Yeah Yeah... I'm posting this on the 5th, but I was doing the whole 'family' thing on the 4th and this is the first opportunity to post.
Before I get into constitutional or political quandaries, lemme go over the holiday. It was a rare holiday as both of my brothers and I had the day off. R gets every weekend off, I get every other weekend off, but B normally works on Saturdays. So having a Saturday holiday with all of us is quite rare.
We spent the day and grilled at my Aunt's house. I'm sure I've said before, but my Mother and my Aunt always make too much food for the holiday meals. I don't think they can quite come to terms that they make a LOT of great food and that it's just not reasonable for them to make everybody's favorite dishes. Nor can they come to the conclusion that they aren't feeding the 15 people that we had before. This year was large... 10 of us... but they still cooked as if feeding a small army. We had burgers and dogs on the grill (this included my brother's chicken burgers), corn fresh off the cob, fried potatoes, baked beans, potato salad, taco salad, and tortilla chips and queso. They really reigned it in for desert as we 'only' had strawberry cake, preacher's cake, and blueberry desert (more or less blueberry and whipped topping no-bake cheesecake).
Before I get to far into this post, I have to add this: It's called Independence Day. Celebrating 'The Fourth Of July" is about as accurate and appropriate as celebrating Christmas by saying "Happy 25th of December!". The fourth of July is a date. Independence Day is a holiday. /rant
My cousin was there and he's doing well. He's quite the blowhard, so it's difficult to take what he says and let it just sit there as fact. If you believed everything he says he is Dan Gilbert's (the man who own's Quicken Loans and is more or less singlehandedly re-building Detroit) right hand man.
He's not.
In the same conversation he'll complain about how he can't afford his child support or pay his mother's cell phone bill, and then talk about how he's buying a Tesla sports car. Thankfully we didn't get into a political conversation as he's quite conservative. He loved the fact that Detroit was assigned a financial Emergency Manager that overpowered the elected mayor and city council. He didn't care that the people's voice was completely silenced because "they weren't doing a good job governing themselves before". I personally believe that people have the right to govern themselves badly... in fact I'd say that it's a conservative idea (Big Government shouldn't come in and tell me what to do!).
But anyway... we didn't get into a political argument this time. I love political debates, but he doesn't debate. He argues. When we went over the Detroit Emergency Manager last year, his main argument was "you don't live there, so you shouldn't have a say in it". It didn't seem to matter to him that HE doesn't live there either... he lives in an affluent suburb.
But this holiday, I've had quite a few political and even constitutional things going around my head.
Gay Marriage
The Supreme Court ruled that Marriage between a homosexual couple is now legal in all states. I celebrated this ruling. I think it's a major step forward and will be considered a landmark decision right up there with biracial marriage and the end of slavery. Unfortunately I also believe it will be about as all encompassing as the abortion ruling. Roe V Wade was decided in 1973, but we still have people putting all of their considerable effort into making abortions illegal. And if not outright illegal than so difficult and inconvenient that it may as well be illegal.
I think if we boil down the opposing arguments it really comes down to whether the United States of America is a Christian nation or not. I, for one, would vehemently argue that it is NOT a Christian nation. Our laws are not Christian. Many of the ideas and ideals we strive for can also be considered Christian, but that doesn't mean they ARE Christian.
From a conservative Christian perspective, homosexuality is wrong. It's a sin. They can go so far as to 'Love the sinner but hate the sin', but making any act of homosexuality legal would be considered 'loving the sin'. I think if we consider that their starting point (America is a Christian nation and homosexuality is a sin), then I can see how they'd come to these outlandish and outrageous conclusions. Conclusions like this decision will be the end of America. This decision will lean to polygamy, bigamy, incest, and bestiality all being made legal. This decision will lead to churches being sued and forced to close their doors. This decision is a direct attack on Christianity (and therefore America).
As an agnostic, here's how I look at marriage. It's a legal union with benefits. It allows certain tax breaks, it allows an easier path to children (adoption), it allows automatic access to healthcare decisions, it's a public display of a couple's love. People who believe in the Christian God should be allowed to get married. People who believe in the Muslim God should be able allowed to get married. People who believe in the Jewish God should be allowed to get married. And people who do not believe in any God should be allowed to get married. If their belief structure adds or subtracts other things from their marriage, then so be it. But from a legal standpoint, it's a union between those two people.
