07:25 – Amendment One passed 61% to 39%. Barbara said this morning that she’s about to give up on voting. What’s the point, she asks, when a contemptible measure like Amendment One can be not just passed but passed by a landslide? The Southern Baptists are very proud of themselves. Bastards.
Although this was referred to as the “Gay Marriage” amendment, it’s much more than that. Gay marriage was already illegal in North Carolina, more’s the pity. This amendment forbids the North Carolina government from recognizing any relationship other than a marriage between one man and one woman, including civil unions and domestic partnerships. So now the state of North Carolina is officially opposed not just to human decency, but to the US Constitution as well. Expect a series of expensive, drawn-out legal challenges, ultimately concluding with the repeal of this obnoxious, evil, and unenforceable Amendment. All thanks to religious nutters and their insistence on forcing their twisted beliefs on everyone else. Bastards.
I see only two solutions to the problem of immoral and illegal interference in others’ lives.
The far more preferable solution is to simply kill everyone who shows an inclination to butt in when it’s none of their business. While I have no moral problem with this, there are practical difficulties because the buttinskies, nanny staters, and it’s-for-your-own-gooders seem to be about 90% of the human population.
The other solution is to penalize those who create illegal laws. The template is what the state of Florida did regarding gun laws: fines for individuals in local governments who make laws in opposition to the state laws. You could hear the screeches of outrage from the local mandarins but, you know what? It worked. It’s one thing when the mayor and town council are risking taxpayer money. It’s another when they’re being hit in their own pockets.
So Barbara approves gay marriage. I assume she also supports plural marriage. What would happen to you if you (legally) brought home a second, third or fourth wife? I’m sure you’d wake one morning with a knife in your ribs.
As for voting, yah. I’ve given up on it. Even if you ignore the fools, well-meaning and otherwise, whose votes count more than mine because there are so damned many of them, there’s the manipulation by the ruling class: School and county budgets which are submitted and rejected, then put up for re-vote after re-vote until the mandarins get the result they want; that is the only vote which counts. Games played with the candidacy process and the primary elections so that those who might shake up the system are kept off the ballot. Unannounced “public” meetings, concealed budgets, and lawmaking delegated to unelected bureaucrats. To hell with them all.
We’re still in that awkward stage, but I’m making a list, checking it twice, and keeping sharp my good long knives.
Miles_Teg, if, hypothetically, New York State (where, for my sins, I live) approved gay, plural, and other forms of marriage, it would not be the State’s business whom I married. (If it’s their concern at all, which I do not stipulate.) It would be the business of any current spouses I had.
It would be like bringing a dog home. Aside from perhaps a small license fee, it wouldn’t be the state’s business whether RBT or I get a dog, but our wives would certainly be interested parties and it would be foolish to bring home a dog as a surprise.
Exactly.
It is no one’s business other than the individuals involved how adults associate. I support bans on adults having sexual relationships with pre-pubescent children, but that’s my limit. If a 14-year-old girl wants to marry a guy my age or a 14-year-old boy wants to marry a woman my age, that’s no one’s business except the two of them.
Nor is this theoretical on my part. Back in the late 70’s, the woman I was living with announced that she wanted to keep me but that she also wanted to be sexually involved with my best friend. I told her that was fine with me, which it was. But my friend, who would have liked to have a sexual relationship with her, absolutely freaked at the idea. So nothing ever came of it. Actually, forced to decide, Debbie finally chose Dave, which I accepted. They ended up getting married. She died very young of ovarian cancer. I still grieve.
As I’ve said, I’d like to get the state out of the marriage business. Whether the rest of you liberals like it or not, I don’t approve of gay or plural marriage. If people come to a private arrangement that’s there business, but I don’t want the state endorsing it, because I am part of the state. Just as Robert wouldn’t like to see degree mills or creationist colleges awarding PhDs in the sciences and having them recognised by the state, I don’t want these types of marriages recognised. If it wasn’t regulated by the state then it wouldn’t really matter.
Steve, if you don’t vote you can’t complain. Period.
that’s *there business
their.
Oh, bullshit. Period.
Well, obviously you can still complain, but you shouldn’t. Now who are you going to complain to? The man you didn’t vote for? What’s he going to do for you, and why?
Vote early.
Vote often.
I’ve been trying to find out how many eligible and/or registered voters there are in NC. Information that is decidedly difficult to decipher. According to balletpedia.org 2,135,740 people voted. Given a population of 9.5 million, with 25% of the population underage to vote, that leaves 7.2 million potential voters. A smaller number will be the actual number, and that’s where I’m stuck. NC has less than 150,000 prison inmates and probationers whom I expect aren’t eligible to vote, but how many others? Not that it really matters, according to Wikipedia, almost 38% of NC identifies themselves as Baptist. It sounds to me like the majority of people who voted were Baptists.
This is the major problem with democracy, and one that many people don’t seem to understand. I don’t necessarily want the majority of people to have their way. Many of those people are out and out assholes!
