My old friend MB (who goes to college in Massachusetts; I think he's in graduate school now), responding to my entry about gay marriage, wrote:

If this whole thing were about "rights" it would be one thing, but upon review of the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court ruling, and conversation with the lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, I find that hard to believe. The extent to which the campaign for gay marriage is taken, at least by some here in Bay State, amounts to a "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" attitude. [. . .] While it's true that at one point in U.S. history, too few years ago, interracial marriage was prohibited, it was never true that Webster's defined marriage as "a union between whites and whites, or blacks and blacks" -- although it DOES define marriage as a union between man and woman. The SJC ruling flies in the face of the English language. [. . .] The lawyer in this case told me that civil unions would create "second-class citizens" because they NEED the word marriage. I don't buy it. Separate but equal was unequal because different facilities clearly meant degraded facilities for blacks and turned them into social pariahs (or, rather, reinforced their positions as social pariahs). Separate terms for different sorts of unions does nothing of the sort, any less than separate terms for 'father' and 'mother' makes either one less of a parent."

I decided to go and read the SJC ruling, titled Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. (Supreme Judicial Court is Massachusetts' particular name for its state Supreme Court. They also like to call themselves a "commonwealth." They're strange there.) The opinion talks about how civil marriage -- state recognition of marriage through licensing -- is one of the "police powers" of the state, but the issue of the Fourteenth Amendment exists because "The benefits accessible only by way of a marriage license are enormous, touching nearly every aspect of life and death. The [state health] department states that 'hundreds of statutes' are related to marriage and to marital benefits." Okay, so why not let them get married?

It's just not quite the same. "Marriage" in the traditional sense involves the possibility of procreation; such a thing is impossible between homosexual couples. And yet, the ruling notes:

The judge in the Superior Court endorsed the first rationale, holding that "the state's interest in regulating marriage is based on the traditional concept that marriage's primary purpose is procreation." This is incorrect. Our laws of civil marriage do not privilege procreative heterosexual intercourse between married people above every other form of adult intimacy and every other means of creating a family. General Laws c. 207 contains no requirement that the applicants for a marriage license attest to their ability or intention to conceive children by coitus. Fertility is not a condition of marriage, nor is it grounds for divorce.

Is there, then, a definition of marriage that includes all heterosexual couples (including infertile ones) but excludes homosexual couples? The Oxford English Dictionary, the last word on the English language, defines marriage as "the condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony." It also notes that "the term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex."

Yet, I'm still loathe to put homosexual marriage on par with heterosexual marriage. It's just not the same. The institution of marriage, as it has existed for practically forever, has always involved men and women. Only in the last forty years have we been asked to change our idea of what marriage is. This is by no means a convincing argument; "because that's how we've always done it" is never valid. MB says, though, "I have no problem with a civil union setup that confers *every single benefit* of marriage -- without calling it that."

Does "separate but equal" apply in this case? Legally, yes. Homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is not a choice (apparently). Thus, couples should not be legally denied certain rights based upon decisions in which they had no part. On the other hand, in terms of terminology, are we obliged to call the union of homosexuals "marriage"? No; in this matter "separate but equal" does not have to call them the same thing, because they are inherently not the same thing. Giving gay couples the same legal rights as everyone else is as far as we need to go; altering our concepts of marriage, and giving homosexual couples vindication by making their marriage as "normal" as heterosexual marriage, is not the state's job. Homosexual marriage is not as normal as heterosexual marriage, and that is the key to attempts to use the word "marriage" to describe gay unions: homosexuals want a moral acknowledgment -- imposed upon us by the state -- that their union is the same as heterosexuals' unions. But it is not.

Posted by Mark at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

USA Today (a.k.a. McNews) published an op-ed today comparing laws preventing gays from getting married to laws preventing people from different races from getting married. The arguments are the same in both cases: they have biblical origins.

Let's pretend for a moment that laws preventing gays from getting married are not rooted in hatred; what is their basis? If it's biblical, then why are we not willing to grant same-sex couples any of the privileges afforded married heterosexual couples? The recent Ohio law barring gay marriage prevents homosexual couples from receiving any state benefits from marriage that are enjoyed by heterosexual couples. The proposed constitutional amendment -- now known as the Defense of Marriage Act -- would do the same on a federal level. Is there a legal basis for this denial of rights? Biblical arguments and discussions of "sanctity of marriage" get put down quickly by the Fourteenth Amendment. Our leaders would do well to remember that the law that governs this country is the constitution and not the Bible.

Okay, okay. Let's let the people opposed to same-sex marriage speak for themselves. How about Leadership University, which advertises itself as "a brochure site" whose mission is "to provide answers to many of science's, religion's and life's weightier issues free of charge. [They] are sponsored by Christian Leadership Ministries, a non-profit organization." That should tell us where they're coming from.

