Civil unions and gay marriage

In the state of Maryland, where I live, both the Governor, Martin O'Malley, and the speaker of the House of Delegates, Michael Busch, have come out in favor of civil unions, so I think that Maryland will join Vermont and Connecticut. And though I generally do not like anything associated with O'Malley, I think he is probably right. Civil unions are the best compromise between the religious right (who want to preserve "traditional marriage") and the gay friendly part of the public (who want equal rights).

Frankly, I see no harm in gay marriage. I cannot see how it even affects the people who are so opposed to it; if same-sex couples can get married, it certainly doesn't prevent opposite-sex couples from doing so. But if some people object to it being called a "marriage," then certainly giving them all the rights of a married couple without the word seems a good compromise.

Of course, the problem is that some people are (based on religious background) simply opposed to homosexuality. You can't show me anything that is not based on religion, and in fact on a specific religious belief, that makes homosexuality per se undesirable. And because we have a Constitution that forbids an "establishment of religion," no religious argument can hold water as a basis for our law.

So for once, I think O'Malley is right.

Politics at its worst

The Democrats have insisted on including a hate-crimes provision in a defense authorization bill. This is one of the worst examples of Congress trying to engineer legislation, not to make it conducive to accomplishing something good, but to try to embarrass the President. Either he signs it and puts into law something he feels is a bad provision (I might actually favor it, but it still doesn't have anything to do with defense funding, and many of the President's allies certainly don't) or he vetoes it and risks not having the military properly funded.

This is the sort of political behavior that gives politics a bad name.

Undeserved criticism

Yesterday's Washington Post contains an article by Jonathan Capehart taking all the Republican candidates to task, but particularly Rudy Giuliani, for not being willing to publicly discuss gay issues with him. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/30/AR2007093001043.html )

Why should Giuliani, at this moment, call attention to the fact that he's been more gay-friendly than most Republicans? At least he hasn't reversed himself like Mitt Romney. But he's trying to get votes from Republicans who are not as tolerant as he. He's going to scare them off if he does what Capehart wants, without winning over enough gay Republicans (how many gay Republicans who will be eligible to vote in a GOP primary are there?)

Capehart shouldn't be criticizing Giuliani -- before Giuliani can do anything helpful to gay causes, he needs to get nominated, and elected. He should be working to help the only possible nominee who might be favorable to the causes he espouses get nominated.

How great is the Canadian style health plan?

Obviously, not very. I just read today that Belinda Stronach came to the United States for medical treatment. (many sources; here is one: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070914/belinda_Stronach_070914/20070914?hub=Canada ) Now you may ask, who is Belinda Stronach? She's a Canadian member of Parliament and former Cabinet member. And she came to the US because the medical care is better!

People who say we ought to emulate the Canadian "single payer" plan want us to imitate a system that is so bad that top government officials admit we have better medical care than they do? Really!

The Mukasey nomination

Looks as if some extremists on the right want to block the accession of Judge Mukasey to the attorney general's post. It always puzzles me why some people, supposedly on the President's side, insist that if he nominates someone who might get some votes from the liberal Democrats on the Senate, he's selling out. (Harriet Miers was another case in point!) In Miers' case, they managed to succeed, getting an Alito in her place, but at the cost of heightening the tension between the Senate and the White House. I just wonder whether the extremists would rather have a fight than getting someone who they can work with into office without the acrimony of a confirmation hearing.

On the other hand, there are some Senate Dems who have no reason to oppose Mukasey, but want to pick a fight, so I've seen the word that they might just use the confirmation hearing to raise -- once more -- the issue of trying to get information that the White House deems to be covered by executive privilege. Just goes to show that both left and right in Washington, these days, seem more interested in making points than in making government work. No wonder the public approval of our governmental institutions is at an all-time low!

The parties on Iraq

It seems that each party has solidified its position on Iraq. Democrats think it's already lost; so they feel all we can do is get out as soon as possible. Republicans realize that it's going to be a long haul, so they are backing the generals: even such dovish Republicans as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has said this.