Allowing homosexual couples to marry, therefore, will not automatically lead to polygamy, bigamy, incest, bestiality, or other things that the Christian faith find to be sinful. I do believe it helps distill it down to more basic state... a legal union between consenting adults. I've heard the argument that instead of allowing it this way, the government should have made 'Civil Unions' more readily accessible. But that would be along the lines of 'Separate but Equal'. And we've already seen that SbE is wrong. Notice I didn't include 'love' in my legal statement. While my belief structure says that marriage should be for love, I don't think that legal we should go down that emotional road. Just as we legally strive for Justice and not Vengeance, we should strive for Legal and not Emotional. I Do include two important pieces... consenting and adult. Really this could be taken down to consenting as a child can't truly comprehend the magnitude of consent, so they can't consent to something like this on their own. But for eases sake, I'll leave 'Adult' in there too. That's also true of animals... they can't consent, so it's not ever going to be legal to marry your dog or your sheep.
Note though that I didn't include 'TWO' anywhere in there. Yes... I believe that polygamy (and I guess therefore bigamy) should be legal. Now if we're going to allow polygamy it still has to be between consenting adults. All of the people in the marriage have to be consenting. This wouldn't be a male dominated ruling... a man could marry three women. A woman could marry three men. A woman could marry two men and two women.... any combination so long as they were all consenting adults. If I want to be in a legally binding union with multiple people, then why is that wrong? Yes, historically polygamy has been a single man marrying several woman, sometimes against their will. But if we allow both genders to participate and ensure that all parties are consenting... then who are we to oppose that?
It would have no direct bearing on parenting or family. By that I mean that a child of two people in this marriage wouldn't automatically have five parents. The other people in that marriage would have the same rights as step parents. Biological parents would still have all of their rights intact.
But I'm straying from the point... let's stay on homosexual marriage. One of the arguments both sides use is that homosexual marriage will or will not destroy heterosexual marriage. I used to think that was the most ridiculous thing to argue. How does a couple being married harm 'my' marriage in any way? It doesn't... unless you believe that America is a Christian nation. Then allowing homosexual marriage is making legal something that is a sin. And allowing that sin hurts us all.
I have plenty of debate points that I could bring up against this. But the one and only one that I'll focus on is that America is NOT a Christian nation. We already have laws and amendments to the constitution saying that we are all equal. Therefore saying that a group of people are LESS equal due only to their sexual beliefs is unconstitutional. Take out the Christianity... take out the religion... and you shouldn't have any problem seeing this as fully constitutional. If these people opposed to homosexual marriage want their beliefs to be constitutional, then they should pass an amendment stating that marriage is between a heterosexual couple. I'd put that as likely as happening as a constitutional amendment repealing the second amendment.
My biggest problem with this line of argument is the man problem I have with most of religions. I don't want to tell you how to live your life... so please don't tell me and everybody else how to live my life. I don't believe in God. I don't believe that religion has an overall net good affect on society. I don't believe that my beliefs lead to the conclusion that we should ban religion. I don't want to foce my beliefs on religious people. But they want to force me to live by their beliefs. They want to ban me from marrying another man. They want to ban my wife from having an abortion. And forcing others to live by your ideals and faith is the same exact thing that ISIS is doing in the middle east.
Just a tad less extreme.
'Obama'care
The Supreme Court also ruled that a very basic part of the Affordable Care Act didn't in fact mean that the government could only give the tax discounts to those living in a state with a healthcare marketplace run BY that state. In other words, if the federal government was running that state's healthcare marketplace, their citizens could still get the discount.
I think Justice Roberts put it best. More or less he looked at the intent of the law and ruled by that definition. He agreed that the law is written badly... but he didn't make a ruling to take down the healthcare law. Instead he looked at what the congress and president at the time wanted to do, and made sure his ruling wouldn't destroy that.
Isn't that what we should want from a Justice of the Supreme Court? Yes... there are going to be times when they have to work with a law written in a different time when we can't really even try to assume what the writers and supporters of the law intended. But this isn't one of those cases. This was made into law just over five years ago.
The way the 'right' reacted though.... they seem to think that a Justice should look into his heart and vote in whatever way he thinks the law SHOULD be. If he did that, wouldn't that make him the very activist type of justice that they rail against so vocally?