One of the "brochures" on this site is entitled "Same-Sex 'Marriage': Should America Allow 'Gay Rights' Activists to Cross The Last Cultural Frontier?" This "public policy analysis" first denigrates a movement for homosexual rights, making it out to be nothing more than an attempt at political power: "Certain gains awarded to 'minorities' in the decades following the 1964 Civil Rights Act's passage added important incentives to gay militants' aspirations to secure 'minority' status." Portions of this analysis hint that gay people are not so politically active so as to secure equal rights; rather, they want superlegal rights that are afforded to minorities, viz. "the ability to claim discrimination if a member or members of a minority class are denied access to employment, housing, public accommodations and/or public services." So, obviously, same-sex marriage is a political sham. Good job, guys.

Posted by Mark at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After only 48 minutes of work, most of the old entries are back up. I omitted about twenty entries which I felt didn't matter much. I could not save the comments that were posted, so if an entry refers to old comments, you cannot see those old comments. So it goes. But this still doesn't answer the fundamental question: why is James Kilpatrick in the "Friends" column?

Posted by Mark at 1:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night, George W. Bush gave his third State of the Union address and promised unilateralism for another year. Shooting wry grins and smugness toward the left side of the aisle (which booed him once or twice), Bush said "Bring it on!" to any potential Democratic challenger. "You think you can touch me? You got nothin'!" He reminds me of Robert DeNiro's Al Capone from The Untouchables.

On health care, he used the "p-word"; on sex education, he used the "a-word." When it came to marriage, he used . . . well, he used several words. Some of them were "sanctity of marriage." You can imagine the rest.

Of course Bush is untouchable, and any Democratic candidate that thinks so is living in a dream world, possibly created by machines. Or not. The point here is that Bush delivered a spectacular "war on terror" which promises only to continue. He bagged Saddam Hussein, something his father couldn't do and Bill Clinton wasn't interested in doing. He's changed the dictatorial regimes of two countries and coerced Qadaffi, the scourge of the 1980s, into abandoning plans for weapons of mass destruction. In foreign policy, the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive warfare will be written in the annals of history next to the "Reagan Doctrine" of intervening in countries where it was economically or politically expedient (but there was also socialism). Thanks to his foreign policy, Bush will surely be re-elected -- as long as a recession doesn't pop up between now and November. That was his father's death knell.

After addressing foreign policy, Bush turned his eyes to the long-neglected set of domestic issues, promising health care for everyone and lauding himself and Congressional Republicans for making prescription drugs more affordable to seniors and ensuring that no child is left behind (except the millions that will be). He also encouraged Congress to make tax cuts permanent and to phase out the estate tax (what Bush expertly titles the "death tax"). So, with tax cuts for everyone, how can we increase spending on social programs and wage a war on an abstract concept without falling victim to the most harsh of judges: math. Unless he declares a War on Math to make his numbers turn out right, Bush will fall victim to the "fuzzy math" that he himself articulated during the 2000 presidential election. Or, taking another cue from the Reagan School, he can deficit-spend even further. But wait! He also wants to balance the budget! Someone get this guy a calculator and some gin.

At the end of his speech, he affirmed the conservative Christian stance on abstinence education: more of it, and more money to it. This in spite of the evidence that abstinence-only education doesn't work (I wrote about it very angrily before the blog broke). Sure, telling kids not to have sex would mean that they wouldn't do it -- in a perfect world. Back in reality, where everyone else lives, kids do it and it's not the school's job to tell them to do it or not. This article in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune discusses the failure of the state's abstinence-only program. Also note that abstinence-only education is hopelessly intermingled with conservative Christian values.

But before he got to abstinence, Bush affirmed his support for a constitutional amendment to sanctify the marriage between a man and a woman. If it weren't for those gol-durn activist judges! What do they think they're doin', interpreting the Constitution in a way that Bush disagrees with?! We'll show 'em! We'll stall the judicial process for the next five years!

So, in closing, the State of the Union address merely affirmed my desire for a new president, since this one is hopelessly divisive and has his priorities all wrong.

Posted by Mark at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Miami Entropy server was giving me problems, but they have since been fixed. I thought re-installing Movable Type (and upgrading to version 2.661) would fix the problems, but it did not. Thus I have wiped everything that has been written to this point, as well as the templates and stylesheets. I am in the process of restoring everything.

Posted by Mark at 6:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was listening to a talk radio host the other day, and he was discussing why we should keep NASA. More than anything else, he said, NASA generates money for the government. An investment in NASA will return the money seven-fold from "product spin-offs," he says. His rationale is that companies will commercially market space technology, which will require hiring workers to produce these products. These workers will pay taxes to the government on their incomes, and the corporations that produce these products will pay corporate taxes. The products themselves will be taxed when they are sold, providing revenue to state and local governments. He suggests that if you disagree, do a Google search for "NASA spin-off products."

