Gay Marriage Again

Mitch the Killer has recently pointed out, “You’re writing about the same stuff.”

It was a good point. I have been writing about the same stuff. I acknowledge that it has to get boring after awhile, and I’m happy that so many of you keep stopping by, even though it’d be easy enough to say, “Should I read Sam’s site today? Naaaaah. He’ll just be angry about gay marriage again.” Admittedly, until gay marriage is legal and recognized in every state in the nation, I’ll probably still be fired up about it. However, let this post be the last I write on the issue until the next time it raises my hackles.

But I can’t help by be infuriated whenever I see someone having the audacity to give thanks for the social repression of a minority, as the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez happily does here:

It was the top of the month when the majority of voters in California approved a proposition that would protect the traditional definition of marriage in the state, in the face of renegade courts’ past struggles to redefine this fundamental building block of society. I’m grateful that even voters who most likely helped elect Barack Obama president can see the value in sacred, age-old institutions. I’m grateful that there are people like my friend Maggie Gallagher, who heads the National Organization for Marriage, and fights the good fight for the traditional idea of family, despite viciously unfair enemies and defeatist colleagues.

(An old website I had - www.insulted.org - used to house my attempted holy war against Maggie Gallagher. She just a horrible human being, happily dressing up her viciously anti-gay rhetoric in some of desperate attempt to save the American family. That she is routinely eviscerated by people whenever they examine her nonsense arguments is fantastic.) Let’s ignore the obvious: traditional marriage does not mean what she claims it does, and it never has. Let’s also ignore more obvious: that Kathryn Jean doesn’t advocate for the sorts of things that really would “protect” marriage, like Constitutional amendments banning divorce. Let’s focus briefly on that “unfair enemies” claim.

What in the hell does she mean? Is it unfair to point out that those opposed to gay marriage must hate gays if they’re going to legally ensure their second class citizenship? Is it unfair to oppose people when they attempt to impose their religious views onto nonbelievers? Is it unfair to fight back against nothing more than hate speech hidden behind Jesus’s robes? The answer to these questions is obviously no, there’s nothing at all unfair about fighting back against the sort of bile that Kathryn Jean Lopez and her cronies are responsible for. These people are setting America back, and no reasonable citizen of this nation should tolerate such offensive behavior.

Incidentally, Lopez is one of the many social conservatives who inexplicably believes that the response from gay marriage supporters to the Mormon Church has amounted to unfair behavior:

I’m grateful to live in a country where, although there are people who may run to TV news cameras bearing hateful, anti-Mormon signs and call in threats to Mormon temples because many of the Latter-day faithful supported the proposition, there are also those who will fight for religious liberty, like the folks at the Becket Fund. There are politicians who will speak in its defense, like Mitt Romney. He may get attacked unfairly, in some cases because he is Mormon, but he has a genuine moral core and ethical calling that sets him above petty criticism.

Ignore that crap about Mitt Romney; Lopez was in the tank for Romney for President since he first hinted at it, and she never dropped the torch for her “moral and ethical” candidate. If Lopez can’t figure out why people are pissed at the Mormons - a persecuted religious minority for the majority of their time in America, chased to Utah because nobody wanted to deal with their then racist and polygamous underpinnings, that turned on another minority that threatened the institution of marriage, while at the same time openly tolerating polygamy as long as nobody gets hurt - then she’s dumber than a sack of hammers. The Mormons deserve everything they’ve gotten so far, and hopefully, everything they’re going to get in the future. Eventually, the only thing that will be remembered about that particular church was its pigheaded opposition to gay marriage, not that it illegally demanded its adherents drop $20,000,000 into a state other than Utah in an attempt to “protect marriage.”

As I said earlier, I’ll drop this issue now. Until the next time somebody decides to act like a total moron. So…Monday, probably.

Technorati Tags: Gay Marriage, Mormons

The War On Drugs Hits (Yet Another) New Low

Boy fills baggie with chopped parsley, with the intent to take it to his friend and convince him that he’s scored a bunch of marijuana. Police intervene and charge the boy, seriously, with Intent To Deliver Counterfeit Controlled Substance. Because playing harmless practical jokes ought to be criminal, because God forbid anybody ever be anything but deadly serious when it comes to drug use.

The other day in one of my classes, I got into an argument with a woman from WVU’s Forensic Science program. We were battling about whether or not company’s should employ people who fail drug tests; I argued that it ought to be situational. A pothead getting high at work was bad. A pothead doing his job during the day and getting high at night was tolerable. The woman went berserk, claiming that even the thought of somebody getting high gave her hives. I pointed out that we allow alcoholics to keep their jobs, and to her credit, she continued to completely freak out about drug use.

