Selective History

In 1862, redefining marriage apparently wasn’t so big a concern for conservatives.

Sometimes I set out to write a quick meme and the damned thing gets away from me. This is one of those times. Once I realized that it was going to be just too long to publish as a meme, I abandoned brevity and wrote a blog post. Enjoy. Or don't.

I’m hearing an awful lot about Conservatives being upset (and downright rebellious) over the recent Supreme Court ruling that makes same-sex marriage legal in the entire United States. It seems that American conservatives don’t think that the Supreme Court, or the U.S. Constitution, should take precedence over the Bible.

This opens the whole issue of the Bible not being a part of U.S. law or American government, but let’s leave that alone for now. There’s another point I want to make.

One of the arguments often made against same-sex marriage is that will lead to such evils as polygamy. So just for grins and giggles, I looked up “polygamy” on Wikipedia. This led me (not surprisingly) to an article on Mormonism and polygamy. One of the things I learned there:

“For over 60 years, the LDS Church and the United States were at odds over the issue (of polygamy): the church defended the practice as a matter of religious freedom, while the federal government aggressively sought to eradicate it, consistent with prevailing public opinion. ... In 1862, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which prohibited plural marriage in the territories. ... In 1879, in Reynolds v. United States, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Morrill Act, stating: ‘Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinion, they may with practices.’”

(Wikipedia, Mormonism and Polygamy)

The meaning of this decision is clear, and was clearly stated: No law can govern your morality, but laws can, and should, govern your actions.

That law was passed more than 160 years ago. The Supreme Court decided on the matter in the late 1870s. That’s as far back as the legal fiction of marriage = one man + one woman can be traced. That’s where it was codified into law. Obviously, in 1862 marriage was legally redefined to disallow polygamy, and this was done despite numerous references to polygamy being practiced in the Bible. This concept was upheld by the Supreme Court, and was fully in keeping with the desires of both liberal and conservative elements in American society. American society was just fine with allowing religious belief to be contained by secular law.

So what the hell are conservatives so damned upset about now? What is so different about how marriage was redefined in the 19th Century by a decision of the Supreme Court, a decision that conservatives were just fine with, and how marriage was redefined by the Supreme Court last week, a decision that has conservatives throwing a collective tantrum that would be unworthy of anyone over four years old? What is it that has conservatives all over America going batshit insane?

Oh...right. Gays.

Perhaps the apparent inconsistency of changing conservative attitudes on redefining marriage can all be put down to the fact that conservatives simply don’t want to treat gays like regular human beings, and are willing to go so far as to alter their basic beliefs to keep that from happening. Is their dislike of homosexuality really that strong?

Why am I bothering to ask? Of course it is. After all, most of them feel that they have a firm religious basis for their prejudice against homosexual practices because such things are flat-out prohibited in the book of Leviticus (just like eating pork or lobster, or perverting justice by showing favoritism to either the rich or the poor, or giving your children to be sacrificed to Moloch).

But this brings us back to the point that that Supreme Court made in the 1879; that law cannot endorse or oppose morality.

The Bible shouldn’t be used as the basis for secular law. We shouldn’t expect our laws to try to regulate what any of us consider good or evil, or expect anyone’s religious belief to regulate anyone else’s behavior. The Supreme court shouldn’t regulate morality, and was never intended to. It is wrong to oppose the rulings of the Supreme Court just because you think that such rulings might offend your religious sensibilities.

Perhaps this explains why the Supreme Court has always been strangely silent on the subject of sacrificing your children to Moloch.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine an if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.


Wikipedia on Polygamy (and Mormonism) 

Wikipedia on Reynolds v. United States

76 things banned in Leviticus

The Perception of Certainty: Ayn Rand Reconsidered. (Or maybe just considered...)

The universe doesn’t deal in absolutes, but that’s the only currency that Ayn Rand ever accepted.

I don’t trust certainty.

The person who never questions their position has never truly looked at it from any other angle, and is locked into a single point of view. Such a person views their certainty as the foundations of all that they believe, or in their view all that is, and perceives any attack on said certainty not just as an attack upon themselves but as an attack against all reality and reason.

Perhaps this is why I have never given any credence to Ayn Rand. Her perception of her own philosophical correctness was absolute; she believed that the assumptions that formed the basis of her own beliefs were so correct that no assault on them could be tolerated; that any who would do so were obviously evil.

Ayn Rand, if you’ve never read her works (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are her best known), had a philosophy she called “Objectivism” which she described thus: "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Atlas Shrugged was perhaps the ultimate expression of this philosophy. Whether or not you accept these philosophical points depends on whether you can accept man/humanity as intrinsically heroic (I can’t), whether you can accept happiness as the only worthwhile goal in life (I don’t) and personal achievement as the highest goal one can aspire to (a concept that I entirely reject). She also had an ego; she described herself once as "the most creative thinker alive". She wasn’t.

I have always believed that wisdom was where you found it; that even the most vile and reprehensible of characters might know something of value and have something to teach. But I was never able to look into Ayn Rand’s writing and find any wisdom there, even though philosophically I am certain that there must be some to be found. Perhaps that’s because I could never get past her absolute certainty in her opinions (and opinions they are, despite her certainty of them).

