July 1^st

Cal Thomas assures us that as a result of the SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage “secularists will try to drive religious people, and especially Christians, out of the public square.” Then he claims, “Given their political clout and antipathy to Christian doctrines, some gay activists are likely to go after the tax exempt status of Christian colleges that prevent the cohabitation of unmarried students, or openly homosexual ones, as well as churches that refuse to marry them.” This is nonsense, of course, but more and better nonsense is yet to come!

But first, where exactly is this “antipathy to Christian doctrine?” I suppose Thomas means that somewhere in the New Testament he has found a quote from Jesus condemning gays. He hasn’t, of course, because Jesus sys nothing, not a word, about gays. Most of the so called condemnation of gays comes not from the New Testament, not from Christians, but from Leviticus in the Old Testament; as most everyone knows Leviticus prohibits many things; eating pork, eating  shellfish, drinking alcohol in a holy place (that sacramental wine has got to go!) etc. And then Jesus, when asked what the greatest commandment was, said that it was to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Thomas believes, “As with legal challenges to the owners of bakeries …in the news for refusing to bake a cake for same sex weddings, activists who demand total conformity to their agenda will seek to put out of business and silence anyone who believes differently.” I suppose if you own a restaurant you can refuse service to a gay couple who wishes to have you host a reception. You could claim that hosting it would violate your religious beliefs.  Suppose you use the same argument to avoid hosting the reception for a black couple’s wedding, or a “mixed race” couple’s wedding; why is one OK and not the other? In both cases you are attempting to cover bigotry with a religious blanket; that hasn’t worked in the past and it won’t work now. Bigotry eventually manages to sticks its head out.

Thomas harps on these “unelected judges.” They aren’t, in practice, unelected at all. If you elect a president then you also elect the political views of the Justices that President appoints. (But not always; Thomas bemoans the fact that many Justices appointed by Republican Presidents have become much more liberal once on the bench, Blackmun, Berger, Souter, O’Connor, Kennedy and Stevens to name a few.) He says that the five “unelected judges” have imposed on 300 million Americans what many believe to be an “abomination.” True. But even more do not believe it is an “abomination” and are in favor of the ruling. Cal Thomas is part of the past and I believe from reading his columns that he is beginning to recognize that  himself. No matter, he has nothing whatever to gain by changing.

 

 

June 30^th

This comment will be briefer than usual. The main event today was the entrance of Governor (Sit down and shut up!) Christie into the ring of Republican candidates for the Presidency. One more, Governor Kasich of Ohio, has declared that he will declare on July 21^st. We now have a considerable number of hopeful candidates.

When numbers of any species are gathered together (This is beginning to sound like a Bible Story; it isn’t), there is usually a special name applied to the group:  we have a murmuration of starlings; a parliament of owls; a pod of whales; a richness of martins and a band of gorillas. For this group may I suggest a snarl of Republicans? Donald Trump has made it plausible and Governor Christie has made it unavoidable!

June 29^th

Pat Buchanan’s column today focuses on the Confederate battle flag and indeed all things symbolizing the Confederacy. Buchanan has never come to terms with the civil rights movement. He famously said that he, “…longed for the days when they had their places and we had ours.” He was speaking, of course, about Washington D.C. watering holes where he might now have to see other than white people.

Now he tries to equate the forgiveness by the relatives of those murdered in Charleston with the riots in other localities where police have murdered black men. The police killed people they had sworn to protect; the Charleston murderer killed people he claimed were taking over the country. Buchanan can’t see the difference between the two; his political and social blinders work just fine to disguise it.

Buchanan seems unhappy that many people see the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate and want it removed. The flag was prominently displayed by the murderer of the Charleston church goers as part of his racist “manifesto.” This Confederate battle flag, now widely used as a symbol of resistance to integration, was not much seen until the Dixiecrats pulled it out of moth balls and paraded it around at the Democratic convention in 1948. They were making a statement against Harry Truman’s desegregating of the armed forces. From then on it became a symbol of resistance to integration, peaking with the SCOTUS decision in Brown vs Board of Education.

Buchanan has now applied his favorite word to this flag battle, “cultural Marxism.” This is aptly defined as a “snarl word” for use when a much more vicious term than political correctness is required. Buchanan gets credit for its development. (It really has nothing to do with Karl Marx as any political scholar can tell you.)

Buchanan cites various southern politicians calling for removal of monuments to heroes of the Confederacy. Everyone from Senator Mitch McConnell –take down the Statue of Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky Capital—to Governor Terry McAuliffe, who, because he wants the battle flag removed from license plates is accused by Buchanan of soon wanting statues of Robert E. Lee removed from Richmond! Say what? From wanting Confederate battle flags removed from car license plates to removing Statues of Robert E. Lee? Buchanan just cannot understand that the Confederate battle flag was, and is, a symbol of resistance to equal rights for blacks and it was used as a symbol by a murderous lunatic to kill nine black worshipers in a church. I don’t recall anyone yelling, “In the name of Robert E. Lee I don’t want my kids going to school with black children!”