People who argue for prohibition have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about - the War on Drugs has obviously been a colossal failure from the get go. Nothing substantive has been accomplished, nor will it ever be. Meanwhile, booze is legal everywhere.

It has gotten to the point that I thought I heard my friend The Apostle - a straight-laced, God-fearing, church attending, capital A American - express incredulity at the illegality of marijuana. When you’re losing that type of person, your movement isn’t doing a very good job.

But still, that poor kid is likely to be tarnished for life for trying to play a clever practical joke on his friend. Way to go Drug War! You win again!

If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be face-palming myself.

Gay Marriage Problems In California

Dear (Some) Christians,

Apparently, you are now winning in California, and your heroic efforts to keep gay people from getting married (despite a legislature and a state Supreme Court that you chose saying otherwise) are on track. Now, with all due respect: go fuck yourselves.

The arrogance it takes to insert yourselves into lives of other citizens and demand that legal contracts both agreed to be nullified is an arrogance that I cannot believe. Your Bible, which you claim is important to you, features a man (Jesus Christ) who never once got as angry about anything as you routinely do about the mere existence of homosexuals, whom you believe to be the worst people on Earth. Despite a dogmatic reality that you are all fallen sinners, you look at gays and see them as a little more fallen and insist that they be treated as such.

Meanwhile, your own marriages collapse in some of the highest numbers amongst demographic groups ever witnessed in the United States, but you don’t fix that institution. Straights everywhere are allowed to marry-and-divorce, marry-and-divorce, marry-and-divorce, but you do not stand aligned against them, and the damage that such frequent marriages must certainly do to the institution.

And then you hide beyond your outrageously stupid justifications for opposing gay marriage, claiming that it isn’t yet time (when will it be?), or that we shouldn’t threaten an already endangered institution (meaning you’ll keep the right for yourself, but refuse it to everybody else), or merely that gays are less than straights and should be treated as such. But you’ll never admit the real reason you feel so steadfastly about homosexuality: you hate gay people.

It is only hate that could lead a reasonable person with a disagreement to demand the dissolution of another person’s marriage. It is only hate that could lead a reasonable person with a disagreement to demand second-class citizenship for another person. It is only hate that could lead a reasonable person with a disagreement to ostracize and demonize and criminalize a person merely for the sex they have with another person.

What in the hell is wrong with you people? What in the hell is wrong with living-and-let-live? What in the hell is wrong with taking care of your own homes before you propose to fix everybody else’s? The audacity of the gay-hating movement is enough to shake any reasonable person to their core, and yet these people are winning. We can hope that they’ll lose, but it’ll probably take more than that.

Hey Denver Police Department…

…Go fuck yourselves. When people warn of a brutal police state, it is precisely this sort of thing that they’re talking about. Clearly, the directive in Denver wasn’t to allow for individuals to freely express their opinions, but rather, to violently put down the crowds. There is simply no other way to interpret the sort of nonsense communicated by that t-shirt.

(Hat tip to Radley Balko.)

Oh Noes!!1!

I love LOLcats, even if I hate real cats. So sue me. Anyway, I’m not entirely sure what the Republican National Committee thinks it’s going to get sending me letters saying that my membership, which of course I never had, is almost up. Maybe it’s praying that I don’t remember my political affiliations, and think to myself, “Dammit, I knew I’d joined something. It must have been this outfit. Let me find my checkbook.”

If this is what American political organizing has stooped to, then no wonder it barely succeeds anymore. No wonder people are disengaged at historically high levels. No wonder people don’t care.

Obviously, the current electoral cycle is bringing out voters in what appear to be high numbers for today’s day and age. Whether or not they’ll compete with historical highs is something else altogether, but we ought to take progress wherever we can get it.

I’m currently engaged in a debate about marriage equality with some Christians who insist that if gays are allowed to marry, it is an act made against them as Christians. It simply isn’t conceivable that allowing for freedom of marriage does just that: allows for consenting adults to choose who they legally join. Rather, it is believed by these Christians than any attempt to legalize gay marriage is simultaneously an attempt to undermine Christianity. Ludicrous as this opinion may be, you almost can’t help but feel sorry for Christians so stupid. They, as we have all been, have been taught that anything they don’t personally like can be considered an attack upon them as a whole.

I learned the same lesson at the University of Massachusetts. “What? Somebody somewhere doesn’t agree with me? That’s xxx-ism!” The Christians have adopted this mindset too. “What? Somebody wants freedom to be extended to people that we claim to love but really hate? That’s anti-Christianism.”