I can understand disagreeing with him and the ruling. I disagree with the Citizens United case.... but my opinion is that the Supreme Court has ruled on it, and it is now the law of the land. I heard people in such disagreement with the ruling that they wondered aloud how 'Nine lawyers wearing robes' should define law. One even went so far as to say we should get rid of the court. He said this after the gay marriage ruling, but he was including the obamacare ruling in it as well.
Umm... what?
Yes indeed. I disagree with the court's decision, and therefore believe that we should eliminate one third of our government. That feels reasonable.
This all seems to boil down to them not wanting this to be the law of the land. Some of that comes from them honestly believing that this is a bad law, but I think most of it is partisan. It's a Democrat Party passed law. Remember when they were debating the law.... what was the republican idea? They said they had some... they just never told us what it was? Most people who are vocal against the law aren't vocal against some of the tent pole ideas of the law... they're vocal against things that have nothing to do with the law; It's a Government take over of healthcare, Death Panels, It raises healthcare costs....
I believe that unless we get a majority of self called 'tea party' republicans in both houses AND the white house, that this law will never be repealed or replaced. It will continue to be the law of the land. And like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it will be modified but continuous. Otherwise they'd have to explain why they are taking away insurance from millions of people, allowing insurance companies to reign in as much profit as they want, allowing insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing coverage, allowing insurance companies to charge women more for insurance, and not allowing children to stay on their parents insurance.
The big problem for the people running against 'Obamacare' is that they are setting up their own failure. They'll run and get elected on taking down Obamacare. When they don't do it, someone else will run right behind them to take down Obamacare. No one, except for the most extreme anti-government people (i.e. the Tea Party) will ever be part of taking down the law in whole. Modify it? Sure... it's not a perfect law and it will have to change over time. Remove it? Nope.
The purpose of the Supreme Court
Here's my basic 11th grade civics class understanding of our government. The congress writes a law and the president signs it into law. The Supreme Court's place is to decide if that law is constitutional.
Now of course the government is far more complicated and there are other checks and balances (over riding a veto, amending the constitution...), but I've heard and read in several interviews that people were upset over the way the Supreme Court 'NOW' seems to be ruling on the constitutionality of laws.
Umm... isn't that what they were supposed to be doing in the first place? I mean... isn't that their job? Has that changed over time? If so, what was the old job of the court?
Seriously. I don't get it.
American Exceptionalism
I like America. I think America is pretty damned good at a lot of things. But why does there seem to be this huge thing about American Exceptionalism? What exactly makes America 'The Greatest Country On The Face Of Earth!!"?
I think there are too many things that go into making a country good for any one country to be 'the greatest'. Economy, Military, Healthcare, Education, Taxes, Spending, Arts, Freedom, Plurality... all of these things are wonderful and needed to be 'great'. And yes we have them, but we can't even agree on these things ourselves. Economy - should we regulate the banks? Should we regulate the stock market? Military - Should we go to war whenever we want? Should we invest enough money into the military so that we can fight two simultaneous world wars? Should we be the world's police force? Healthcare - Should we provide healthcare to everybody? Should we invest into medical research? Should we support private investment into healthcare and allow corporations to charge whatever they want for healthcare? Education - Should we have a common core of standards? Should we test to those standards? Should we make higher education more affordable (or even free?). Taxes - Should we tax the poor at all? Should we tax the rich more? Should we tax corporations? Should we tax people who act as corporations? Spending - Should we spend money on making our society better? Should we build dams and roads and bridges? Should we spend money on the military/schools/healthcare? Arts - Should we support only the arts that we like? Should we support the arts at all? Freedom - Should we be allowed to do whatever we want? Should be be allowed to do whatever we want so long as someone doesn't come to harm? Should we ever take away freedoms? Plurality - Are we all equal? Does skin color ever matter? Does sexual orientation ever matter? Does religion ever matter?
So with all these differing opinions about what makes us 'Great', how can we ever say we are the 'Greatest'? I don't think any side could say that we are their ideal version of America.
I don't know... I get sick and tired bout hearing people say how great we are in one breath and saying how much we need to change in the next. How if we could only live up to and by their ideals, that we would be even greater greatest.
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