Why Obama Is Wrong About Gay Marriage

From the July 2012 issue of Bazooka Magazine: 

Recently, Democratic tribalists everywhere went on the hopium addict’s equivalent of a three-day coke binge over the fact that President Obama made a statement in support of gay marriage. They applauded Obama’s brave position and treated the statement as a huge victory for equal rights. One small problem: There was absolutely no bravery in Obama’s statement. It was wishy-washy, pussified political hedging at its best.

Don’t get me wrong; A sitting president openly admitting that he supports marriage equality, especially in an election year, is a good thing. At the very least, it indicates that most Americans are comfortable enough with the idea that it’s no longer political Kryptonite. Unfortunately, Obama’s support of gay marriage is expressed purely in terms of his personal beliefs. When it comes to the government’s role in handling marriage equality, he says that he believes each state should decide.  

Aside from the jaw-dropping irony of a bi-racial president advocating a states’ rights argument, Obama’s position has implications that are actually harmful the cause of gay rights. By saying that the legality of gay marriage should be decided by the states, Obama is essentially saying that sexual orientation is not protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While it is true that the Supreme Court has so far refused to extend “Suspect Class” status--which entitles cases involving members of the class a higher level of judicial scrutiny--to homosexuals, laws that restrict rights based on sexual orientation are still unconstitutional unless it can be shown that said laws represent a legitimate government interest.

“Legitimate government interest” is a legal term that no doubt has a very specific technical meaning derived from countless court decisions. However, since I’m not a lawyer and you’re probably not either, let’s assume that in layman’s terms it basically means that the law has to in some way prevent harm to society at large. So let’s consider whether gay marriage has the potential to affect those outside of the marriage in a negative way. There are a few major arguments about the harmful effects of gay marriage:

Gay marriage violates the First Amendment rights of Christians.
The argument relies on the idea that the legal institution of marriage and the religious institution of marriage are one and the same, and that marriage equality would somehow obligate churches to recognize gay marriage as legitimate in the eyes of the church. Since Christian churches are currently under no obligation to grant religious legitimacy to secular, Jewish, Pagan, or other non-Christian marriages, this seems unlikely. If a church is engaged in a non-religious activity for which it receives public funding (such as running an adoption agency or hospital), it may be required to recognize the legal rights of a married couple (gay or straight) married outside of the church, but that’s a requirement of the funding. If church-run institutions want discriminate under the guise of religion, they have to do it without taxpayer dollars. The other main argument--that the very existence of gay marriage in some way infringes on religious freedom--is a case of, as Jon Stewart put it, confusing “persecution” with “not getting your way.”

Gay marriage violates the sanctity of marriage.
This is basically the religious argument with a shroud of obfuscation around the religious stuff, kind of like dressing up Creationism as science and calling it “Intelligent Design.” The idea here is that there’s something culturally sacred (in a non-religious way), about marriage. Since something like half of all marriages end in divorce and people raffle their marital status off to midgets on reality TV, this argument doesn’t hold much water.

Even if marriage in this country did mean something, the idea that letting gays marry would somehow harm straight marriages just doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying  that allowing gay people to play tennis will somehow ruin tennis for straight people. The only way legalizing gay marriage is going to hurt a straight marriage is if one of the spouses is gay to begin with, in which case the marriage is probably destined to be short, unhappy, or both no matter what.

If we allow same-sex marriage, people will start marrying animals and inanimate objects.
This slippery slope argument ignores the fact that as far as the government is concerned marriage is a legal contract between two people. As soon as you acknowledge that animals and inanimate objects can’t enter into legal arrangements, this argument falls apart.  

Gay marriage will harm children.
When rational arguments are weak, people tend to fall back on emotional appeals, and one of the most effective is “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” This one is usually broken down into several sub-arguments:

• Same-sex marriage will lead to an increase in pedophilia: This one combines the turtle-fucking slippery slope argument aboves with the tendency of certain bigots to equate homosexuality with pedophilia (despite the lack of any statistical or scientific evidence to support such claims). It’s every bit as ridiculous as claiming that straight marriage legitimizes statutory rape.  
• Gay marriage will lead to gay adoption, which will harm the adopted children: Even if we accept that legalizing gay marriage will make it easier for gay couples to adopt, there is no evidence that growing up in a same-sex household harms a child in any way. So this argument is bullshit. Because science.
• I don’t want to explain buttsex to my kids: OK, I’ll admit that this argument usually isn’t phrased quite so bluntly, but when you strip it down, this is what you’re left with. The obvious flaw here, of course, is that explaining gay marriage to a child doesn’t require any more detail about fucking than explaining straight marriage does. In most case, something along the lines of “those two people are married because they love each other” does the trick just fine no matter what configuration of genitals is involved. I suspect that most people who use this argument are more worried that at some point they’ll have to admit that some people have sex for fun rather than procreation, which some religions look down upon. But that’s a religious issue and the government has absolutely no obligation to shield your child from ideas that might not conform to your chosen mythology.  

