Tax Day = Passover this year. Does this violate separation of Church and State? #avoidingtaxes
bshirley
April 1, 2014
Category Archives: government
Marriage Equality is a No Brainer
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Today there are two very important cases being discussed at the US Supreme Court. Whether the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed under President Clinton is constitutional. It’s not, and Clinton has publicly said as much recently. And whether California’s Prop 8, which bans gay marriage, is discriminatory with be discussed as well.
It has long been my contention that the discussion of marriage equality for non heterosexual couples is largely hindered my nomenclature. The meaning of the word marriage is doing (at least) double duty. I propose we retire the word and replace it with two others: r-marriage and g-marriage. Or minimally, footnote our discussions to clarify what it is we are saying when we say “marriage”.
For millennia there has been r-marriage. Marriage within a religious context. It is sacred, and for many it is a bond before god that will not be broken until the death of one of the members.
For several hundred years we’ve been living under law that attempts to separate church and state. Despite that we have legally defined g-marriage, Government Marriage. This is something that requires government documents, and government fees, and when the relationship is terminated more government fees and documents, and perhaps facilitation by government judges.
There are hundreds of other rights conferred to people who are g-married. These rights have nothing to do with religion; they could mostly be boiled down to fiscal issues. These are the rights that are under debate.
No one is trying to change anything regarding r-marriage. Churches will not be forced to marry anyone they believe is unworthy before god to be married. No one!
I question whether the government should even acknowledge marriage. I would abolish it. But that’s a radical point of view. As mentioned, there are hundreds of laws referencing these 2-person bondings. Removing the g-marriage concept would effect all these historical laws. Indeed I wonder if the limit of the relationship to 2 people will continue in the distant future.
But there is no doubt the laws conferred by our secular legal system should not be confined by the moral codes of any religion. Accordingly, there is absolutely no reason to restrict g-marriage on r-marriage’s standards. Any two people should be able to marry under the eyes of our government, and under the eyes (or not) of any god they espouse.
When you hear people arguing about this issue, try to mentally flag when they’re using the word to mean one thing or the other.
One Unwanted Gun Gone is a Good Thing
The back and forth on gun safety regulation is going strong and I expect it to continue earnestly through January if not longer. I hope something come’s of it.
Today in an NBC article there was a 2008 quote from a representative of the New Speak named Independent Institute. NBC News describes them as “conservative”, which seem reasonable given the quote. The Institute itself claims to be non-partisan and says it “sponsors in-depth studies of critical social and economic issues”.
So, if the studies are in-depth, the quotes coming from their Research Director are a bit hyperbolic if not all out lies.
“It’s like trying to drain the Pacific with a bucket,” Alex Tabarrock of the conservative Independent Institute told USA Today in 2008. There are an estimated 310 million guns in the U.S. — about one for every U.S. resident.
I would certainly not accuse Mr. Tabarrock of being a scientist.
There are legitimate questions as to whether gun buy-backs are useful or successful. It depends greatly on how you would measure the success. It seems the same people that would say “if we get one criminal off the streets, we’re doing good” aren’t willing to extend that tenuous logic to “if we get one weapon of possible death off the street, we’re doing good.”
If we even accept the sisyphian challenge false dichotomy Mr. Tabarrock presents us with, one intimating that unless we remove every gun from circulation that gun crimes will not be diminished, we should look at the numbers he is trying to scare us with.
In the last week I’ve read newspaper articles that totaled over 5,000 guns purchased back from citizens. With 310M guns at large, we would have to have 61,000 such weeks, or less than 1200 years. Those are all rough numbers, but 1200 years is still a long time, and if that’s the point you’re trying to make, make it on that merit.
Now, the Pacific Ocean has 6.6 x 10^20 liters of water (1.7 x 10^20 gallons). If we’re equating buckets with the guns, and not one buy-back event, and we stipulate that a bucket is about a gallon. That would leave us with 3.4 x 10^16 weeks or 653,846,153,846,153 years to empty the Pacific Ocean. That’s 544,871,794,871 times longer than slowly, in an unorganized manner, buying back guns.
That’s a ridiculous comparison.
But the implied point is equally ridiculous. Buy back plans are not about appreciably reducing crime numbers. The point is, if there is any unwanted gun, we should get it out of circulation. All guns should be owned by responsible adults that handle and store them properly. In the same way that if you have used motor oil, we need to provide a safe place for you to dump it, if you no longer want to be responsible for maintaining your gun, we should make it easy for you to get rid of it. Responsibly.
Jill Stein, Presidential Candidate
Polls are currently leading toward President Obama being re-elected. Texas will certainly remain a red state and push its electoral votes toward Mitt Romney. But there are other candidates running for president, Jill Stein among them.
