There are two general arguments people make when people sue to have the Ten Commandments removed from a court house or government building near you:

1. This country (or state) was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we should recoginze this fact as a foundation of our government and do away with this whole separation of church and state business.
2. This is an issue of free speech and religious free speech is being attacked.

For the first argument we may be in a situation where 2 + 2 = 5 because enough people vote for it. If you truly believe #1 then you should agree that we need a constitutional amendment saying that we have no separation of church and state and the church is X. It’s the same thing. I think if we had an amendment that we are a Christian nation, it might pass. That’s scary as fuck because it destroys one of the things that makes America great: religion is free.

For #2, clearly if this were the issue one solution would be to allow the religious free speech of any religion on government property to an equitible degree. This is hard but not impossible. No one is proposing it. The people that want the 10 Commandments on the lawn of the court house want it there because they agree with the religion. They are making a secular decision based on religious arguments. I am still apalled that Judeo-Christians are so willing to trample the separation of church and state. For religion to remain free, the state has to be utterly impartial. We are a secular state, folks, regardless of our origins and everyone, Christians included, want the separation of church and state. If you want your religion to stay free, you have to feverishly support the separation of church and state. I’m sorry to say that means the statue of your religious document has to be put somewhere else. Put it in your front yard, put it on your business property, put it anywhere you want except on our public property.

I saw a great bumper sticker that said “Don’t believe everything you think.” This is profound. Everyone, myself included, believes things that, if we were to gain more insight, more facts or considered it more carefully, we disagree with. We disagree with some things we think. That’s pretty funny. It is really important that we all keep this in mind. If you believe that everything you think is 100% for sure correct, you are a moron with a deluded view of your own perfection. I suspect everyone reading this agrees: none of us are perfect and some of what we believe is wrong.

This is important because debate is often seen as each side trying to convince the other they are right. It is seldom that we are open to being convinced! The paralytic political warfare we are all suffering through (and participating in) does not further the issues. We don’t get nearer the truth. If you read my blog is it clear I am a raging liberal but I still feel a responsibility to seek the truth, even in cases where it may not appear to match the liberal agenda. I don’t want to be right because I shouted louder and longer than the other guy, I want to be right because the facts agree.

So I’m asking you to remember that there is room in your world view for improvement. You can learn and grow and your beliefs and opinions may change in the process. This is good! Leave the door ajar on your opinions and beliefs.

This article at CNN reports that House Speaker Dennis Hastert is refusing to extend a deadline for the 9/11 commission, even though “the bipartisan members of the commission unanimously supported the extension, and the White House has publicly indicated it would support it”. Can you say fall guy? The Republicans are orchestrating a ploy, in essence using 9/11 as a political chess piece, and you should be outraged. We want the truth, that’s all. We want to learn from this attack. Why are the supposedly security-focused Republicans thrwarting the efforts of Americans to learn from this horrific attack?

In addition, Condoleezza Rice, Bush and Cheney are all refusing to meet with the commission. Meanwhile, Clinton and Gore are fully cooperating with the commission.

I’ll remind you that this commission is not a bunch of liberals — it was created by Congress in November 2002 and is a 10-member bipartisan panel.

How can honest conservatives support such evasive bullshit?

So our President has finally made it official — he now endorses an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. First of all let me say that this is the right way to approach the problem. The Right is now notorious for using the idiotic phrase “judicial activism” — they have decided that if they disagree with the courts then the courts must be biased liberals who have no integrity and are hell bent on solely pursuing their own political agenda in spite of years of dedicated and proven service to this country. This is shameful. No matter who you are, the courts are going to disagree with you sometimes and it is pretty lame to assume that the court has traded integrity for political activism, especially when your man, the Right-Wing George W. Bush, was placed on the throne by the courts in a decision widely criticized. I’m going to say here and now, and I’m a raging liberal, that the act of the Supreme Court handing Bush the presidency does not in and of itself cause me to question its integrity. I disagree but I will not claim it was judicial activism. Karl Rove, next time you program our president to speak, delete this subroutine that constantly calls the courts “judicial activism”. It is insulting, it represents a hostile power struggle between the branches of government and it is unbecoming of the President of the United States.

So I agree — if you don’t like how the courts have interpreted the Constitution, the correct course of action is to change the Constitution. This may be the only time you’ll ever hear me say that Bush is doing the right thing.

Given his views. Which I strongly disagree with. I believe this Constitutional amendment is about the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

The polls are pretty unambiguous — most Americans do not support gay marriage. This is not a referendum on marriage, though — most Americans just plain don’t like homosexuality. The question they are answering, whether they are asked it or not, is do you support homosexuals and their answer is no. There are many an estranged father and son because of this issue — people who will literally disown their children because they don’t like homosexuality. Almost, if not all of these people, are also religious. They think the Bible says homosexuality is a sin. Nevermind all the other sins they gladly participate in, this one needs a Constitutional amendment. Fucking A.

One of my only criticisms of John Kerry is that he is wishy-washy on this issue because he, too, knows what the polls say. He is still saying the right thing, which is that the state is not and should not be involved in religious rituals and what we call marriage at the state level would be more appropriately called civil union. This is a legal matter as far as the state is concerned. John Kerry should have the balls to say that as president he will not support this amendment and that he supports gay marriage.

