Did You Hear About the Thing With the Thing?

The things in question: a certain health care law, and how the Supreme Court ruled earlier today.

Many observers of the SCOTUS had predicted a 6-3 decision upholding the law, or a 5-4 decision for it, or a 5-4 ruling that declared it unconstitutional. Also in the cards early this morning: partial invalidation of the Affordable Care Act, such as striking the individual mandate but keeping other provisions intact.

But in most cases, Chief Justice John Roberts and occasional swing vote Anthony Kennedy were seen to be voting in the same way. It's practically impossible to find anyone who foresaw the conservative Roberts affirming the law while the moderate Kennedy tried to kill it.

That's because most observers, including me, were working from the assumption that the Justices would NOT consider whether the law was constitutional, but would rather just exercise their usual political hackery and rule one way or another according to their political leanings.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the final decision -- one of the key players on the right decided to not be an activist judge. Instead, he decided to be a judge judge. Instead of subverting the Constitution of the United States with the Personal Opinion of My Own Prodigious Intellect, he dared to judge the law on its merits. (!!!) Then, he had the audacity to issue a ruling that explained that the legislation was unsavory to his political taste buds, but constitutionally sound. (double !!! !!!)

Listen to the language from the decision, written by the Briefly Esteemed John Roberts:

"The Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits. The Court does so today." Already, Roberts' lack of enthusiasm for the law is apparent. As in: I wouldn't support this piece of crap legislation, except that I sort of have to, dagnabbit. "But the Court does not express an opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people."

Roberts doesn't even believe the federal government has a right to force people to buy health insurance. He doesn't read the Commerce Clause in that manner. The individual mandate survives only because he agrees that the government can penalize the uninsured. "The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A [the individual mandate] is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax."

(I can easily see him saying "tax" in the same tone you and I might use for "f*ck." Easily.)

(Bonus parenthetical comment: Roberts' characterization of the penalty as a "tax" means the Chief Justice is handing Mitt Romney, R-Windup Doll, another billion or so rounds of ammo for the presidential campaign. Goody.)

So it's plain that Congressman John Roberts would have stridently opposed Obamacare. It's plain that Chief Justice John Roberts dislikes the policy preferences that drove Democrats to craft the law. But it's also plain that the man has enough respect for American representative democracy to be content with playing his part, and no more. The intelligent design of checks and balances is not lost on the Chief Justice. Hallelujah, I guess.

I didn't expect to be praising Roberts today. This is the same guy who, when nominated for the SCOTUS position in the first place, conveniently "forgot," under oath, that he ever belonged to the Federalist Society, a group farther to the right than the American Socialist Party is to the left. This is the same guy who lent his approval to Citizens United, the most anti-democratic Court decision of the millennium. Roberts is going to continue to do his best to make life harder for disadvantaged and poorly-connected Americans, for many years probably. He's still, on the whole, a force for corporate interests over the general well-being of the nation. He's still responsible for making sure the health care law didn't compel states to expand Medicaid -- that section DID get stripped -- so at least the right wing's war on the poor continues to go well.

He's still probably guilty of perjury, probably.

But forget all that for another fifteen seconds. Today, Roberts placed his ego beneath the U.S. Constitution.


And sadly, America was surprised.

Scatological, Theological, Same Difference

An anecdote that has the power to make you believe way more, or way less, in heaven and hell. Like everything else in life, the secret is perspective. Time for you to find out what yours is.

SYNOPSIS

A parent overhears his two boys, "Bobby" and "Dave," in the prime of their poop-joke-making days, discussing the afterlife.

CHAPTER ONE (frankly, it's the only chapter)

9:30 on a lazy summer night: bedtime. Bobby, age nine and full of the evening's desperate energy, seized his toothbrush and began to carelessly coat it in toothpaste. Swirls of magenta, white and teal trickled down the bristles at an impossibly slow speed, like a family of mismatched neon slugs.
Bobby's younger brother, Dave, stood at the toilet, giggling while relieving himself. Not an uncommon multitasking activity for the wiggly and precocious six-year-old.
"I used to think that when we died," Bobby said, "if we were bad, we went to a place that was all poop."
Dave giggled, flushed, and started on his own teeth-brushing mission. "And all pee!" he added.
Bobby paused his tooth-brushing long enough to chuckle, then disagree with the younger boy. "No, just everything was made of poop, even the houses."
"Even the food!" Dave chimed in.
"Well, maybe you had to drink pee."
"And the rain could be pee."
"Ewwwwww. Gross." Laughter.
"Ewwwwww." Snickers.
More toothbrushing ensued. Bobby finished first, which allowed him to expound on his earlier point:
"And if we were good, we went to a place where everything was made of gold." 
Dave, not terribly interested in the living conditions of a golden paradise, spit and circled back to the scatological portion of the story.
"And you would drive around in poop cars..."
"It would be so stinky all the time," said Bobby, and the treatise on an afterlife replete with bodily functions would no doubt have gone on for a while, had the boys' father, Jon, not stepped in.
"Finish up guys if you want a chance to read before lights out. And keep the poop talk confined to the bathroom."