I'm with the Republicans, naturally.

Did we really need a report?

The Petraeus/Crocker report is in, and as expected, it reported some progress but not total victory. Except for the details, this could have been predicted when Gen. Petraeus was told to poduce a report. And the Congressmen who have been opposed to the Iraq war have used the report to proclaim that everything is a failure (since we have made only a little bit of progress, and not won it outright!) while those who have supported the war have used the report to support the current efforts (because progress is shown). Both these reactions could also have been predicted. In other words, the report really changed nobody's mind, and it was always the case that nobody could expect otherwise. Was this report necessary? I think not.

On gun control, continued

Yesterday's post dealt with the right of governments like D. C.'s to pass gun control legislation. Today's deals with the desirability of such legisltion. For it's certainly constitutional to pass a lot of laws that make no sense, and many gun nuts attack gun-control laws on various grounds purporting to show that they are undesirable. On the other hand, I feel that we need gun control, probably stricter controls than anything on the books now, but certainly not the lax laws in, say, Virginia.

1. First we have the "If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" argument. When I first saw this one, I was inclined to simply dismiss it, saying, "Of course. They'll be outlaws because they have guns." But of course, what they mean, and I do need to address the point, is that criminals will find it easy to get guns and circumvent any laws. My position is that criminals can get guns by one of two means: by buying them and by stealing them. If guns are not available to the public, but are only sold directly by the manufacturer to police departments and the Army (or other branches of the military), then criminals cannot pretend to be legitimate purchasers and buy firearms. And if there are no privately-owned guns, who are criminals going to steal them from? Certainly, a police department or military base that is so incompetent that they cannot guard their firearm storeroom against theft has no business existing.
2. Second, we have the "If a criminal attacks us, we need guns for self-defense" argument. I've seen this put forth by people after the Virginia Tech shootings, where they actually claim that the killer would not have been able to take out so many victims if some of the students had been armed. First of all, does anyone really think that college students (known for binge drinking, fraternity hazing, general prank-playing, and the like) could be relied upon to restrict their gun usage to legitimate self-defense? Second of all, how many of them have the knowledge to use a gun properly, and not hit fellow-students or their professor while attempring to shoot at the attacker? Getting away from the college situation, if people have guns lying around their home, do they really have the self-control to make sure that someone is really an intruder before shooting? I shudder to think of a case where someone hears a noise in the house in the middle of the night, gets out his gun, goes to confront the "intruder," and shoots his kid getting in from a late date, or his wife going to the kitchen for a midnight snack. These scenarios are far more likely than the noise being from a real criminal entry.
3. Finally, we have the extreme libertarian argument that "We need to protect ourselves from a government that wants to enslave us, and so we can't rely on the government police to be our servants." I say, if you're really bent on a revolution, no laws enacted by the government matter, so this argument is not worth trying to counter.

I favor freedom, but not anarchy. And I really don't think anyone needs a gun (except if he's in the military or the police).

The challenge to the DC gun-control law

Normally I am of a rather libertarian bent, but I seriously part company with people who are usually allied with me on one issue: gun control. I fail to see any reason why an ordinary law-abiding citizen would have reason to own a gun (and unless he/she was in the army, where they would even have learned to use one!) and so I fail to see any reason to allow anyone privately to own one. (The military and police, of course, need them.)


But before getting into this issue in depth, I want to address the issue that is really at hand: Washington, D. C.'s right to enact its strict gun-control laws. Some people appeal to a misguided reading of the Second Amendment. Let me quote the Second Amendment in its entirety: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Note the first first 13 words. No other freedom guaranteed in our Constitution has a qualifier: not a single one! Obviously this is a clue to the intent of this amendment. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms" is only guaranteed in order to provide for "a well regulated militia" and not for any other purpose. (For more details see http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/secondam.pdf where this is discussed at some length.)