Vote early.
Vote often.
Well, that’s a problem. People today regard democracy as the ultimate form of government. As probably everyone on this board realizes, pure democracy is a dictatorship of the masses.
Most people (and I count myself in this group as well) simply do not know enough about many issues to offer an intelligent opinion. Many of them cannot be bothered to even try to educate themselves about the issues. Voila: amendment 1.
Well, one rule of thumb that works for me is if the law submitted for voting bans freedoms, it’s flat out wrong, and if the law promotes more freedom, it’s less wrong.
And people wonder why I’m an anarchist.
I’d be delighted if government, all government, disappeared immediately.
If you want to compel someone, do it yourself. Don’t abdicate personal responsibility. If someone, like a child rapist, needs killing, kill him yourself. Don’t look to the “authorities” to do it for you.
I remain unconvinced that anarchy is the way to enlightenment. There just isn’t enough intelligent people to resist the more primal urges. If someone, like a fanatic Baptist, decides that being an unbeliever is worthy of killing, where does it end? Gunfights in the street? It certainly wouldn’t be the America the Founding Fathers considered.
Ah, the old argument about how none of us have shoes because the government doesn’t provide them. In an anarchist society, natural selection operates efficiently to eliminate those who insist on inserting their noses into other people’s business. And I’d much rather have an occasional gunfight in the street than what we have now, let alone what we’ll have increasingly more of.
Ultimately, most people are pretty reasonable, particularly when there is a high cost to being unreasonable. Bury the unreasonable ones with the epitaph, “He should have minded his own business”
The problem with all these new definitions of what a marriage is, is that legally marriage has certain rights for the individuals involved. Serious rights. Like medical and life insurance, medical decisions, tax benefits, retirement payments, etc. If we decide to change what marriage means then we probably need to examine all of these rights. We cannot just Cart Blanche change something and expect everything to fall in place without social upheaval. And lots of legal action. You may not like the results of the court actions as things that are now defaults become optional.
And, once gay marriage is settled, polygamy is next. Heinlein pushed polygamy in his books with stable results. I’m not sure that polygamy works that well from the recent problems that we have had with it here in Texas. Those societies have tended to marry the young girls to the elders and throw out the young men once they hit 16 or so.
I don’t support gay, plural, inanimate or any other form of marriage. I think it is wrong. I don’t support abortion as I think it is wrong. That is my opinion and I am entitled to that opinion.
What I am not entitled to is telling someone else to conform to my beliefs or opinion. As was mentioned early by a wise sage, anytime you pass a law restricting the freedoms of others by imposing your beliefs or moral values it is a bad law.
The state should not restrict offbeat marriages. I may not like it but tough shit. How people decide on a partner is their business and is really not a concern of mine as it does not affect me.
If I had gone to the polls and voted I would have voted against the amendment even though I don’t support such abstract unions. It is wrong to restrict personal freedoms and choices.
North Carolina, where it is legal to marry your cousin but not your gay cousin.
Every society that has polygamy as a norm has ended up treating women as property. And most end up attacking their neighbors for women. I don’t know of any that had polyandry as a norm. Maybe China will end up that way in a while. Or decide to get wives from the neighbors.
Until recently, nearly every society has treated women as property, full stop.
But again, no one is suggesting that anyone be forced to marry someone of the same sex, or to marry multiple someones. What consenting adults choose to do among themselves is none of anyone’s business, period.
As to the government benefits associated with marriage, the simple answer is that there shouldn’t be any. The marital status or lack thereof isn’t something the government should even keep track of, let alone discriminate in favor of or against.
Let the free market take care of everything. If one insurance company insists that only grouping eligible for their insurance covered is one man + one woman, fine. I promise you that there’ll be plenty of other companies that don’t discriminate. Same thing on survivorship benefits, hospital visitation rights, and so on. Simply filing a signed document with the register or deeds or whatever should suffice to grant someone full spousal rights.
Every society which widely practices polygyny has ended up with problems. The natural supply of men and women is about the same in our species, so you have to kill off many of the men, force them to do without women, or export your problems.
From what I understand (and I’m no expert, so I could be generalizing from cherry-picked data) societies which practiced a more open-ended partnership and family relationship tended to be more peaceable than the polygynous or one-man-one-woman societies. We don’t see many of them today because they were destroyed by their more aggressive neighbors. Now, between polyamorism and peacableness, which was the chicken and which was the egg I couldn’t tell you.
But… but… That way lies anarchy!
I’m not sure whether to call myself an anarchist or not. Yes, because I will not willingly accept societal constraints on my activities and never try to force others to live by my standards. No, because I realize that most people are stupid and lazy and cowardly and weak and have no desire for self-responsibility and therefore an anarchic society will quickly devolve to a feudal society. I think I’d rather have the modern US mess than that, though sometimes I’m not so sure.
Well, by definition an anarchist society is merit-based.