One of the painful things about living in a multicultural society is that we have to be, yknow, multicultural, and that means not forcing everybody to follow along with whatever we believe. It means creating, and protecting, the marketplace of ideas, and letting the intellectual battles that ensue not spill out into legislation.

It seems clear that if opponents of something really want to get their way, then they ought to take responsibility for convincing people to go along with whatever they’re advocating. Christians who advocate keeping gay relationships as separate but equal entities are clearly doing so because they’re too lazy, bashful, or otherwise disengaged to approach gay people and preach to them about the alleged evil of their sin. Same goes for anti-abortion foes, who would be perfectly happy to see the practice outlawed and police take over for the responsibility of enforcing it.

Needless to say, we’re currently suffering a politics of the scapegoat. The Democrats and Republicans do it at equal speed, although the GOP has been better at scapegoating particular groups. It seems clear that it is ultimately a go nowhere strategy, which is why the party is desperately hoping that I’ve forgotten everything I ever believed in sending me that letter. Unfortunately for the RNC, it failed. Speaking of fail.

Nerding Out

I like The Onion’s AV Club. I’ve been a fan since I first realized that the satirical news magazine was doing serious reviews, interviews, and giving Dan Savage a place to publish. That said, it is a publication that has the tendency to really condescend beyond all reason to its readership.

Today’s The Knights Who Say “Nerd”: 20 Pop-Cultural Obsessions Even Geekier Than Monty Python is just ugly. There’s no merit to it, because nowhere do the authors indicate that they themselves might share in some of this fandom; it reads instead as if the hipsters are just making fun of the nerds in an attempt to feel better about their own cultural obsessions. And yes, these are people that are culturally obsessed.

It takes genuine cajones to believe that spending all of your available income on the latest European release of a Modest Mouse EP before heading over to your friend’s house for a Fassbinder Film Festival is somehow better than dressing up like your favorite anime character. Hipsters, of course, do prioritize the world this way, believing that their own obsessions are somehow superior to everybody else’s and using that idea to condescend to everybody around them. “Oh, really? Frank Zappa? Thanks, but no thanks. Rilo Kiley’s the thing now.” (Or, you know, whatever band is the thing now. I have no idea. I still think They Might Be Giants are fantastic.)

In the movie “The Apostle” with Robert Duvall, he is walking over a bridge in Louisiana when he sees Catholics celebrating a Christian holiday. Himself a Pentecostal minister, he watches for a few minutes. “You do things your way, and I’ll do them mine.” He says, laughing to himself, because while he isn’t a Catholic, he understands that ultimately, they’re both praying to the same god.

The hipsters at The Onion’s AV Club could take a lesson from that. Hipsterism isn’t in any way superior to the sort of nerdish behavior decried in the article above; rather, it is precisely the same sort of behavior focused on (barely) different pursuits. Acting as if the other is true is both offensive and shockingly dense. (One wonders if they have any idea what kind of people are reading and enjoying The Onion itself?)

Schools Bans Facial Hair

A young man in Texas decided to let his wispy mustache grow - his school pulled him out of class and told him to shave it. Are there more important issues in the world? Of course.

Facial hair is a passion of mine. I hate, hate, being clean-shaven, and so I have done it up with huge sideburns, beards, goatees, and anything else that I could get away with. That a school district would claim dominion over a child’s maintenance of his own body, thus preventing the growth of facial hair, is absurd. Previously, I’ve angrily decried rules against t-shirts. This is arguably worse, because instead of school telling a student what clothes he can put on her body, it is telling him what to do to his own body. Schools simply do not enjoy this dominion. A child’s face is his own, and as soon as a school claims the right to shave the kid, surely it will also enjoy the authority to cut his hair, the power to trim his nails, and the strength to do any number of other things.

Besides the intrusion into the lives of these young men - seriously, does a school enjoy the right to tell children what they can and cannot do on their own time? - there is a social issue here about facial hair. My friend Stewart rightly argues that facial hair grows naturally. It is unnatural that it be shaved. We already live in a society in which facial hair is viewed as being something problematic. Now we have schools requiring that young men remove any facial hair that grows immediately, despite the fact that the human condition grows facial hair. Thousands of children (this has apparently been a school policy forever) are growing up believing that facial hair is bad, and not exploring its possibilities during the point in their lives when they’re most likely to decide if they’ll be lifelong growers or lifelong shavers. This is nightmarish.