So now we get to people who claim that, under common law, the militia consists of all able-bodied citizens. (Mostly this is to deny that "militia" now means the National Guard.) Well, if you claim to be part of the militia, you are obligated to put yourself under Congressional control. After all, Art. I, Sect. 8, clause 15 states: "[The Congress shall have Power] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions" while clause 16 adds: "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress" -- a pretty clear grant of power to the Congress.

There is no way of getting around this language. If you want to claim that the militia is everyone, then you cannot be armed except by Congressional provision; if you accept, as I do, that the militia is now the organized National Guards, then you do not have "the right ... to keep and bear arms" except if you are a member of the organized Guard. Any other reading of the Second Amendment is a perversion of its intent.

Now the question arises: is the District of Columbia entitled to pass these laws? Obviously, by my reading, a State has the power; the Second Amendment doesn't apply to the states anyway, and the Bill of Rights freedoms only apply to the states because of a judicial reading (probably justified) of the Fourteenth Amendment, but even if you apply the Second Amendment to the States in this way, it still grants "the right ... to keep and bear arms" only to people organized in militias, not to the public at large. But the District is not a state. It therefore gains its powers from Congress, under Article I, Section 8, clause 17, just as any city government gains its powers from the laws of the state in which it is incorporated. And Congress has not challenged that the home-rule charter granted to DC allows it to pass this legislation; it has been on the books for decades.

Arlen Specter and Larry Craig

The news over the weekend was that Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said that Craig shouldn't resign if he thinks he's innocent, but should fight the charges. Specter is a former prosecutor, and his claim that the charges might not stand up comes from a source that ought to know what is, and what isn't, a strong legal case.

And before proceeding in this discussion, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for Sen. Specter. A number of years ago, when he was contemplating a run for the Presidency (which he gave up on because he'd seen the power of the extreme right within the GOP), I was a strong supporter, and even wrote a letter to Specter encouraging him to run and offering to help in any way I could. And Arlen Specter's positions on critical issues are closer to mine than perhaps any other member of the Senate. So any criticim I give to Specter is to be considered as coming from a friendly direction.

But Specter seems not to understand one thing. Larry Craig represents Idaho, a very conservative state. Arlen Specter represents Pennsylvania, a quite liberal state with two cosmopolitan cities in it. Specter doesn't realize that Craig has decided that someone who is suspected to be gay has no chance of winning a high political office in Idaho. On the other hand, in Pennsylvania that would be much less of a problem. And Specter is attuned to Pennsylvania politics, not Idaho.

I just feel that the thing we need to note is that Craig's comment, "I'm not gay and I don't do such things," not just "I didn't do it," shows it's more important for him to come out as not gay than as innocent!

The politics of sex

Larry Craig, a senator from Idaho, recently got arrested in a police sting in a men's restroom and charged with disorderly conduct in a plea bargain. The big headline on the paper I saw this morning was Craig's proclaming he wasn't gay.

That this should matter is really a shame. But Craig is a conservative Republican, and as I mentioned in my Aug. 15 post, some people think that conservatism on some issues means you have to be on all issues, and anti-homosexualism is considered a necessary part of conservatism in many people's eyes. So a liberal like Barney Frank or former governor McGreevey of New Jersey can be gay, but not a conservative senator from Idaho.

That's really stupid. Why a person who is gay can't be a conservative (or vice versa) escapes me. What sexual orientation has to do with economics (or gun control, or almost any other issue in politics) escapes me.

A blog I found

Today I just found http://americasmayor2008.blogspot.com/ (A blog specifically about Giuliani!) While this blog supports him, I don't intend support for Giuliani to be its only raison d'être. But I'll be happy to plug other blogs that I like!

An insoluble problem?

There seems to be a clash of values among our citizens on the illegal immigration issue, which seems beyond reconciliation -- it's almost as bad as the abortion issue, which I am certain is beyond reconciliation.