THE END (curtain)

You don't need me to spell out the reasons why that anecdote's capable of reinforcing OR threatening the concepts of heaven and hell. And I won't. I'll just say that fire and brimstone no longer sounds like the worst  everlasting punishment ever devised.

The story, obviously, is zero percent fictional. In fact, it's barely an hour old. The names haven't even been adequately changed to protect the guilty parties. Sorry for all the poop.

It's the Numbers Who Are Omnipotent

I believe in Random.

This occurred to me while taking a recent survey. During the questionnaire, I was asked at three points to identify with a religious group or tradition. The first time, I chose "Christian." I didn't hesitate much. That's how I was raised, I philosophically agree with the Golden Rule and that cheek-turning bizness, and thus far, I'm a much better Christian than a Taoist. At least if I get to define the terms.

The second time, I answered "Agnostic." Just to even things out.

The third time, I clicked "Other."

Problem is, the Yellow Pages -- if they even still exist -- are conspicuously unfull of Other Agnostic Christian churches. It's not even a category!

Naturally, long after the survey was complete, the questions poked at me. What am I? Where do I fit? In what do I believe, besides avoiding sentence-ending prepositions? Those are the three big faith-y questions. And they are tough to answer definitively.

Well, I'm pretty sure I believe in Random. Let's steal a phrase from Frankie Baum. I believe in The Great and Powerful Random. Maybe even The Great and Powerful Randomizer.

Probability is omnipotent. A certain percentage of us will:

Get cancer
Win the lottery
Sign divorce papers
Miss our next credit card payment
Wake up with a hangover
Die tomorrow morning
Give birth
Eat Grape-Nuts for breakfast

And with enough research, I can tell you how many people in this country, on July 6, 2012, will meet the eight outcomes listed above. Pick any random date in the immediate future, and I can tell you how Random will act on that date. I can't tell you who Random will choose, who the Great Randomizer has predestined for a happy occasion or a tragic twist of fate.

Ah, but I can tell you that in 2012, x Americans will die in car crashes. I can tell you for certain that the number will be between 20,000 and 40,000. There is a zero-point-zero percent chance that the actual result will fall outside those numbers. Look.

2005: 43,510
2006: 42,708
2007: 41,259
2008: 37,423
2009: 33,883
2010: 32,885
2011: 32,310 (estimate)

(Source: here you go)

I could even make a $1000 bet with you that the 2012 number will fall between 27,000 and 35,000. Not that you would take that bet. You are not stupid. Why would I ever insult you? You are reading my blog! You are one of my favorite people in the world!

Okay. Point: If there is powerful celestial being, it is not as powerful as the numbers that explain probability. Or it has set itself up to be less potent than those numbers. A slave to those numbers, even.

But before you complete the process of burning me at the stake, let me say a couple more things.

You can not prove God exists; you can prove probability exists.

You cannot disprove God choosing to intervene in someone's personal life; you cannot disprove the force of random chance in a population of 300 million.

Taken as a whole, the past two paragraphs lead me to believe first in the supreme power of probability, and to begin crafting a theology around that. Do I have to reject a Judeo-Christian God-figure, as a result? Of course not. I just have to place that god's power one notch below the might of numbers.

Same-Sex Marriage, Take Three

Last take for a while on the SSM front.

American society doesn't often change very quickly. Well, sure, transformative changes like the Louisiana Purchase or WWII or state-sponsored genocide or the invention of the Internet can have a sudden impact on any nation. But attitudes don't shift overnight. If this country's population heavily endorses one side of an issue, its mind stays made up for a long time.