Ahhh, anarchism rears its ugly head again. Anarchist societies have worked where? Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War? Yeah, they liked trashing churches so In suppose some people here would like that. If anarchism is such a good idea why don’t we have anarchist “governments” anywhere? How long would the US have lasted during the Cold War with no government?
As I am a paleoconservative and traditionalist Roman Catholic with a distinct preference for the Latin Rite, one might imagine what I support and what do not support fairly easily. But I also have a little libertarian streak that tells me the State has no business whatsoever to do with marriage and should not be licensing us like livestock. But then again, as Lynn mentioned, we can throw out ten-thousand years of accepted marriage practice, however much a tiny minority may find it hideously objectionable and a terrible atrocity, and throw the gates wide open to gay marriage, marriage with children, marriage with animals, marriage with plants and other inanimate objects, and whatever weird and wacky shit human beings can possibly come up with. But as Lynn also says, we can then no doubt expect massive social upheaval and a total shit-storm of legal activity, which I would think is something not many here would wanna encourage.
A couple adult males wanna marry each other, or adult females, fine, have at it, but keep the State out of it and let them do it by some other means, church, mosque, synagogue, coven, or the local shaman. Work out the legal and insurance angles so nobody gets messed over, although we can see how well that works currently in straight marriage divorce cases, can’t we? I think it’s wrong and contra natura, but hey, tough shit, I guess. And none too fond of the idea of polygamy and old bulls conducting panty raids on teenage girls.
The other consideration here is that to me it is clearly the camel’s nose poking under the tent, the give-’em-an-inch-and-they’ll-take-a-mile thing. The radical activists did not stop with civil unions here in Vermont and I knew full well they wouldn’t. Then it had to be gay marriage in toto. Next up: whatever their twisted little brains can screw together. Get the population accustomed to an outrage (and this is so true in so many other areas these last hundred years) and you can incrementally push and push and push, until in the end, you have Hell on earth.
What is our big prize now in human affairs here in the West since the Glorious Sixties and the wonderful Sexual Revolution? Someone be sure to clue me, OK? Because all I see is mass destruction of marriages and families, tens of millions of aborted babies, a sick and twisted kultur that celebrates and glorifies every possible form of violence and perversion through increasingly sophisticated and ominpresent media. And several generations of kids now dumb as fence posts but breeding like mink. Like the two that just creamed themselves all over the landscape up here in a head-on collision with a truck towing a trailer and motorcycle, neither wearing seat belts, the male biped with a suspended license and cast on his right foot. And their baby (needless to mention but they weren’t married, how wonderful, isn’t it?) was not strapped in properly in the car seat. That baby was doomed one way or the other; be aborted or given birth to a couple of bonafide cretins.
As someone has said here before….what a country!
OFD wrote:
“As I am a paleoconservative and traditionalist Roman Catholic with a distinct preference for the Latin Rite…”
is that where the priest conducts the service in a language 99.9% of the population don’t understand?
Our relationship laws are totally screwed up right now. I have people working for me just to get health insurance. And here in Texas, if you get divorced and do not have job then you lose your health insurance as many, many stay at home moms have found out. The kids stay on the working parent’s health insurance but the non-working spouse gets dropped off all the insurance. Usually the day that the divorce is final.
I predict that with time, all of this stuff will NOT get sorted out and will get worse with all of the new relationship models, legal or not. This is what is pushing the USA towards a single payer health plan. If if you think the federal government cannot screw up a single payer health plan, go look at the VA. My son is a honorably discharged combat veteran going to school on the GI bill and they screw up his paperwork every semester (he has been out of the USMC for 3 years now). The GI bill is an awesome deal if you can get the VA to pay. They just coughed up his tuition and living expenses for this semester in April. Since the University would not wait, I had to help him pay his tuition and mortgage payments back in Jan.
Just wait until the VA runs the entire health care system in the USA. I predict awesome screw-ups, over payments, under payments and no payments. It will be fine if you stagger into an emergency room with stage 4 cancer or a heart attack. Anything else will need to go through a six to twelve month triage. If you survive that time period, you may get authorized for treatment. I also predict massive fraud of the system that makes today’s fraud look like a walk in the park. See the WSJ for income tax fraud: ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577309854181227634.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection#printMode ).
I agree that the state should get out of marriage — and everything else, for that matter. Still, that’s not going to happen soon; so I have to support gay marriage.
In response to the conservative arguments about unforeseen social consequences, I suggest those same conservatives look around them. Just in the past century, and limiting our view to the West, we see that culture and life have changed radically. More than once. In many, many aspects. In the face of this, worrying about the potential consequences of gay marriage is ludicrously out of proportion.
Granted, eristicist, gay marriage is not anywhere near the top of my bucket list of things that need worrying about. But as might be surmised from my post above, I tend to classify it as a minor key in the larger postmodern symphony of decadence and despair that is the hallmark of the West since Rousseau, Marx, and the last terrible century.