Some people are so imbued with the spirit of compassion and sanctuary that they even refuse to use the word "illegal" in describing these immigrants, which of course obfuscates the issue, because to fail to distinguish legal from illegal immigration denies the actual existence of what, to their opponents, is the principal issue: people entering this country in violation of our nation's laws. As a result, pro-illegal-immigrant groups can paint their opponents as xenophobic and racist, which is a false characterization for many. (I have no intention of denying that there are some among the anti-illegal-immigrationists who are xenophobic and racist, but certainly many, probably most, are not.)

On the other hand, on the other side are folks who insist that any action short of mass deportation constitutes an amnesty. It offends me to see the McCain-Kennedy bill characterized as an "amnesty" bill, since the illegal immigrants would have to pay penalties before being granted legal status. A true amnesty would mean automatically granting them this status.

Since the positions are so far apart, with the pro-illegal-immigrant groups apparently insisting on nothing short of a true amnesty and the anti-illegal-immigrant groups calling any attempt at compromise an amnesty, I cannot see any solution.

Karl Rove vs. Hillary Clinton

Yesterday Karl Rove was on such interview programs as Meet the Press, and he had a bunch of negative things to say about Hillary Clinton. Some of the news community seemed to wonder whether he was doing that because he wanted to energize the anti-GOP Democrats to vote for her in the primaries, because he (and Republicans generally) thought she would be the easiest Democrat to beat. Others thought he was doing it for exactly the opposite reason: that Republicans were scared of Hillary. I wonder why they didn't just take Rove at his word: he believes she is the person the Democrats will nominate. Given that belief, there is no reason to attack Barack Obama, or any other also-ran Democrat: it will be Hillary that the Republican nominee will have to run against next year, and so it is Hillary that any Republican will have to put in a bad light. (I hope the GOP nominee is Giuliani, of course, but any Republican has to think the same way: it is Hillary who will be the competition in 2008.) I think Rove's action is totally logical.

Academic freedom and political correctness

Today I read something in the paper that made my blood boil. A clerk at the co-op at the University of Maryland (OK, not an official University organ, but one that gets support from the University) refused to serve a student who was wearing a "We Stand for Israel" shirt. (See http://www.examiner.com/a-883729~The_speech_police_at_Maryland.html ) While the student eventually did get served, after much argument, the student apparently found it necessary (or was convinced) to apologize to the clerk! Apparently it's just fine to be an anti-Semite; I'm sure that no clerk could have gotten away with that kind of behavior to a customer wearing a "Black Power" shirt.

As the editorial shows, political correctness has trumped academic freedom.

Why do they have to go together?

It seems to me that there is too much of an assumption that "if you believe in X, you must also believe in Y" around, where X and Y are two totally unrelated things. There are people who might be described as "economic conservatives" (I count myself among them) and people who call themselves "social conservatives" (I am certainly not among them!) and a lot of people seem to feel that if you are one, you are the other (which obviously is not true for me).

Case in point: There are two radio stations in the Washington, D. C. area which, I believe, are owned by one company and which have been advertising, "You're sure to hate one or the other" -- one, WTNT, is full of conservative talk radio, and the other is its liberal counterpart. I occasionally listen to WTNT and sometimes agree strongly with opinions expressed there, but the other day I was listening to one of the regularly featured broadcasters, Michael Savage. He was going on and on about "perverts," by which he meant homosexuals looking for their rights. I don't know what makes Mr. Savage have such a vigorous hostility to homosexuals; perhaps he's afraid of being confused with Dan Savage, a sex-advice columnist who is gay. But it just seems to me that, whatever your sexual orientation, nobody else's sexual orientation really concerns you unless they try to seduce you, and in that case, it's the unwanted attention, and not the sexual orientation, that is the problem.

Now some "social conservatives" might say it's condemned in the Bible -- and, of course, many people's reading of the Bible would agree with that, though there are obviously some very religious gay people who read that same Bible differently. But we're in a country with a pluralistic religious composition, and nobody has a right to let his religion dictate his politics to the point of banning people whose religion differs from theirs. An interpretation of "conservatism" consistent with my own economic conservatism would be to keep government out of our private business unless it damages someone, and in that case, why get involved in anyone's sex lives unless it negatively affects someone who isn't involved.