This was true regarding the women's right to vote, of interracial marriage, of Sunday liquor laws. Those restrictions on freedom took a long time to eradicate. Decades, generations, lifetimes. (In the case of booze regulation, the fight rages on in several parts of the country, somehow. The mind boggles, as it often does during post-making. What's so special about Sunday that state governments should step in and curb whiskey sales during those hours?)

Focus! The same national resistance to change remains true, to this day, on issues like capital punishment. For decades now, Americans have agreed that the death penalty ought to remain in place, to be applied in certain murder cases. Some national soul-searching in the 1960s notwithstanding, the numbers say we historically do not mind a good-n-bloody execution once in a while:

Thanks to gallup.com for that nugget, which can be found here. But like I was saying, social mores don't abruptly do a 180-degree turn. It takes generations to accomplish great things like abolition, restoration of civil rights, anti-discrimination laws. Sometimes the battle can't be won, and the government gets to keep killing people. Mostly guilty people. Mostly.

But this post isn't actually about the happy subject of capital punishment. Focus!

You know what's bucking the trend, and changing faster than a really really fast-changing thing? Americans' attitudes toward same-sex marriage. And it's moving the right direction, steamrolling the opposition like a really really strong fast thing, one equipped with steamrolling capabilities. (Help me, Simile Metaphor People.)

Before the pretty graph, some pretty numbers, culled from my online sojourns:

Americans endorsing interracial marriage (Gallup poll)
1973 ---- 29 percent
1978 ---- 36
1983 ---- 43
1988 ---- 48
1993 ---- 48

Americans endorsing same-sex marriage (Gallup-Pew Research composite figures, wikipedia link)
2004 ---- 33 percent
2006 ---- 41
2008 ---- 39
2010 ---- 43
2012 ---- 49

What's different? Yeah, the increments.

Here, a graph that illustrates what I'm saying.

Fivethirtyeight.com made this one for me. Thanks, Nate Silver. As the trendlines indicate, this whole SSM hullabaloo could be solved in a short time. How short? Well, interracial marriage numbers make a good model -- once approval crested 50 percent in 1997, it began to skyrocket. Just two increments later, it passed 70; today, approval sits at 86 percent.

Let's project out a similar polling trend for gay marriage, only instead of five years at a time, let's keep using two. Try this on:
2014 ---- 53
2016 ---- 60
2018 ---- 71
2020 ---- 82

Confession -- that looks way too optimistic. Let's tone the numbers down a bit, and say that the increase will be roughly half of what interracial marriage accomplished. Perhaps, instead:
2014 ---- 52
2016 ---- 56
2018 ---- 61
2020 ---- 67

You know who's jumping ship in 2018? Just about all the SSM opponents left in office. You know what's a non-issue in 2020? Yeah, this thing that has us all in a tizzy today.

Victory over the foes of equality is attainable, and quickly. Good thing. The kids I know in households with two moms probably won't mind.

The Mormon Thorn

Preface: I like Mormons.

I have Mormon clients, Mormon acquaintances, and I wish LDS missionaries well when they knock on my door and hand me yet another Book of Mormon. I like the Mormons I've met. Why shouldn't I? They're usually nice people.

I mean, the kids on my front steps, in the ties, stammering about Jesus, they're just kids, doing the best they can. And their parents are usually just parents, doing the best they can, usually.

So why do I feel like Mitt Romney's Mormonism is a ticking political time bomb?

whoa

Well, to be perfectly blunt, it's probably because his church has a history of responding to persecution by turning in on itself, looking out too dearly for its financial health, and setting up a cultish-looking hierarchy. It's also probably because his church's theology is very nontraditional... all right, I won't mince words. LDS beliefs are routinely offensive to other Christians. (Not offensive to me, because if someone wants to believe something, they should go ahead and do that. I might disagree, even raise my eyebrows a little, but I do that to Muslims, Calvinists, Jews, Catholics, and witch doctors. Nobody should feel special if I politely scoff at the most preposterous sections of their dogma.)

Tangential Paragraph Alert: I'd like to someday delve into the issues people encounter when they decide to abandon the Mormon faith, but that will have to wait for its own post. Going to invoke the term "someday" here again. In other words, please don't wait up for it. That post requires some responsible wading on my part through various personal horror stories of family bonds irrevocably broken, allegations of brainwashing, and the like, and I'll have to do it with an eye out for veracity and believability. I've started that research already (this website is pretty cool as a jumping off point), but no promises, ok?