“…go look at the VA. My son is a honorably discharged combat veteran going to school on the GI bill and they screw up his paperwork every semester (he has been out of the USMC for 3 years now). The GI bill is an awesome deal if you can get the VA to pay. They just coughed up his tuition and living expenses for this semester in April. Since the University would not wait, I had to help him pay his tuition and mortgage payments back in Jan….”
I have to laugh, and it is a nasty laugh, believe me. Not at you or your son, of course. This shit was going on and done to me and my fellow honorably discharged combat vets forty years ago. The exact same shit, too, lost and fucked-up paperwork EVERY semester, missing tuition payments and monthly stipends, and, to top it off, to put the frosting on the cake, I happened to be in the hallway one day outside the bursar’s office and overhead two old biddies yakking about what a shame it was that the veterans these days can’t seem to finish their college and keep dropping out. I felt like tossing a hand grenade in there, ya know, bring the war home.
Many of us, if not most of us, really counted on those monthly payments to meet living expenses, as well as pay for tuition and books. And I was going to a state college to save money. The buggers never paid us on time, never. Months and months with nothing, until I, and most of the others, had no choice but to drop out and go to work full-time at whatever shit jobs we could find in a Massachusetts at the time suffering from ‘official’ 15% unemployment. My first job back, after only a couple months previously serving as a gunner on choppers and Spooky gunships blowing away commie rats, was rolling up and hauling out Oriental rugs to the vast parking lots for middle-class shoppers at Jordan Marsh, Shopper’s World, Framingham, MA, long gone now.
Tell your son we are extremely proud of his service and happy beyond words to have him back home in one piece, hopefully. Tell him also to hang in there; it may take a while and be a total pain in the ass, but getting educated after time working for Uncle is a huge deal. In the end, I dropped out, and went to school part-time, full-time, whatever I could do for a long time, and it was a total of fourteen years before I finally got my BA in English Literature. But I went on to grad school (a joke, a very bad joke) and now I horse around with IT hw and sw for a gigantic corporation and am more or less in pretty good shape.
Yeah, Greg, none of the parishioners know a word of Latin, and they get really upset about it. Also that son-of-a-bitch priest with his back to them, muttering all those magical incantations to Whoever. It so happens that the current Missal (and most older ones) has the Latin and English on facing pages, and there is not so much of it that the cretinous and credulous papists can’t grasp a teeny bit of it. It ain’t Cicero or Catullus.
Miles_Teg says (9 May 2012 at 17:35) :
“If anarchism is such a good idea why don’t we have anarchist “governments” anywhere?”
Well, Greg, regretfully I have to point out that WE (you and I) do in fact have a form of Anarchist government. The so-called “Green” party is in fact the old Marxist-Anarchist party, flying under false colours to rake in votes from today’s youth who have been left uneducated by systems dominated by Communist intellectuals. (And yes, even your sister must come under their influence). Now, since the “Greens” currently hold a balance of power in the Australian Federal Government, then we do in fact have a (Marxist-)Anarchist government. And it don’t work well, as I’m sure you, existing as you do even closer to the
arseseat of power than do I, have noticed on occasion.OFD wrote:
“Also that son-of-a-bitch priest with his back to them, muttering all those magical incantations …”
I’ll bet he wears a white dressing gown to work too. Some people have it lucky.
Don, the Greens are a long long way from anarchist. They want to control *everything* about our lives. For our own good, of course.
At he next election I’m putting the Greens last and the ALP second-to-last. And Labor’s heading for a train wreck at the next election. Even though they are being led (for the time being) by the lovely Julia, that won’t save them. They’ll be wiped out, and good riddance as far as I’m concerned.
But the Greens don’t acknowledge any law as applying to themselves, so that’s like being halfway to anarchists, right?
Funny, but no. The Greens don’t apply restrictions they impose on others to themselves.
I’ve told the story before of being on a mini bus returning to work from the blood bank. A chap was sitting nearby who worked for the public service department tasked with servicing the local Canberra parliament (which nobody wanted in the first place.) He said that one of the two Green members of the parliament had chosen the most gas guzzling, highly optioned car available as their taxpayer funded perk.
I’ve always detested the Greens for their crazy policies, but also for their hypocrisy.
Paul Krugman on “The Revolting Europeans”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/opinion/krugman-those-revolting-europeans.html?_r=1
eristicist wrote:
“I agree that the state should get out of marriage — and everything else, for that matter. Still, that’s not going to happen soon; so I have to support gay marriage.”
I take it from this that you’re an anarchist. Since our host can’t or won’t come out of the long grass and explain how an anarchist society would work in practice would you care to explain? I’ve never seen an explanation of how it would work, and I’ve read part of one of Chomsky’s books on the subject – isn’t that guy tedious – and have an anarchist pal who’s never been able to explain it past the theory stage.
