Marriage: The battle for hearts and minds

So this time, I’m going to talk about marriage.

There is an ongoing controversy in the United States over marriage.  It is causing a widening divide, yet another ditch between the religious conservatives and secular America.  It all seems rather silly to me.  I was raised in an evangelical Pentecostal home.  I understand the value set, but I have trouble applying those values to our social codes.

Let me be clear, when I write marriage in the context of this essay, I am referring to the marriage license, a piece of paper controlled by our government.  That is the crux of my argument.  To deny two people at the age of consent, the right to join into a legal contract because of their choice of partners is ludicrous. 

For all that you hear many conservative decry the idea of the government as ‘big brother,” they are using  the government to be just that.  Marriage contracts are a way for the government to control populations, plain and simple.  They are a scam, perpetuated by people who believe that the common man or woman is incapable of thinking for themselves.  It’s pure mind control and the American people have fallen for it.

They have fallen for it so hard that now they believe they have to fight for the “sanctity” of marriage.  Listen, having the state say that two women can join in a legal contract is not going to destroy the supposed sanctity of an action.  Hell, most churches won’t marry anyone that walks through the door now.  That isn’t going to change with the change of the law.

Now, when the state starts marching in and telling churches they have to marry same sex couples, I’ll be standing beside them fighting.  Until then, wake up and smell the coffee.  It is long past time we got the government out of the business of regulating the bedroom of its citizens.

Another little snippet about racism

Writing a coherent and not overly technical post on Genetic Engineering is more difficult than I thought.  Instead, I would like to refer people to this story in Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2192831/.  No matter what you might think of Slate’s bias, their court reporting is some of the best.

So, I have to wonder, if a lawyer thinks something so vile about their client (“The little nigger deserves the death penalty.”), how can they even claim to be adequately defending them?  How do we justify that?

The basic answer is that we can’t.

Racism

I have been reading small snippets about how Obama’s campaign workers have been accosted and campaign headquarters in certain states have been vandalized or threatened.  This concerns me, not only because I find it shocking but because there has been little to no coverage of it.

 

I live in a pretty liberal area of a very odd western state.  I used to live in the mostly unsouthern part of a southern state.  I can see some of these incidents happening in parts of the south, but I suppose that part of me has never seen Pennsylvania or Indiana as very southern.   

 

I never expect in 2008 to hear that workers had been told that Obama should be strung up or that campaign workers have been berated harassed and threatened.  What surprises me the most is that these incidents were never highly publized.  The Obama campaign has made it their policy not to make these incidents front page news.

 

Why?  I suspect it is probably the worry that things like this would further widen the divide between black and white voters.  It is possibly that it would but I think it is a bad move.  It is a move towards the issues that now plague Europe, where it is common practice to ignore issues like this.  Americans have a proud, if colored and none to pretty, history of talking about our problems.

 

I think the Obama campaign should not be trying to keep these issues quiet.  People need to know that this kind of blatant bigotry is rampant in our country.  I am not saying that they should go out and decry it to the heavens, but acknowledge it.  There are people out there, in our country right now, that will not vote for Obama because he is black.  The color of his skin has damned him.  Hell, we have had people supporting Clinton that have openly said that if Obama was not black, he would not even have gotten this far. 

 

Should a candidate be honest about the racism their campaign workers had confronted?

 

 

What does the color of his skin matter, except that it might be history making.  It is not Obama’s skin color that appeals to me, but the image that the man conveys.  Admittedly, I would never have been a supporter of Clinton.  I have never found her appealing, but I did not shift to Obama because he was black or a democrat.  I like what he has to say, but that is not the topic.

 

Topic for this week is racism. 

A Certain PoV

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

I admit it.  I am a die-hard old school Star Wars fan.  I have fangirled my way into meeting lots of Star Wars people.  I lingered over movies to catch the names of techs I knew were involved in Star Wars.  Despite all the fanfare, or maybe because of it, this one quote continues to stick with me.

I have already made a blog to talk about me personally, but The Examined Life isn’t going to be about me.  Not exclusively.  The Examined Life is about not taking anything for granted, not taking someone else’s word.

The Examined Life is about coming to your own conclusions and having solid reasons behind them.  It is about accepting responsibility for your beliefs and your ideas.

You might not agree with my point of view.  That’s great.  But be able to back up that disagreement with something other than a rote answer.  That is all I ask.

The Examined Life is about challenging ideas and beliefs.  It is also about understanding that you do not have to agree with someone to respect them.