We don’t need a society of people that look the same. We don’t need a society of people that act the same. And we certainly don’t need yet another policy in which children are treated as pieces of property by schools districts anxious to churn out a graduating class that all looks the same. If individual freedom matters at all, then this is a policy that must be immediately abandoned. To do anything else is unnatural.

Talking With My Cousin About Depression

Full disclosure: Will Wilkinson is not my cousin. He is just blessed with a fantabulous last name. Some guys, as they say, get all the breaks.

For some reason, I have started receiving Reason magazine, a perfectly tolerable publication that supports libertarian ideas. It’s tagline - Free Minds and Free Markets - sounds pretty good to me. But as with all things libertarian, I sometimes wonder about the consistency of actors within the movement. Many have objected to this. “Why are you obsessed with Libertarians?” They’ll ask, and I have no good response except to say that I want to agree with them. But my primary objective is an uptick in aggregate liberty for peoples; (some) libertarians seem concerned primarily with economic liberty. As Arthur Okun once wrote of his fellow economists, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. At times, this obsession of (some) libertarians with particular types of liberty blinds them.

Will Wilkinson wrote an article in this month’s issue of Reason about depression, a topic near and dear to my heart. It is an issue that I have dealt, and continue to deal, with. Wilkinson’s argument is ensconsed in a book review and is both simple and appealing - he believes that depression is overdiagnosed and overmedicated. It is not, according to Wilkinson, the public health crisis which some are making it out to be.

Fair enough. Obviously, as with most medicines that offer what some might describe as cosmetic benefits, some people who are taking them should be and some people who are taking them should not. None of that part of Wilkinson’s claims draw my ire; rather, it is his strange insistence that we have public health officials to blame for this. Forget, for a moment, that he offers us no reason to indict public health officials - how can he inexplicably not connect the dots drawn in his own piece?

“Outpatient treatment of depression in the United States increased 300 percent between 1987 and 1997, the last year for which comprehensive statistics are available.”

“What accounts for this deadly, rapidly spreading malaise? Nothing.”

“The overboard definition of major depressive disorder in the DSM, together with the 1987 appearance of Prozac, seems to have done much of that work.”

I bolded those two dates, as they seem to particularly pertinent here when asking why we’ve seen this uptick in depression diagnosis. The answer is clear: the marketplace demanded it. Pharmaceutical companies invented drugs specifically designed to make people feel better, the result of entrepreneurial innovation filling a void in the medicinal marketplace. Doctors, faced with an avalanche of patients (customers) coming to them asking for the prescriptions (and no doubt being simultaneously rewarded by pharmaceutical companies who aren’t insisting that certain drugs be prescribed, but rather, just suggesting it) capitulate to their clientele’s needs. Once the prescription is written, enough customers pressure their insurance companies to cover the drugs, which begins occurring. At the conclusion of this very free, and very open, practice, we end where we are today, with far more people taking medication than might otherwise need it.

As I look at this scenario, the one actor that doesn’t appear to be visible is the government. Maybe it meddled in what anti-depressive medications were allowed onto the marketplace? I don’t see how such behavior would have, in some way, limited the sort of overdiagnosis that is allegedly plaguing America today.

What’s strange about Wilkinson’s article is that it seems like it ought to be a celebration of all things capitalism. Customers wanted, mechanisms provided, everybody ended up better off. But Wilkinson still can’t help but throw in his last second criticism of public health officials, as if this is somehow their fault.

The mind boggles.

(It is worth noting that Wilkinson, elsewhere in the article, makes the sort of free-market observations that I’m making, but at no point does he connect the one - free-market - with the other - overdiagnosis of depression. It seems an almost impossible oversight.)

Random Upda…Smash! Sam Angry! Sam Smash!

Tomorrow begin..neth the novel. But today? There’s nothing but angry, but pure, unadulterated fury. Shall we begin?

-My best friend in the blogging universe is one Josh Foust. He has worked dilligently since whenever we first met, turning his Conjecturer into a well read site. Well-read enough that he managed to simultaneously infuriate the Instapundit and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald we’ll get to in a minute, but first, the Instapundit.

Dear Instapundit,

Stop being an idiot. Stop holding the mainstream media to expectations that you’d never place upon yourself. Stop writing ‘Heh’ and ‘Indeed.’ Stop pretending that you aren’t a vacuous mouthpiece of the Bush Administration. Also, stop being a douchebag.