[snip] Just wait until the VA runs the entire health care system in the USA. I predict awesome screw-ups, over payments, under payments and no payments. [snip]
Government run health insurance: The cost control of the Pentagon, the clarity of the IRS, and the customer service of the Post Office. What could *possibly* go wrong?
Boy, this guy over-reacted, even by my standards:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-10/man-runs-down-sister-over-urinating-cat/4002708
Our atheist, left-wing prime minister is on the side of the angels, for once:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-10/pm-reacts-to-obamas-support-for-gay-marriage/4003116
Chomsky lives la dolce vita in the tony suburb of Lexington, Maffachufetts, just outside of Boston. Like most librul hypocrites, he lives in style and comfort.
Hi OFD,
Thank you for your service !
I wish that I was surprised to hear how screwed up the VA was 40 years ago. Unfortunately, I have watched my FIL who is a 90% disabled vet deal with them for years. If he has a clear problem such as lung cancer, they had the surgery within two weeks. If he is having breathing problems due to the fact he broke his neck twice in the service, not so much. He built his own breathing machine for night-time when laying flat causes his neck vertebrae to sag and stop sending breathing pulses to his chest.
My son says any organization above 1000 people is a scam (based on his experience in the USMC). He may be correct.
Present company excluded, but much of the rest of the country considers “the south” to be full of ignorant, poor, obese, religious nutters. Amendments like the one NC just passed certainly don’t help the stereotype.
However, the more states that amend their state constitutions to forbid such things the faster it ends up in the US Supreme Court and it’s decided at a federal level that such amendments are unconstitutional. So, all the religious right is doing with amendments like this is accelerating toward a point where gay marriage is chiseled in stone as permissible nationwide. Dumbasses.
Well, the religious right is not known for its collective IQ.
And they’re fighting a losing war. I remember reading a stunning survey a few months ago. The survey was run by a religious right organization, so if anything they probably put the best face on the numbers they could manage. They surveyed a large number of kids from fundie homes, nearly all of whom had presumably grown up being taught that evolution was false and the earth is 6,000 years old. The follow-up was on students who’d attended normal universities rather than religious-right “colleges”. The seniors and recent graduates they surveyed had, in large numbers, abandoned their beliefs in the fundie teachings. What was really stunning, though, was that something like 70% of these students had left their churches. Many of the students commented that they’d been lied to constantly but that those lies couldn’t stand up to the truth. So fundies are faced with a choice of not sending their kids to colleges and universities that the real world takes seriously versus sending their kids to such places and then watching them abandon their faith.
I’ll dispute why the kids are falling away from the churches but not the fact they have different opinions about gay marriage and such. Many of the “kids” from my church are now going to non-denominational churches (we call them bible churches) . They are very much live and let live and feel that the government should not interfere in people’s lives. Plus it is a different time and many kids nowadays know someone who is openly gay. That has only happened in the last 20 years or so.
BTW, the early Christian church flourished in Rome which had to be one of the most decadent cultures ever. I forget which Christian philosopher who said in the 1600s ??? that he had read several times in the Bible where the church was persecuted but that he had never read in the Bible where the church persecuted someone. Tough words for the church.
I’ve always felt that there’s a large number of people in church every Sunday that are there simply out of familial and peer pressure. I know plenty of guys, for example, that are only in church because their wife wants them there or because their parents expect to see them there every Sunday. Also, it’s not much more than a social club for a lot of people. Churches are full of atheists and agnostics every Sunday. They just haven’t come out of the closet yet. 🙂
I see the same things Lynn does in the contemporary churches, especially the mainstream Protestant ones. They’re either dropping out completely or gravitating toward the Bible churches, some of which are the so-called mega-churches, almost always in the South and West, and sometimes more fundamentalist denominations. As for the Catholic youth, there are two groups that I see: first are the ones, like our son and daughter who were raised in the Faith but not strictly so, and who now have little or no interest in it. That may change as they get older or they may go on to something else, who knows, they’re adults now anyway. The other group is the millions and millions who are deep into the Church and who flock in their hundreds of thousands to every site the Pope visits in the world, and this has been going on since Johannes Paulus Secundus kicked it off bigtime. The present Holy Father is 85 now and shows very little sign of slowing down anytime soon. As an indication of my insanity and refusal to see the clearly obvious light of scientism and positivism, I would have happily fallen on a sword for either one of them. And undoubtedly will for the next one, probably Francis Cardinal Arinze, the first black African pope.
Not sure which Christian philosopher of the 17th-C might have said that about the Bible and church persecutions, but he was most likely one of the Protestants, and as the New Testament writings concerning the early Church only cover up to the Apostles and Epistles, all we have are the stories of the Church itself being persecuted, usually by the Roman Empire. The Church then was in no position to persecute anyone else and barely survived at all. Some might call it miraculous.
“Churches are full of atheists and agnostics every Sunday. They just haven’t come out of the closet yet.”