She is the Green Party candidate, and if you live in Texas or any other state not in contention, voting for her (certainly not a winner) is an absolutely valid choice.
As it happens, she’ll be visiting Houston for a few days this week. A full itinerary is available at Brains and Eggs‘ blog. If you have the time, check out any of her appearances or listen to her on the radio.
The Green Party’s Ten Key Values are
- Grassroots democracy
- Social justice and equal opportunity
- Ecological wisdom
- Nonviolence
- Decentralization
- Community-based economics
- Privilege Checking and gender equality
- Respect for diversity
- Personal and global responsibility
- Future focus and sustainability
You can read their platform online at their website.
The State & Education
I’m of the opinion that the state cannot spend too much money on education. Ever dollar spent reaps rewards many fold over.
While the modern Republicans are more than happy to put words in the mouths of the Founding Fathers, and claim them as their own and no one else’s, if you return to the source material it is clear there is little in common between the two.
“Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to ; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson [The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series 12:442]
Meanwhile Republicans in Texas frame a platform that is so horrific that a Forbes blogger says “it is difficult to believe that what the Republicans put together during their convention in Fort Worth was even written in the 21st century.”
In particular the platform says we should not teach children to think. Literally. As if that is not the entire intent of (public) schooling. (I can’t personally speak toward the intent of private or home schooling, but hope they would intend the same.) I’m not sure whether it’s Double Speak or sarcasm that places their opinion under the title “Educating Our Children”.
Here’s the full text in context:
Knowledge Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. [p12]
So the subtext here is that if we teach logic to children they might be able to “out think” their parents. I certainly increasingly had rational discussions/arguments with my parents the more I grew/learned. Those are stepping stones to becoming an adult. Sounds like a muddy path is the one preferred in this platform.
Later in the same platform they add the following:
We support curricula that are heavily weighted on original founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Founders’ writings. [p13, Traditional Principals]
Definitely sending mixed messages here, there’s nothing but higher order thinking going on in the Founders’ writings.
To be fair such Janus-faced statements are to be expected in a document by committee, and there are dozens more in this document
Two weeks ago House Speaker John Boehner (R) said “Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform? I’ve never met anybody.”[WSJ] (His context was one in which candidate Mitt Romney wouldn’t seek an ultimate abortion ban despite the Platform calling for it.) He also added the documents should only be a page long. Reading the Texas Republican Party Platform for 2012, I am tempted to agree with him.
Anonymous: Terrorists or Robin Hood?
I’ll start this post with an aside: some may even consider Robin Hood to be a terrorist. Have there been any retellings of Robin Hood from that perspective? Please point me to any such efforts.
Alexis Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) asks in The Atlantic. “Who Do You Trust Less: The NSA or Anonymous?” prompted by the vague accusation by the director of the NSA that Anonymous would soon have the capability “to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.”
He didn’t say that they had the intent, just that they’d soon have the knowledge. This is to accuse the general public of having the knowledge of how to make a fertilizer bomb, rent a truck, and park it next to a federal building. If they soon have this ability, it’s a failure on our security systems, not of them for obtaining knowledge.
To not be subtle about it, I am against any part of our government demonizing Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) as a terrorist group. I personally think what they (mostly) do is somewhere between digital graffiti and non-violent protest, sometimes venturing into whistle-blowing crusader territory. Their biggest fault I would describe as political or social altruism.
I agree with alexis that labeling them as stateless is an attempt to paint them with the broad brush the NSA and other US governmental bodies use to demonize al Qaeda.
To clarify, i don’t mind the government keeping tabs on them (legally), tracking their activity or membership (if/where possible), or prosecuting them for breaking the law (civil disobedience should expect prosecution – if we need to change the law, that’s another issue).
Farming fear is a good way to steer policy in the direction you want (and how we got into the Iraq War). I want those officials who are my direct employees, those whose ballot I will touch, to please use several grains of salt when weighing opinions from our “intelligence” community. Don’t be bullied to their opinion because you’re not computer technology savvy, or “Cyber” is a scary word, or “stateless” slowly taints your view on a group.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Pres. Barack Obama, I’m talking to you. We have much bigger fish to fry. Sowing peace and diplomacy takes more effort than demonizing and warmongering. (As your constituent, and a Computer Scientist, i want you to now my opinion.)
I will end there and briefly echo Alexis conclusion: “One doesn’t have to support Anonymous’ methods, goals, or aesthetics to worry about the US response to them in the intelligence community.”
[Note: sent to each of the elected officials mentioned above – find yours (in Texas) with Who Represents Me?]