As I’ve already said, I’m no lawyer, but none of the above arguments against gay marriage seem to me to suggest a legitimate government interest in preventing gay people from entering into a legal contract. Therefore, gay marriage should be protected by the Constitution. Even if we pretend that Obama’s comments on gay marriage were sincere (which is kind of a stretch, given the context), his decision to invoke the states’ rights argument implies that homosexuals are second-class citizens who are not entitled to the same legal rights as the rest of us. Or, to paraphrase Winston Wolfe, maybe the gay community should “not start sucking Obama’s dick quite yet.”

Top Ten Important Lessons Of The Avengers Movie

1. Mark Ruffalo should work more. Those of you who’ve seen him in things like  The Brothers Bloom and The Kids Are Alright probably already knew this.
2. Aunt Robin is kind of a badass. Especially for a Canadian teen pop star.
3. Science doesn’t have to bore the shit out of the movie-going public. Pay attention, Ang Lee.
4. Even when Samuel L. Jackson doesn’t say “mother fucker,” you feel like he said “mother fucker.”
5. Every comic fan knows that when two or more Marvel Super-heroes first meet, it’s customary for them to fight. Including this scene in a Marvel movie lends authenticity.
6. It’s better to have Harry Dean Stanton and not need him than to need Harry Dean Stanton and not have him.
7. Joss Whedon sometimes does terrible things to beloved characters. Geeks really should have accepted this by now.
8. Captain America can be written as a guy from the 40s without coming across as hokey. Pay attention, nearly every Marvel comic writer.
9. If you want the villain to call the female lead a whiny cunt, have him do it in the Queen’s English and you can get away with it.  
10. There is nothing funnier than the Hulk swinging a god around like a rubber chicken.

Heritage or Hate?

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Bazooka Magazine.  

Although I rarely watch the news on WPSD, I do get a lot of entertainment from their Facebook page. There’s a certain Carlinesque, nihilistic joy in having a front-row seat to the kind of willful ignorance that’s directly responsible for human civilization’s steady downward spiral towards Idiocracy. This ignorance is rarely more proudly displayed than during the Confederate flag “discussions” that the Channel 6 web monkeys incite every Tater Day and periodically throughout the year.

It’s really not surprising that there are strong feelings about the Confederate flag in Kentucky, and especially in our part of the state. After all, all the “brother against brother” cliches about the Civil War apply doubly to Kentucky. Our state was the birthplace of both Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Kentuckians fought on both sides, several bloody battles and a lot of raids and skirmishes took place here, and we were one of only two states (along with Missouri) represented in the Confederate Congress despite officially remaining part of the Union. Since Confederate sympathies were especially strong in the western part of the state--Kentucky’s Confederate shadow government’s capital was officially Bowling Green, though in reality representatives spent most of the war in exile in Tennessee--we have good reason to be conflicted about our Confederate heritage, both as a region and as individuals.  

In the interest of historical accuracy, I should probably mention that what most people refer to as the “Confederate flag” was never actually the flag of the Confederacy, though its design did appear as an element on the second and third C.S.A. flags. The first Confederate national flag--and the flag the name “Stars and Bars” actually referred to during the Civil War era--closely resembled early American flags, but with three broad stripes instead of thirteen and between seven and thirteen stars (depending on the number of states in the Confederacy). In fact, the C.S.A. flag was so similar to that of the Union that it was often mistaken for the Stars and Stripes in the confusion of battle, leading Confederate soldiers to fire on their own troops. In order to cut down on the amount of friendly fire, the Confederate Army decided to adopt a battle flag that was distinct enough to prevent confusion. They ended up choosing a flag based on the “secessionist flag” of South Carolina, and that’s the flag--the one southerners like airbrush Hank Jr. onto and paint on the top of Dodge Chargers--that most people today think of as the “Confederate flag.” Because the Confederacy was never rich in resources or strong on logistics, the flag was never universally adopted by the Confederate army, but its use by prominent units like Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia made it a powerful symbol of the Civil War South.