And the ranks of atheists and agnostics are full of potential believers, some of whom change their tunes on their deathbeds, but many others wake up and fiat lux. There are also, admittedly, hordes of people who are utterly indifferent, and who, as Chad says, show up for other, less supernatural reasons. But God works in mysterious ways…so we shall see. I used to get annoyed seeing the building packed to the rafters only on Christmas and Easter but now I let it slide. Who am I to question any of this?
They’re just hedging their bets. You get to be a certain age and you realize there’s more years behind you than there are ahead of you and figure you better start going to church. If you believe in God and there is no God, then no big deal. However, if you do not believe in God and there is a God, then that’s eternal damnation. So, best to play it safe and slap a fish emblem on the back of your car and start showing up to church every Sunday.
Pascal’s Wager? Anyone who buys that doesn’t understand basic reasoning.
Practically the entirety of the species, in other words.
Well now boyz, I guess I been hedging my bets, so to speak, since I was five years old.
But you won’t see a fish emblem on our vehicles. And we seem to miss more masses than we go to lately. (the music sucks rocks most of the time, yeah I know, we ain’t sposed to go for the music…) (and I weary of seeing the usual assortment of disrespectful cretins and their sluts dressed like shit and talking and giggling, among other distractions…)
And the species has lasted a pretty long time now without necessarily developing the pristine reasoning capability of the average libertarian genius scientist. Just sayin.
I absolutely, positively do not believe in that bullshit that because you don’t vote, you have no right to complain. First of all, the US election just past was a primary election. For those not familiar, that means you must declare your party, and vote only among those competing for the same office within that party. Since there were no contests in the Libertarian party in my voting precinct, there were no choices for me to make.
Secondly, the US DOES have a free speech clause in the Constitution. It comes with no prerequisite requirements. I do not have to conform to ANY political necessity for the right to complain. I do NOT have to vote to complain, and I DO have the inalienable right to complain.
But, for those of you who believe everything they told you in Civics class–that everyone should study the issues, come to a reasoned decision, and vote for those consistent with that studied and reasoned decision–you will be glad to know that I often do that. I am a strong proponent for term limits and rotation in office. Ever since I returned from Germany, in the general elections, I almost always vote against the incumbent. It is my reasoned and studied way of trying to force term limits and rotation in office on the electoral process.
Marriage springs from religious concepts. It should not be a legal one and has no place or necessity in government nor should government have a thing to do with it. If you are religious and because of that, believe it is wrong for gays to love each other and live together, or for polygamists to associate according to their own wishes, then practice that among your church brethren and associate with whom you like. But there should be no reason for government to approve, disapprove, license, subsidize or legitimatize any type of human association for living whatever—nor should there be any discrimination whatever by government over what living arrangements individuals choose to adopt. And churches should not be able to initiate, lobby, or pass governmental laws promoting or restricting any type of association that two humans desire. That should be up to the individuals involved, be they believers or not.
Chuck, perhaps you misunderstood. You have a right to complain, but if you haven’t voted you have a right to be ignored.
In 1990 I was in London visiting friends, the wife told me of a woman who had been dragged from a local Tube station and raped. She had resisted but had not cried for help in any way at all, so people ignored her, rightly or wrongly. My friend was scathing about this woman, although she had every right not to be assaulted, abducted and raped. She should have done everything in her power to avoid being dragged off, but she didn’t. I won’t say she got what she deserved, but I think she was most unwise.
I feel the same way about people who don’t vote, and then complain, just as I find it hard to take seriously erstwhile Republicans who voted for Obama because they didn’t like Palin.
Fortunately we didn’t have civics classes in Australia back in the stone age when I was in school. In Year 12, when I did American History, our text book was half civics/half history. It was so bad I bought The National Experience by John Blum, et al. Incomparably better, despite the left wing slant.
Chuck wrote:
“Marriage springs from religious concepts.”
This is simply wrong. Marriage has everything to do with controlling people and preserving family wealth and property. The religious angle was tacked on much later.
I’ll remind y’all, once again, of how my sagacious anthropology lecturer summed up his full year first year course:
“It’s all about control.”
(Not controlling people so they don’t enter a same sex or plural marriage, but so that the family wealth, farm, etc is preserved in socially acceptable ways.) Just a short sentence but he really did sum up how society works.
Well, as I said earlier I wish the state would get out of the marriage business. I don’t like same sex or plural marriage but if the state didn’t regulate and recognise it I’d be happy to keep my nose out of other people’s business.
Now, suppose I bought a PhD in organic chemistry from a degree mill, based on my “life experience” and a cursory knowledge of first year organic chem. The state recognised the degree mill and insisted that people call me doctor and take me seriously when I made pronouncements about the subject. I’m sure most people here wouldn’t like that a bit, and would refuse to call me doctor, especially the ones who had earned advanced science degrees. I feel the same way about marriage. If the state doesn’t recognise it, on my behalf because I am part of the state, it wouldn’t matter to me.