What we know for sure right now is that unlike me, many Protestants and Catholics (these are the people who vote!) are intolerant of Mormonism's significant theological quirks. Those quirks include:

a) placement of the Book of Mormon on equal footing with the Bible
b) rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, replaced with the almost-polytheistic belief that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are three different beings
c) a widespread belief, endorsed by church leaders, that humans can become like gods or actual gods in the afterlife, and that in fact, that's what our God is -- a former man himself
d) posthumous baptism of non-believers to ensure their salvation; the recipient of the baptism is said to possess, beyond the grave, the choice between accepting and rejecting the ceremony.

Those are four big ones. Other idiosyncrasies include:

a) a past embrace of polygamy (officially denounced in 1890)
b) eternal marriage -- i.e., your spouse is your spouse in the afterlife too
c) a racially problematic past. Church founder Joseph Smith admitted African Americans to the priesthood, but then, the church refused to ordain African-Americans from 1852 to 1978, and taught that if blacks so fortunate as to reach heaven, they would function there merely as servants.
d) the so-called "magic underwear" prescriptions (wiki leak here if you're interested)
e) a graduated view of heaven, in which the celestial afterlife is divided into differently attainable levels of bliss
f) a hierarchy that puts one man atop the church, based on seniority, and endows him with the ability to receive revelation directly from God. (Women are not permitted to become priests, bishops, or apostles; ascending to the title of Prophet is not a realistic career goal for a young Mormon girl.)
g) the incontrovertible fact that the church makes a lot of money. A lot. A few Google searches turn up that the Mormon church owns multiple large businesses, with revenue in the billions of dollars, while also taking in at least $5 billion in tithes annually.

"So what do you guys want to hear this election cycle?"

What's fascinating is how much those quirks -- which cause many well-meaning Christians to slap the "cult" label on the LDS branch of the Christian family tree -- will matter on a political level for Mr. Romney this fall. Or how little they'll matter, I guess. They didn't matter much when he successfully ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2003. They didn't matter much in the recently completed primary season, at least not enough to deny him the nomination. And Mormon beliefs didn't prevent Democratic Senator Harry Reid from rising to the post of Senate Majority Leader.

So, to recap, voters seem to agree with me: We like Mormons. They have some unique articles of faith, and most certainly a less-than-perfect history, but hell, Catholics have all that too, and in spades.

And Mitt's political positions can't hurt him with the Republican base. Look, the man is pro-life, anti-gay marriage (anti-civil unions, even!), unapologetically pro-business, and wants us all to be taxed at a minus-38 percent rate while we ramp up for nuclear war with Iran, just for fun. There's a lot for conservatives to like about Romney. The 2012 edition, anyway.

Also, he's not named Barack Obama. I hear these days that's a very endearing trait to Republicans.

Still... is the other stuff, the quirk stuff, is that going to matter? And if it doesn't end up mattering, and by some awful practical joke perpetrated on us by the political gods, Willard Romney becomes our 44th President, does it mean that there really exists no religious test a presidential candidate has to pass? You have to admit that if the LDS church is in the American mainstream, it's at the very fringes. Beyond it lies organizations like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the like. If we elect a biracial secret Muslim named Hussein, then a future god in magic underwear, does that mean we've finally broken the mold, and we can focus more on the person's vision for the country and less on his/her nifty ideas for the afterlife?

So yeah, a Mormon president, I would like that very much. In theory. Anything that leads to a confirmed atheist becoming President, I'm cool with. Or a Muslim, or a Hindu. No religious test, just like it says in Article VI of the Constitution Thingy, right? I'll take a Mormon, sure. As long as it's not Mitt Romney. Or any Republican.

Same-Sex Marriage, Take Two

When it comes to the confluence of homosexuality, love, marriage and what the Bible has to say, we all think we know better than God.

(By "we all," I don't mean my fellow liberals and me. I mean all of us. Like all the humans. All, like "everyone." Meaning people. Peoples everywhere.)

We all think we're so smart, we all think that God should just shut up already and let us talk about what love is, and what it isn't. We human beings are the experts, after all.

It's clear, by our behavior, that we all think God hasn't put enough mental energy into this whole love business. And let's not even get started on marriage. God's pretty clueless in that aspect too.

Exhibit One: Literalists who aren't literalists. A literalist's arguments against gay marriage go something like, "the Bible forbids it," "Leviticus is clear on this topic," "Even the New Testament says being gay is sinful," "God ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman."