Which brings me to my final point. Bookmark this page and come back here and give me shit if I am wrong. I hereby predict that there is no way, none at all, zero percent chance that a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman will ever pass. That is one reason I encourage them to try — this issue will end political careers because it is completely against more than one aspect of the Constitution. First of all, we’re supposed to have a separation of church and state, so when Bush talks about the sanctity of marriage, he is violating that. Second, we afford equal rights to all people. Read that sentence again. It is nonsense to even be talking about this. Same-sex marriage is a done deal, for sure, gonna happen, no question about it. What you can do is quietly and insistently support it to those people around you who don’t. They’ll come around.

Here is another example of how if you disagree with the Bush administration you are instantly labeled partisan or biased. This article at WiReD describes a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists detailing how the administration has distorted science whenever it disagrees with its ideological agenda. I suppose just like Republicans like to cry about how academia is consistently more liberal than they would like, they will now accuse scientists around the world of being puppets of the liberal agenda. I’m sorry, but just like there is a correlation between being rich and being conservative, there is a correlation between being educated and being liberal. This is because the conservative agenda is about protecting the status quo and the liberal agenda is about improving the status quo. Conservatives think that money is the best motivator and liberals think that doing the right thing is the best motivator. Both sides are correct, in a sense. But liberals are much more open to the profit motive than conservatives are to the “do the right thing” motive. Case in point: I will pay more if strengthening lead poisoning regulations makes things more expensive. I will not bitch. The Bush administration would rather have us pay less and be more at risk. The science is unambiguous — small amounts of lead are very dangerous, especially to children. How can you possibly defend companies who knowingly pollute the world with lead when we know this? Fuck their shareholders, do the right fucking thing.

I’ve digressed but the above mentioned article is more proof that the Bush administration will stop at nothing to further their fucked up political agenda, which no rational person should support.

Thanks to the Bush administration, we now live in a police state. Check out this article, written by one of the leading security experts in the United States. This is not partisan warfare, this is real. This administration is completely misguided and is manipulating the fears of Americans to strengthen its power base and to distract us from what a complete fucking loser this president is. America is becoming evil.

Now, to this sad state of affairs, throw in the fact that to the rest of the world we are considered religious fanatics. The radical conservative Christians in this country are engaged in the most confused agenda I have seen. They are against abortions AND against birth control. They are FOR capital punishment and AGAINST welfare. The are apparently perfectly willing to sacrifice the separation of church and state provided it is their church. They are trying to turn their religious doctrine into US law. Shouldn’t that concern you?

I know this country is better than this but the people who agree with me don’t fucking vote. Please, please, please vote against these religious fanatic police state loving idiots.

I think we should all be concerned when people talk about preventing people from using the courts to solve grievances. We have all heard of ridiculous lawsuits and it should bother us when people use the courts as a lottery ticket. We absolutely need a system where suits without merit are unsuccessful and suits with merit are successful. We all agree on this.

What concerns me is the fact that people, almost always on the Right, think the solution is to prevent these suits from getting to the courts. They want to pass laws that say you can’t be heard in court. That is bad. The worst thing about it is it implies that the courts cannot be trusted to do the right thing. It also paints everyone with the same broad brush, unquestionably preventing people with legitimate suits from seeking restitution.

The correct answer is to give the courts better direction so that suits with merit can still proceed and suits without merit are thrown out early in the process. I believe this is possible. I also believe it correctly insures the balance of power on which our country was founded. If legislatures start to prevent people from accessing the courts, they have overstepped their power. If they give instruction to the courts, they are acting within their power and still allow the courts to exercise their discretion.

I repeat, all Americans should be very suspicious of people who want to take away their right to bring a suit to the courts. It sounds logical on the surface but it will result in serious miscarriages of justice at the expense of the little guy and to the benefit of the big guy. That is un-American.

One more thing. You hear a lot these days about the high cost of medical malpractice insurance due to these frivolous lawsuits. You hear doctors appealing to us that they can’t continue to practice in this environment. This is serious. We do need to solve this and, in my opinion, solve it in the manner I discuss above. But one thought I had about this is: when someone “screws up” and it causes you physical harm, there absolutely should be recourse. To be sure, bad things happen in this world and sometimes it is no one’s fault. Other times, though, it IS someone’s fault. We all make mistakes in our jobs but when I make a mistake, people aren’t permanently physically harmed. When doctors make mistakes very bad things may happen. In this way, doctor’s should carry very, very good insurance. We should plan on mistakes being made and plan on ways to try to provide restitution. The market needs to absorb this in a manner which spreads the pain out so we don’t drive doctors out of business. If we successfully “fixed” the courts so that suits without merit were thrown out early in the process, we could solve this. Doctors and hospitals will always need to have great insurance. This is the nature of the practice. But by providing better direction to courts and letting market forces spread the risk evenly among doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and patients, we can solve this without denying access to the courts.

Do not let the the executive or legislative branches of government take control of the courts. It is a vital part of the balance of power.