virtually the entire company, remember), "piled one upon another", he said "perish any man who suspects that these men did or suffered anything unseemly".

“God says it’s immoral” ~ Got God’s fax number? Willing to share it? Then it’s just your opinion. You may have an elderly book that says your god feels this way but I have a book which says otherwise and since neither of us can prove our case or disprove the others, let’s just leave everyone’s gods out of the equation. Or, to quote Sir Francis Walsingham: “Is your god such a worldly god that he must play at politics?”. UPDATE: As "Prop 8: The Musical" reminds us, the Bible also codemns homosexuality in exactly the same language as it condemns eating shellfish. The Bible also allows stoning one's wife, selling one's daughter into slavery and slavery in general.

“It’s unnatural” ~ So is wearing clothes, driving cars, modern medicine, corporations and American Idol. The life of man in a state of nature is nasty, brutish and short. The entirety of human existence has been a flight away from nature, a drive to modify nature to our own ends. That is what has made us the dominant species on the planet and, because we never know when to stop, is killing the planet. Homosexuality has been observed in at least a hundred species (last time I checked, it may be even more now). If animals in the state of nature do it, it is natural by definition. UPDATE: At time of writing, homosexual behaviour (that is, choosing to engage in same-sex coupling even when a mate of the opposite sex was available) has been observed in around 1500 species. In about a third of those, homosexuality is both common and well-documented. It's not difficult to find examples of this. From the German penguins who formed same-sex couples to near-uniformly bisexual bonobos to gay bison so common that Native American peoples have distinct names for them, homosexuality is natural. Case closed.

“It will encourage homosexuality” ~ You can’t encourage an inborn trait. All the
evidence, while not entirely conclusive yet, indicates that homosexuality is almost certainly innate. More to the point, what do you think is going to happen? Are otherwise hetero kids going to notice two guys getting married and think “I’m cured, I want the boys!”. If gay people have been being gay and living as gay and coming out as gay despite the ban on same-sex marriage and despite the phenomenal pressures to be straight and conform and despite the (decreasing but still very prevalent) threat of physical violence, we can safely assume that suppressing gay people hasn’t worked. UPDATE: Still true.

“It will destroy the sanctity of marriage” ~ OK, first off, let’s talk about that sanctity. Last time I checked, the divorce rate was around fifty percent and around eighty percent of married people (men and women) will cheat at some point in their married life so marriage doesn’t currently seem to be very sanctified anyway. Secondly, do you honestly believe that gay people getting married will have any effect on hetero marriages (beyond the minuscule effect on tax revenues)? Straight people are not going to stop getting married purely because marriage is no longer exclusive to them, the human mind doesn’t work that way. UPDATE: This one seems to be what the pro-8 forces are basing their argument on. Hilariously, they've run into a judge who seems determined to make them prove it. There are an increasing number of nations which have legalised same-sex marriage or (as my own UK has) an indentical-in-everything-but-name arrangement. Surprise, straight people in those nations are still getting married. The world keeps turning.

"If gay people can marry, they'll be raising children" ~ This one's a new entry with the prop-8 trial. And the only rational response is "So?". There's quite a lot of research on the effects that being raised by a same-sex couple has on children (just Google it, it's fascinating stuff) and, while the nature of sociological research means that uniform agreement is impossible, the vast preponderence of the research says that children raised by same-sex couples do just as well in every way as kids raised by hetero couples. In certain areas, they actually do slightly better (for example, kids raised by lesbian parents are less likely to develop mental illnesses). There's a tendancy among anti-gay people to claim that children need role models of both genders and that part's true, kids really do need role models of both male and female genders. Where they screw up is assuming that those roles have to be filled by parents, they don't. The child of a lesbian couple (for example) can just as easily gain a male role model from an elder sibling or relative, an involved teacher or coach or their parent's friends (few couples have friends exclusively of one gender). I was raised by my grandmother for most of my formative years and turned out fairly masculine, I even have a beard (the kind that grows on one's face). Moreover, if such people were honestly concerned about a child's wellbeing (rather than just having a convient excuse to be anti-gay), they would pay more attention to the plethora of research which says that the single best model for childrearing is the extended family. It has been proven time and again that the extended family, the traditional close-knit collection of parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents where everyone pitches in to help raise a child, turns out the most well-adjusted children. That was the normal method of raising children for most of human history although now, as families now live apart more often, it's becoming rarer. Of course, one could also point out how much this argument is based on socially constructed gender roles but I have no desire to turn this into an essay on gender roles and societal expectations.
Further still, one could point out that, due to biology, most gay couples who have children choose to have them. Unlike a straight couple who can concieve a child by accident, a gay couple either has children from a previous relationship who they have chosen (and normally, had to fight) to keep with them or have gone through a very long and trying process to adopt or concieve a child. Thus, that child is very much wanted and loved. A child who feels loved, regardless of the gender of his/her parents will always turn out better adjusted emotionally than one who does not.