A lot of people on both sides of the issue believe that some people consider the flag to be a symbol of racism because it represented the Confederacy and the Civil War was about slavery, but that’s a gross oversimplification. At that point in our nation’s history, the balance of power between the federal government and the states was still a point of heated contention. In the pre-Civil War era the states were still to some extent considered sovereign entities, with the federal government playing a role more akin to the European Union today. As a result, many people thought of themselves as citizens of a particular state rather than citizens of the United States. Many southerners who were not slave owners and were opposed to secession--notably Robert E. Lee--sided with the Confederacy because they felt loyalty to their home state trumped loyalty to the Union.

It’s also important to remember that when it comes to war, there’s usually a disconnect between the real motivations of those in power and the reasons that those who are actually doing the fighting believe they’re getting shot at. While many of the loudest proponents of succession certainly benefitted economically from slavery, most southerners didn’t own slaves and many were economically marginalized because of plantation agriculture. They wouldn’t support a war solely to protect the institution of slavery any more than Americans a few years ago would have supported a war to improve Halliburton’s bottom line and allow Dubya to get revenge on the guy who tried to kill his daddy. Think of “states’ rights” as the 1860s version of “weapons of mass destruction.” As the war--mostly fought in the South--went on, many southerners who neither supported slavery nor bought the states’ rights argument joined the Confederate army for no other reason than to protect their homes and communities.

On the other hand, the claim that the Civil War was entirely about state sovereignty and had nothing to do with racism is just as much of an oversimplification. Proponents of the “heritage” side of the argument who accept that the institution of slavery was at the root of succession often point out that the debate that led to the Civil War was about the expansion of slavery to new states, not abolition, that the southern states wanted to expand slavery for economic and political reasons that had nothing to do with racism, and that black Southerners fought in the Confederate army. These arguments, however, ignore the simple fact that slavery in America was was based around the premise that people of certain races were somehow “less human” than the rest of us. Therefore, proponents of slavery were also implicit proponents of racism, and even those who joined the Confederate cause to defend the rights of the states were placing political concerns above the basic human rights of slaves.

In light of history, the question of whether the South’s decision to succeed from the Union was rooted in racism is “yes and no.” I realize that in today’s political climate many people will find this kind of nuance off-putting--after all, isn’t everything supposed to boil down to two diametrically opposed alternatives that conveniently align with the beliefs of the political parties who run the Two Man Con?--but it’s the only conclusion that makes sense. Even if it were possible to conclude that the Civil War was or was not about racism, so far we’ve only covered the first few years of the Confederate flag’s history, so we’ve about a century and a half to go. The meanings of symbols, like the meanings of words, change over time. When a symbol becomes strongly associated with a particular movement or idea, the old meanings are often ruined. For example, the earliest use of the swastika was in Bronze Age India, where it was a symbol of good fortune. About four thousand years later (give or take a few centuries), the swastika was adopted by a symbol of the Nazi party. The association was so strong that today most people (especially in the West) who see a swastika conclude that the person displaying it is Nazi scum. And they’re usually right.  

For the next 100 years or so after the civil war, America as a whole was largely ambivalent about the Confederate flag. Some saw it as a reminder of one of the worst times in our nation’s history, others felt it honored southerners who had followed in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers by taking up arms to defend themselves against what they saw as government oppression. Because more than a few ex-Confederates became involved in white supremacist groups after the war, the flag did take on some racist associations, but for the most part these associations weren’t especially strong. It was when the Civil Rights Movement started building up steam that the Confederate flag was widely adopted as a symbol by southern opponents of the movement, especially white supremacist groups like the KKK. Some tried to claim that opposition to Civil Rights, like the Civil War, were about state’s rights, but such arguments were paper thin and it’s during this era that the phrase gained its reputation as a racist dog whistle. More importantly, unlike the southerners during the Civil War, the people now flying the flag weren’t fighting an opposing army, they were committed acts of terrorism against their fellow citizens because of the color of their skin. All the levels of abstraction that existed during the Civil War era were stripped away and to many the flag became a symbol of open and violent racism.