Miles_Teg says:
Chuck, perhaps you misunderstood. You have a right to complain, but if you haven’t voted you have a right to be ignored.
Oh, come on. Voting does not give anyone a special place in life to be recognized over those who do not vote. No one in US society even knows who voted and who did not! People are ignored primarily because others disdain them and/or their viewpoints, not because they did not vote.
“Marriage springs from religious concepts.”
This is simply wrong. Marriage has everything to do with controlling people and preserving family wealth and property. The religious angle was tacked on much later.
No—that is simply not right. Women have been considered the property of men—first the father, then the husband—since earliest civilization, and is even today the case in many parts of the world. An ‘institution’ of ‘marriage’ was promulgated by religion, when that fiction arose. And its recognition by law was—at first—only to protect and confirm the wife as a special form of chattel. My gawd, it has only been in my lifetime that divorce without cause—with the ability to be initiated by women—has even been possible. Unfortunately, that chattel view is still at the heart of a great many religions. A state of “marriage” came from religion; not the other way around.
I find these conversations about what lays ahead after death, more and more fantastical as time goes on. There is no one—not an individual, not a clergyman, no ‘prophet’, no ‘christ’, no book author, no book, no religion, no faith—that can tell with authority and conclusiveness, or—most importantly—with any shred of proof, what exists beyond death.
It is just as reasonable to assert that if a god exists, he created the story of a Jewish prophet laying down rules and a Christly ‘son’ updating those rules, as a diversion to test one’s fidelity to their own conscience and reasoning derived from him. If you abandon your own ability to reason with the information life presents to you and fall for the fiction, then you fail! Everyone believing in religion as presented by Jew, Christian, the Bible, Muslim, or the Koran, heads straight to damnation for not having followed their own ‘god-given’ conscience and convictions.
In fact, to me that is more likely the actuality, based on the sayings of these supposedly ‘especially endowed’ people. They present god as all-powerful and all-intelligent. Were that so, god could just as easily speak to each of us, as to a few individuals through a murky ill-recorded multi-interpreted history; and were he all-intelligent, he would know such direct contact would be less likely mistaken than the officious babblings of these historical lunatics. Religion itself is then the devil.
Chuck wrote:
‘A state of “marriage” came from religion; not the other way around.’
Afraid not, Chuck. Religion goes by the wayside when family wealth, property and status is involved. It really is “all about control.”
Hey, wait a minute. *I* bought my Ph.D. *and* my MD from diploma mills. Why shouldn’t they count?
Read up Greg. Civil traditions to protect property (the wife) existed long before marriage; but sanctifying it as a moral mandate called “marriage” came from the church. In fact, there was no necessity to protect property and wealth, because—until the 20th century,—in virtually all societies, property and wealth including the wife, belonged solely to the male, and women were often impoverished by the death of their mate, when all his property passed to other male members of the family and not to her.
Chuck, when I spoke of protecting the family property I wasn’t especially talking about the woman’s property, just the family’s. And women have had significant input to how family property was used. For example, correspondence exists for a circa C13 family called the Plaxtons, in Norfolk, England I think. The wife had significant power and bought and sold property in her husband’s absence, and exchanged correspondence with him about what she/they were doing/should do. She was “chattel” but had *real* power and a great deal of latitude. And even though various religions hated each other back then they could still come to mixed religion marriage agreements.
As to all property belonging to the male, I think you should look up the word “dowry” in a good dictionary. I agree that women weren’t well treated back then but they did have significant protections, and not just in western societies. Rules regarding marriage *had* to be codified because it was necessary to protect the legitimacy of the family line and keeping the extended family’s property from being used/split up in destructive ways.
Greg, you mean the Paston Family letters, from, yes, Norfolk, England. I did a paper on them during my MA studies at Clark U., in Worcester, MA over twenty years ago. Fascinating stuff, and yes, Margaret ran the whole shebang while hubby was in London on business and also held the place during the incessant wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paston_Letters
A late question for all those who want government out of marriage and have the philosophy “It should not be a legal one and has no place or necessity in government nor should government have a thing to do with it.”
Why did you get “married” in the first place? Shouldn’t you just have lived together and had an agreed upon legal document for when you separated? No spouse support, palimony, etc., just agreed upon terms.
I’m “legally” married. The ceremony of commitment is what is important to me, not the legal aspect, but the wife and I still did the legal thing. A judge married us to it was all done at the same time. He even played the wedding march. lol
My ex-wife and I were married by a JP and that was it; she is a non-practicing Jew/agnostic and I was an Episcopalian/Anglican. Mrs. OFD and I were also married by a JP initially, both of us Roman Catholic. Two years later, after going through our parish priest, the diocese and the bishop, and finally receiving the written, signed blessing of His Holiness Johannes Paulus Secundus, we were married in the Catholic Church. In both marriages my ex-wife and I, and Mrs. OFD and I, suffered the indignity of having to go down and pay money to the city clerk to receive a license to get married from Our Nanny the Almighty State.