And perhaps it’s a flaw in my own character that prevents me from giving Ayn Rand her due.  Perhaps it’s my own distrust of her certainty that keeps me from paying any heed to her philosophy. I would find it regrettable if any bit of wisdom encased in her writing escaped me because I couldn’t stomach her work. Just the same, I do not believe that there’s enough of value there to justify my abandoning my profound dislike/distrust of Ayn Rand.

In the end, I think that it’s her perception of certainty that I have always distrusted most, and perhaps that’s because of my own distrust of Ayn Rand’s perceived certainty.

When one finds perceived certainty, one should always themselves perceive doubt. That’s my philosophy, anyway; I doubt that Ayn Rand would agree.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.


Wikipedia on Ayn Rand

Now, who was I supposed to vote for again?

UPDATED 6/1/2015 - See the bottom of this article.

You say you aren't sure who to support for our next President? join the freakin' club, pal. 

Once again, we in the U.S. face national elections next year. Actually, a year and a half from now: November 2016 to be exact. It still seems like such a long way off...

Once again, the Republican party faces a plethora (a record plethora this year) of contenders, all hoping to out-conservative each other in order to gain their party's nomination, and said person will then face the difficult task of trying to plausibly deny all of the far-right claptrap they were more than willing to spew in the primaries; all in order to appeal to a more centrist electorate than they had to pander to for the nomination. That strategy isn't likely to end well...remember Mitt Romney?

On the Democratic side, things are a bit trickier.

For months, years even, it has been almost universally assumed that the Democratic candidate would be Hillary Clinton (and indeed at this point it still looks that way). It looked as if the Democratic primaries would be little more than a formality, existing only to rubber-stamp her candidacy. But now she has a challenger, and a serious contender at that; Bernie Sanders.

(I should note that, at this point, Elizabeth Warren is still in the definitely-will-not-run category, which is a damned shame since she is someone I could support unreservedly. I, like many others, still hope she'll change her mind. But time for that is running short.)

I'm not going to go into brief, but inevitably way to long, bios of Clinton and Sanders; there are web sites for that (check the links at the bottom of this article). I will say that I think Clinton more likely to eventually win a national election than Sanders, but that I find myself politically more in agreement with Sanders.

I am going to admit that I'm a bit disappointing (not much, but a bit) with Clinton's campaigning of late; I don't think she's doing enough of it. Clinton has been campaigning like the nomination is hers to lose, which in fairness it is, but so far her strategy has been primarily defensive and (in my opinion) not aggressive enough.

Sanders, on the other hand, has come out with both guns blazing, attacking the established power structures in banking, business, and politics with gusto. Hillary needs to do more of that.

And that's what Bernie Sanders brings to the table...passion. The sort of passion that Clinton's campaign has been lacking. I am hoping that the presence in the race of a hard-core unashamed Liberal like him will restore some needed passion to Hillary Clinton's campaign specifically and to the Democratic party as a whole.

Frankly, I am hoping to see a more aggressive campaign from Hillary Clinton.

Since I had decided to hold off on supporting a candidate until after the primaries (not that it matters at all in the scheme of things who I favor) I wasn't openly supporting Bernie Sanders because the eventual candidate might be (probably would be) Hillary Clinton, and I would likely be supporting her in the election. An if that's the way things break, I still will. But Bernie has been actively saying things that I very much agree with, while Hillary Clinton...well, not so much. Hillary needs to learn, and the sooner the better, that she has not been anointed and she needs to stop behaving as if she were, and she really needs to make sure that the nation hears her message. Now.

Eventually, it will all come down to the two major party candidates and I will almost certainly support, and campaign for, the more progressive of the two. I feel confident in predicting that that will be the Democratic candidate. Beyond that, I am not willing, at this point, to predict a damned thing. If Bernie Sanders can shake up the Democratic status quo (and by that I mean Hillary Clinton) and get Hillary out actively campaigning--and keep her from drifting too far to the right, which I can definitely see as a possibility--then I'm going to go ahead and risk looking like a total Bernie Sanders supporter, because even if he's not the eventual candidate of the Democrats his candidacy can only help the party. And, I believe, the nation.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.


A direct comparison between Bernie Sanders an Hillary Clinton: http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/compare/35-40/Bernie-Sanders-vs-Hillary-Clinton

Bernie Sanders' website: https://berniesanders.com/

Hillary Clinton's website: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/

UPDATE: When I logged on to publish this just now and went to Facebook to post a link to my page, I read that former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley (D) had thrown his hat into the ring. Frankly, I know little about him, other than that he sings and plays guitar in a rock band that I have never heard. I can't say this changes my article, so I see no reason to change anything. I will say that I think that a broader Democratic field at this stage benefits everyone, and that I am happy that the Democratic party will now be forced to have actual debates. That, too, is a good thing.

Martin O’Malley Announces Presidential Campaign, Pushing Image of Vitality (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/us/politics/martin-omalley-presidential-campaign-2016.html?_r=0