Then that same person goes ahead and reads the exact opposite meaning into a neighboring verse. Or he dismisses it out of hand. Translation: I may pretend to believe every word in the Bible, but I reserve the right to change my mind on a whim. God didn't REALLY mean we should stone anyone. Silly God.

The main four arguments a fundamentalist Christian makes are easy to annihilate, one by one. The Bible forbids lots of things, like any sort of work from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, upon penalty of death. Leviticus is also clear that we should stone people for minor offenses, like jaywalking. The New Testament also calls debate, jesting and foolishness sins, which don't appear to count, ever. And God ordained marriage to be between one man and *at least* one woman, as evidenced by a cursory jaunt through the book of Genesis.

So God knows best, literalists say, except when it's inconvenient. Biblical arguments against same-sex marriage rely on an assertion, spoken or not, that I Know Better Than God.

Exhibit Two: Agnostics and atheists who dismiss the Bible out of hand. When they agree to meet believers on their terms, atheists will often say the Bible is ambiguous or inconsistent on the topic of homosexuality, which is only possible if you willfully ignore scriptures that condemn man-on-man love. (In their defense, Jesus didn't address homosexuality at all, so there's nothing there to ignore in the first place.) But their theological choices are basically one giant I Know Better Than God, If God Even Exists statement. Same difference, in the end.

Recap: Religious extremists have decided that God's not serious about curtailing, for example, divorce, but is simultaneously very serious about stomping out homosexuality. Silly God, they're saying. Agnostics and atheists, by definition, don't care much what God thinks or is purported to think. Silly God, they've concluded.

Where does that leave the rest of us -- those of us who care about what and who God is, but are not willing to read the Bible ungullibly? What about those of us who like to examine scripture (all scriptures) with an eye out for what the text, rather than what it says? Those of us who like to witness love, to respect love, to enjoy  love in as many non-abusive forms as possible?

(Are there even that many of that kind of "us" out there?)

I believe it leaves us with only one option: removing the Bible from the discussion altogether, and practicing a deference to law. Deference to the law of man, that is, not the law of God. If a person can make a convincing constitutional case against SSM, without once invoking divine authority, then they should go ahead and decide to believe that way. If another person can succeed in re-defining marriage in legal terms as a covenant between two consenting adults, then they should try and implement their idea of marriage, through legal and political means.

But in the meantime, society would be better off if we stopped pretending we know better than God.

Same-Sex Marriage, Take One

Maybe you've heard.

President Obama expressed his support for same-sex marriage yesterday afternoon. He is, as one deduces pretty quickly, the first sitting president to do so.

Barack's Big Decision, revealed in a television interview and confirmed in an e-mail sent to supporters, is no doubt News with a capital N, and is no doubt worth celebrating.. (My favorite line: "Even at my own dinner table, when I look at Sasha and Malia, who have friends whose parents are same-sex couples, I know it wouldn't dawn on them that their friends' parents should be treated differently.") 

Who knew: a Christian chief of state is capable of finding his moral compass from time to time, after all.

Still, the miracle here is not that a President "courageously" came down on the side of compassion and equal rights for all citizens. It's that a middle-aged outspoken Christian role model can no longer be legitimately defined by his homophobic attitudes.

I'm not exaggerating. According to a study done by the Barna Group (an evangelical polling company), the first word or phrase that unchurched 18-to-29 year-olds use to describe Christians is "anti-gay."

Not "Christlike"; not "compassionate." Not "exclusive"; not "hypocritical". Not "loving"; not "religious."

Just anti-gay.

It's not like the final numbers are all that close, either -- that's the first thing mentioned by 91 percent of respondents. The first thing! By nine in ten young adults! Hating gays is the defining characteristic of Christianity, by a long shot, from the outside looking in. Remember, this poll was conducted by a company run by evangelicals.

(While that sinks in, here's an advertisement. If your interest is piqued, this is the book in which the study appears. It's an exploration of young people's attitudes toward the Church and its members.)

Commercial break over. There's a not-too-ancient spiritual song that you'll recognize if you grew up in the church. The opening line goes, "They will know we are Christians by our ..." Well, by our what? According to the song, the next lyric is "love." 

Pshaw. Fantasylandtalk. The people have spoken, and the way they plan on knowing someone is a Christian is by detecting disdain for gays.

Congratulations everyone. Turn to your neighbor in the pew, and give him a well-earned pat on the back. Not the lower back, though. TOOO GAAYYY