We wanted to be married in the Church; if we were secular agnostics or atheists or simply didn’t care, we would probably just live together and make sure our medical and legal affairs were in order accordingly. But no damn license.
No wedding march, either, but at our JP wedding one of Mrs. OFD’s cousins sang and played the organ. Then we went off to a reception at a local ski resort/inn and they all partied their asses off and I went to bed and slept *my* ass off. 1998. Now we grandparents. Tempus fugit.
Mr Atoz, my wife and I were married for similar reasons. A formal declaration that we were together and naturally the ample tax benefits 🙂 were all we wanted out of the ceremony. In order to keep peace with the older members of both families, we chose to have it in a United Church, since they let pretty much anyone join, but a civil ceremony with a JP (march playing or not) would have served as well for the two of us.
I also don’t have a problem with making sure that close family members aren’t getting married, but other than that the state or church has no business in the decision about WHOM I would marry.
OFD wrote:
“Greg, you mean the Paston Family letters…”
I would have sworn the family name was Paxton. Well as our host says: “Getting old is hell.”
Two of the most wonderful courses I’ve ever done at tertiary level were run by a chap called Dr John Tillotson at the ANU in Canberra: “The Medieval Church” (in 1987) and “The Decline of the Middle Ages: England 1300-1485”. It was in the second course in which the Paston correspondence was mentioned.
I’m not married, unfortunately. As an old (54 year old last Thursday) codger I wish I’d taken the opportunities I’ve had to get hitched.
Mostly, I think, it’s the women who want the elaborate wedding. I would have been happy to elope. I have no objection to having a small legal requirement, say a “registration of domestic partnership”, that would be between any number of H. Sapiens (16 years old and over), cats, dogs, horses, grizzly bears, kangaroos, etc. Since it wouldn’t be called marriage it wouldn’t matter. There could be a religious or non-religious ceremony associated with it, complete with nude dancing girls, pot, ice, flogging of heretics, virgin sacrifices, even atheist-heretic-anarch-libertarian sacrifices. (My preferred option.)
I was married the first time because I did not then know better. Actually, in Hoosierland, where it occurred, live together, have a kid, and 6 years later you are automatically married by law, so your child does not enter school without legal parents. The flip side to that—which most married folk under common-law do not realize—is that in most states you must get a legal divorce from the common-law marriage. Anyway, whether we got married or not, would have made no difference, as we would automatically have been married not long afterwards.
Second time I got legally married at my S.O.’s request. Good thing I did, because I would not have been eligible for her SS death benefits, had I not gotten married (the marriage certificate was a crucial piece of information required by the SSA).. That is EXACTLY the thing I object to with the state requiring marriage or else punishing the parties.
for your amusement:
http://sarahbear9789.tumblr.com/post/22872453351/religiousragings-what-is-that-dark-area
Oh, as far as “marriage” signifying some kind of commitment, that’s a bunch of malarkey. It no more signifies or guarantees a commitment than a bicycle guarantees you can ride it. After standing in front of 1,200 people and swearing ’till death do us part’, my ex ejected from the marriage for someone else in not much more than a decade. Commitment is defined by daily deeds, not by saying words in a church or signing a government document.
Second time, the only attendees who heard the sworn statements were our offspring and the minister. That one lasted far longer than the first, and death did us part.
Jeeze Chuck, you’re too young to be so cynical.
My marriage vows lasted 25 years and ended only with Anne’s passing. YMMV.
Which, if I may point out, is the only rule that applies to life. Your Mileage May Vary should be embroidered on every pillow. Perhaps the “99%” could take note?
I’m not cynical; I’m a realist. And as you note, real varies.
Somehow I read the total time wrong and started a movie that I thought would be over an hour ago. An old college friend sent a list of movies that have to do with radio broadcasting, so I have been working my way through the ones I can get my hands on. Don’t bother with “The Boat That Rocked”. It is supposed to be loosely based on the 1960’s pirate radio stations off the coast of England. Loose is the word. There is an occasional funny joke, but not much more. Have to finish it another time. It is not keeping me awake.
Chuck, I think you should re-watch Sirens. If that doesn’t keep you up, in more ways than one, nothing will… 🙂
I totally rocked the “The Boat That Rocked” which I saw as “Pirate Radio”, but then I wasn’t expecting much from it. I expected some really good tunes, and it had that. I figured Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be interesting to watch at the very least, and they were. IMDB has it listed a 7.4 out of 10, and that’s pretty darn good these days.
Not enough real radio stuff in it for me—aside from the fact they never play more than 10 seconds of any song, and mix music from years in a way nobody did back then (there was enough new good stuff coming out that it was the ’80’s before oldies stations took hold—and now most of them have died out). There is nothing historical, no plot, and very poor dialog for a British production.
I am not a fan of Branagh’s. His version of Hamlet was a complete abortion, IMO. I love Jack Lemmon, but he was unexpectedly awful in that never-ending movie.