So, heritage or hate? Once again, there’s not a simple “yes” or “no” answer. In certain contexts, the flag can still be a genuine expression of southern heritage. However, because of the flag’s co-option by racist agitators, the choice to display it publicly reveals a certain level of disregard for those who have been victimized by people flying it, just like wearing a swastika reveals a lack of respect for Holocaust survivors no matter how much you insist you’re wearing it for its luck-bringing properties. Of course, that conclusion is based on historical context, and most people who rally around the Confederate flag have at best a vague grasp of its history. The truth is that for most people who identify strongly with the Confederate flag, it’s about tribalism. They  wear it, fly it from the backs of their trucks, and have it tattooed on their bodies to convey a sense of identity and membership in a particular group. In this way, they’re a lot like the people who brand themselves with sports team mascots or corporate logos. The main difference is that people waving Kentucky Wildcat and Harley-Davidson flags have never burned a cross on somebody’s lawn or engaged in open warfare against their own government.

Personally, outside of a few very specific contexts I feel that public display of the Confederate flag is offensive, but I also support the First Amendment rights of those whose opinions differ from mine. However, freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences, so people who choose to display the Confederate flag need to accept that a lot of people will interpret it as a sign of ignorance and racism. Likewise, the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee you the right to display the Confederate flag (or any other symbol) in all situations. Private businesses can ask you to leave; school officials have considerable power to enforce rules against potentially disruptive behavior, including the display of symbols that some may find offensive; and tuber-based civic festivals have every right to ban Confederate flags from parades, even if those festivals are run by a government entity. While freedom of speech is a Constitutional right, freedom to be in a parade is not. Those who claim First Amendment violations where there are none prove they meet at least half of the “ignorant racist” stereotype associated with self-proclaimed “rebels.” Whether or not they fulfill the “racist” part of  the stereotype can usually be determined by asking their opinions on things like welfare, rap music, and the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Food Stamp Conversions

As a result of some comments Newt Gingrich made regarding food stamps, it's come to light that more white people than black people receive food stamps. About 42% of food stamp recipients are white, compared to only 28% who are African American. This of course presents a small problem with the "welfare Cadillac" meme, but "the 53%" needn't worry. With just a few minor changes, they can use the same tired old arguments to talk about how lazy whit people are taking their tax money. The following conversion list should prove helpful:

• Cadillac = Pick-up Truck
• Rims = Mud Tires
• Cell Phone = Hunting Rifle
• Big Screen TV = Bass Boat
• Gold Teeth = Confederate Flag Tattoos
  
• Tommy Hilfiger = Official NASCAR
  
• Junk Food = Replace references to specific types with "pork rinds" and "Moon Pies"
• Soda = Specify "RC Cola"
  
• Crack = Meth
• Oprah = Hee Haw

Other Laws Oklahoma Should Pass

In November of 2010, the Oklahoma legislature approved an amendment that would make it illegal for courts to consider Sharia law when deciding cases. More recently, legislation has been introduced to make it illegal to sell food products made out of aborted fetuses. I, for one, am glad to hear that Oklahoma is boldly taking the initiative to ensure that there are laws in place to prevent things that have absolutely no chance of ever happening. However, there are still so many imaginary threats that Oklahoma lawmakers have yet to address that I fear they may be overwhelmed when it comes to deciding what the next battle should be. That’s why I’ve put together the following list of what, in my opinion, are the most pressing completely made up dangers facing Oklahoma and society as a whole. I hope that Oklahoma legislators will make it a priority to address as many of these issues as possible in the immediate future.

1. Werewolves and vampires are two completely different mythological species, and should not be allowed to intermarry.
2. People with no formal training in the Dark Arts should not be permitted to perform rituals or read from ancient blasphemous tomes, as this inevitably leads to an outbreak of uncontrolled demonic activity. A regulatory system providing for formal licensing and accreditation in the Black Arts is highly recommended.
3. Anyone who captures a leprechaun is entitled to a pot of gold. Any leprechaun who gives a person “fairy gold” that turns into something with no value after a period of time should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
4. Mental institutions, especially those subject to frequent escapes, should stop providing hooks to patients who have lost their hands. It only leads to tragedy.
5. “Loose Cannon” police detectives should be forced to turn in their gun and badge as soon as they are assigned to a case. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this improves officer efficiency and success rate by over 1000%.
6. Popular high school students will no longer be allowed to make wagers regarding the captain of the football team’s ability to turn the quiet, introverted girl with glasses into prom queen.
7. Aliens may not perform anal probes without express written consent of the person to be probed. If the probee is under the age of 18, consent must be provided by a parent or legal guardian.
8. Jenkem should be treated as a Schedule II controlled substance.
9. Referring to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named by name should be classified an act of treason against the wizarding world.
10. Debates about the Romantic poets at NASCAR events should be strictly prohibited.