The irritating thing about Greenwald is that I’ve spent the last several weeks really getting to like the guy. Sure, he trends toward absolutism, like every blogger on planet Earth, but he really had a good streak going recently, in which his criticisms seemed spot on and his analysis read well. So what’s to explain his idiotic refusal to, yknow, actually look at Josh’s blog before describing it as a garden variety pro-war blog. Where on Earth is he getting this crap from? More importantly, don’t we live in a world where bloggers can exist in the netherworld that exists between “I Love George Bush” and “I Hate George Bush.” Or are we back on some stupid playground somewhere where you’re either with me and my friends, or you’re against us, and there’s simply no possibility that different people can take different positions and learn, against all odds, to co-exist with one another? I probably know the answer.

-Meanwhile, revisiting the repression of children, here we have the story of a young woman suspended from school for having maroon weaved into her microbraids. Because holy fucking Moses, if a young girl has maroon weaved into her microbraids, western civilization as we know it and understand it will crumble into the abyss almost immediately. How can we possibly move forward if one girl somewhere decides that she wants to have maroon - of all colors!?!?!? - in her hair. Thank God we’ve given teachers and administrators the right to decide what is and isn’t distracting to the other students. Without their dilligent repression of any individuality at all, what would we have but kids in school with vague differences? And for fuck’s sake people, we absolutely cannot have that! We have to have uniformity in our students! We have to! Jesus Christ fucking declared it in the Bible somewhere…or, umm…something…I don’t even know. Principal Sandy Somogyi is just stupid. That’s all there is to it.

-Idiots.

-Finally, this little slice of blatant racism which will, predictably, go unpunished. Libertarians might argue that, “Nobody should be forced to take care of those people!” and of course, they’d be right. But pointing guns at them and telling them to go back toward the hell that they were coming out of? Particularly if the people holding the guns are whites and the refugees are black? You’ll excuse me if I believe that there was more going on here than limited supplies. Clearly, the whites didn’t want the blacks in their town. You’ll excuse me if I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to threaten violence to keep them out.

A Personal Failure

My friend Mitch The Killer - check the Glossary of Characters - recently commented on a blog post that this blog has been busy sucking. In a way, I agree. Whereas I once swore regularly, and raged against the dying of the light, and charged foolishly into windmills, now I bore those few people who stop by with tattooing, rationality, and Libertarianism.

Somebody asked me about this obsession with Libertarians. “Why, what’s wrong with you? Why bother with them? They’re a few percent of the population, and they’re never going to win!” These are excellent points.

Once, I went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the gay Meccas on the East Coast, and I remember thinking, “How on Earth can everybody here look so damned similar? These people are gay! They, if anybody, should be tolerant of difference! Where is the difference?!?” And then I walked down to the ocean, which was beautiful, and screamed at the high tide.

So why the newer focus on Libertarians? Because they claim to care about all of the same things that I do - specifically, individual liberty - and yet they propose solutions which will almost certainly reduce the aggregate amount of individual liberty. I cannot possibly square these two realities.

“Move on! Focus on something else! Jesus Christ already, the Libertarians see individual liberty differently than you do, and they’re not going to change that! Come on already.”

But I can’t. Just like I struggle to let go of most things: old breakups, the Mountaineers not stopping Tremaine Mack on the end in the loss to Miami, the lunacy of running John Kerry for president, four-putting the final green in a golf tournament that I won. “How can people be so fucking stupid,” I wonder about everyone, including myself.

Libertarians aren’t so fucking stupid, for whatever that’s worth. It’s just that they don’t seem to give a good god damn about anybody but themselves. That’s fine I guess. No law requires anybody to care about anybody else. But it seems like the right thing to do, and it certainly seems like there are some people who simply can’t take care of themselves. I know that Libertarians have no problem with innocent people being allowed to die - “Hey, nobody has a right to take my money to pay for that old woman’s selfish desire for medical attention!” - but I can’t take the same position myself.

Sometimes, I have this fantasy. There are people in my town who are crazy anti-abortion protestors. They carry around those signs with babies on them in an attempt to shock us into political submission, and they do it on major street corners, because God-for-fucking-bid that I be allowed to drive to work without being confronted with somebody else’s political crusade. I think it would be fun to make a sandwich board that says, “These people oppose contraception.” Nothing for me clarifies better the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement than the morons who believe that contraception is bad. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will lead to fewer abortions than the correct use of contraception. I imagine that my sign board would actually mean something, that people driving by would say, “God, these people are idiots.” I don’t have the time, or the inclination, to actually do such things. So it remains my little dream, a fun little fantasy.

And so it goes that I find myself standing outside of the Libertarian headquarters shaking my fist like an old man telling those damned kids to get off my lawn. It probably doesn’t make for radically interesting reading, but dammit, I’ve got to be me.