Similarly, "social conservatives" try to impose the beliefs of particular religions on areas like abortion on others who do not believe that way, and in general seem to be convinced that their own religion's views on anything trump all others. What this has to do with the essentially "laissez faire" view of economic conservatives escapes me.

Hence the title of this post: Why do they have to go together? In other words, what do they have in common that justifies the word "conservatism" being used for both?

Who's picking fights?

Senate majority leader Harry Reid is quoted as saying, of President Bush, "His comments today once again made clear that he is more interested in picking fights than problem-solving. Our differences amount to less than one percent of the budget..." This quote is even reprinted in the Democrats' own site, http://democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/record.cfm?id=280358 -- so they seem proud to proclaim this. Well, if I were in some sort of an argument, and I thought that the difference was so insignificant, I'd give in! Obviously, Mr. Reid isn't about to give in -- so I'd say he is the one who is only interested in picking fights!

And about the Democrats...

Gee, I'm glad I don't have to choose one of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination. They have to appear moderate enough that they don't scare the voters the way George McGovern did in 1972 or Michael Dukakis did a few elections later. Yet they know that only the extremists will control the nominating process. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is really anywhere near the center, of course, so it's easy for them to please the extremists, but if they really said what they honestly want to do, it would be Dukakis all over again. So they tack toward the center, but they can't go so far away from the left wing extreme that they alienate their base. It is so nice to watch from the outside!

Intelligence

A couple of days ago I was in a meeting of a bunch of people and talking about James Garfield, whom I described as "one of the smartest Persidents we've ever had." The person I was talking to remarked "as opposed to the present one." For some reason, it seems that liberal Democrats in general downgrade the intelligence of conservative Republican presidents; I've heard Eisenhower, Reagan, and our current Pres. Bush described as idiots. (John Kerry once said, according to quotes I've seen, "I can't believe I'm getting beaten by this idiot!" Yet when they were both students at Yale, Bush's grades were slightly higher than Kerry's, which seems to give a different picture.)

Obviously, anyone who can earn degrees from two of the best-reputed universities in the US (Yale and Harvard) is no idiot, and is likely pretty smart. And Pres. Bush is just such a person. Dwight Eisenhower was the general in charge of the World War II effort. And I'm quite sure Ronald Reagan was no idiot either, though I cannot point to specific intellectual accomplishments.

What it seems to be is that anyone who, looking at the facts of the world today, comes to conclusions different from those reached by our liberal Democratic commentators, cannot possibly be intelligent. What a bunch of garbage!

Mitt Romney, "social conservatives," and pornography

Today I saw a headline on a local newspaper: "Romney plans attack on pornography to try to woo social conservatives." (The online version of the paper puts it slightly differently: http://www.examiner.com/a-836030~Romney_plans_attack_on_porn_to_please_conservatives.html leaving out the word "social," but obviously it means the same.) I had originally, on seeing this headline, planned to write a post on how "social conservatives" are a cancer infesting the Republican Party and how Romney is turning me off more and more; I think that pornography is hardly the crowning issue of this campaign, but cracking down on it is as stupid as cracking down on alcohol in the 1920s was, and pornography actually has its good points; a person who might be impelled to commit a rape might be more harmlessly able to give vent to his feelings by looking at it, and certainly if Bill Clinton had looked at porn instead, he might not have wrecked Monica Lewinsky's life, to give two examples.

But on reading the article, I saw more reason to sympathize with Romney's position. He was not talking about porn in general, but about porn directed toward people's e-mail boxes against their wish. Just as I feel people should have the right to look at porn -- no matter how disgusting others might find it -- I also feel people should have the right to control what they look at in a negative way: to decide what they do not want to look at. And on that point I fully agree with Mitt Romney.