Well, some of that is true. Products originally designed for NASA do find their way into consumer markets. NASA actually publishes a magazine, called Spinoff, which highlights these technologies. One of these technologies is the device that controls the laser in LASIK eye surgery. Another is a system that provides commercial airline pilots with realtime, satellite-broadcast weather information inside the cockpit.

Nevertheless, why such a high rate of return on NASA investment? Most of the people who would be employed by the corporations producing these products were already employed by someone else; this means that they had been paying taxes to the government (federal, state, and local) already. No new money has entered the system. In fact, given that employment rates are going down, money has probably left the tax system. The only new revenue the government could get out of these prodcuts is the corporate taxes and the sales taxes, and I doubt that this is seven times more than the original investment.

He then went on to continue to argue for the Laffer curve. Proponents of Reaganomics are familiar with it, even if they don't know it by its official name. The Laffer curve is a function that describes tax revenue. As the tax rate increases from 0 to 50%, revenue from taxes increases; however, 50% is its maximum. After that, it decreases until revenue is at 0 when tax rate is at 100%. What does this mean? It means that as the government taxes people more and more, people will actually lose the incentive to work, since their income increasingly goes to the government. At 100% taxation, no one will work, the curve argues. This is another example of black-and-white thinking. In the United States, there is no tax rate close to 50%. The highest rate tops out at 37.5% (or something close to that); the Laffer curve is a great straw man argument: if you tax people at 100%, then they will not work at all. The only problem with this argument is that no one is suggesting that we tax people at 100%. In fact, if we want to follow the Laffer curve rule, we should increase taxes so that the highest tax rate is 50%; that way, we are guaranteed a maximum of revenue from taxes. The world is not black-and-white or 0% and 100%. There are subtleties in between, and only a child (or someone with a child's logic) would suggest that taxing people at 37.5% is akin to taxing them at 100% (or, because something is true in one instance, it is true in all instances).

Proponents of Reaganomics (which is known to economists as supply-side economics) maintain that cutting tax rates for the wealthy will allow them to hire more workers, since it is the wealthy that own businesses. More workers employed means money for those workers, and those workers will pay taxes. But what about the government's revenue? It will decrease, and the government will have to compensate for that by raising taxes elsewhere or deficit-spending (spending more money than you bring in and borrowing what you don't have). Deficit-spending only works if you pay the money back later, which our government has not been doing. Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy and deficit-spent, massively increasing our national debt. The tax burden ought to be borne by the wealthy, since they can afford it. Our graduated tax system allows us to keep taxes low for people who can't afford to pay the same tax rate as those who can.

Posted by Mark at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read the book Cheaper by the Dozen in seventh grade, and it was a fun book. Written by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, it told the true story of the Gilbreth family, headed by Frank and Lillian. Truthfully, the Gilbreth family had twelve children. The book gets its title from attempts made by their father to get a discount on all the children. Frank, Sr. would recognize the nationality of whoever he had to pay to get into something and ask (if the person were, say, Irish), "Are my Irishmen cheaper by the dozen?" Frank was an efficiency expert, and as such, he discovered ways of figuring out how to get twelve kids to do the most amount of work in the least amount of time (for example, when one child had to get his tonsils out, Frank arranged for all the children to have their tonsils out).

The movie is not entertaining. It is based on the book Cheaper by the Dozen in the same way that Stephen King's The Stand is based on the Code of Hammurabi. The only thing even remotely similar between the two is the scenario of twelve kids. The names of the characters, the plot, the occupations, and absolutely everything else have changed. Steve Martin plays Tom Baker, who takes a job as a football coach, but must neglect his twelve children to do so. Frank Gilbreth would never neglect his children. This new film takes the book, a testament to Frank Gilbreth, and spins it so as to make it unrecognizable, destroying the memory of Mr. Gilbreth in the process.

The name Cheaper by the Dozen would entice people from an older generation to go see the film, but only hyperactive kids and football would entice today's hyperactive, sports-crazed kids. That was the key. I pity anyone who spends any money at all on this film. Read the book, instead. This is not the same complaint made by people who think Peter Jackson "destroyed" the Lord of the Rings. Those are recognizable as Tolkien's work; the film Cheaper by the Dozen and the book are related in name only. Everything else has been altered beyond recognition. To go so far as to change the names of the characters and plot lines is akin to writing a separate work altogether that has little or no relationship to the original book. The people who write positive reviews of this trash on IMDb should wise up and base their idea of good films on something other than straight-to-video Disney sequels.

Posted by Mark at 3:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)