Buchanan claims that the “flag is not so much a symbol of hatred as an object of hatred;” it is both of course. Sally Jenkins in her Washington Post Column called the Confederacy treasonous, and it was. Buchanan says that this visceral hatred is manifest in “…equating Washington, Jefferson, John Calhoun, Andrew Jackson and Lee with Hitler’s Third Reich.” But none of these people were revolting against their country in defense of slavery except for Lee and Lee did violate the oath he took when he entered West Point. The people supporting 1960s segregation were not the founding fathers; they were Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia. This was the group that used the Confederate flag to fight against civil rights. Buchanan doesn’t mention any of  them.

June 28^th

Mona Charen is writing a little revisionist history in her column today; she claims that the Democrats opposed civil rights legislation which the Republicans enthusiastically supported. She points to the “Southern Manifesto” which allowed members of Congress to express their opposition to Brown vs Board of Education, a SCOTUS decision desegregating public schools. Almost all of the southern members of the House and the Senate voted for this manifesto and against desegregation. The signatories of this document were indeed Democrats but Mona doesn’t tell us that they would soon become Republicans. Desegregation had been championed by Democrats so the segregationists deserted the Democratic Party and went over to the Republican Party. Not all southerners voted for bigotry; Lyndon Johnson, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. didn’t vote for this manifesto. Two years after this attempt to roll back the SCOTUS decision, Lyndon Baines Johnson was President of the United States and not long after that his address to the Congress contained this:

"No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law."

President Johnson also recognized that his action had lost the south for the Democratic Party, and he said so. Of course he was right; the “Solid South” is now solidly Republican and it’s because Democrats supported civil rights. Mona skips this part.

Mona Charen takes Bill Clinton to task for his eulogy of J. William Fulbright. Fulbright was a long serving Senator from Arkansas, Clinton’s home state. She claims that Fulbright was a racist; he was certainly a segregationist and possibly a racist as well. Of course so were most of the founding fathers. Jefferson and Washington both owned large numbers of slaves. It is interesting that Charen seeks out Fulbright since he revealed some serious currency manipulation between American contributors to Israel and that country’s sending the funds back here to buy favorable propaganda toward Israel. Here is some of Fulbright’s thinking forty-one years after his resignation from the Senate:

“Throughout our nation’s history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But…when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our Puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.”

“Harsh and angry moralism;” --which party’s candidates fit  that characterization?

June 27^th

In downtown Traverse City today there was a Gay Pride parade. There were hundreds of marchers. Not all of them were gay, there were many sympathizers too, and many not in the parade, standing along the way, applauded those who marched. Michigan has a law against gay marriage but Governor Snyder has agreed that SCOTUS’ decision is now the law of the land and ordered the authorities to “fully comply” with the ruling…and then there is Texas!

Texas Governor Abbott ordered officials there to “prioritize religious objections” in complying with the law. This means that if you work for the state office that issues marriage licenses and you object to gay couples getting married you can claim your religious beliefs compel you not to comply with that request. Keep in mind that the “religious” clerk who makes this claim may not have been in a church since he was six years old, Governor Abbott allows him to hide his bigotry behind a phony religious mask. I wonder if Viet-Nam war draftees were encouraged by the then Texas Governor to exercise the same privilege. Want to bet?

Texas has no shortage of public officials outraged over the SCOTUS decision on gay marriage. No less than a sitting US Senator, Ted Cruz, has remarked about the effect of “five unelected Judges on the Supreme Court nullifying the wishes of 300 million Americans.” Most any high school kid could tell the Senator that the federal constitution which he claims to revere, and which he has sworn to uphold, specifically requires that the Justices of the Supreme Court be appointed by the President of the United States. You would suppose that a graduate of Harvard Law School would know at least as much about the Constitution of the United States as a high school kid. Can you skip the course in Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School? Probably not but maybe Cruz snoozed through the lectures on the selection of Supreme Court justices.

Then there are Cruz’s comments about this decision being in opposition to the “wishes of 300 million Americans.” That’s demonstrably horse hockey; most polls show that slightly better than 60 percent of the population support gay marriage and an equal number say that states have no right to prohibit it. One Republican panelist, S.E. Cupp, was in full support of the SCOTUS decision; she claims that the Republican Party will be a “relic” if they don’t update their rhetoric. I’m afraid it’s too late for that Ms. Cupp.

June 26^th

You really have to feel sorry for poor Justice Scalia; he has had a monumentally disappointing couple of days. First, just yesterday, his colleagues approved, again, the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and today the court has nullified prohibitions against same sex marriage. Yesterday’s decision was a resounding six to three, todays was a narrower five to four, but poor Scalia was on the losing end both times. Two days in a row his response to this disappointment has been to produce a hissy fit. Notice please that Justice Thomas and Justice Alito have also been on the wrong side of history with their decisions on these issues but they haven’t seen fit to respond like an eight year old child denied a favorite candy.

Then we have the absolute outrage from some of the Republican Presidential candidates; Governor Huckabee, “expressed calls of judicial tyranny.” Santorum pointed out that the five judges were unelected. Governor Jindal claimed that marriage issues were ordained by God. Donald Trump disgraced himself; he twittered, “Once again Bush appointed Justice John Roberts has let us down.” Trump apparently doesn’t follow this stuff very closely because Justice Roberts was today, unlike yesterday, on the side preferred by Donald Trump; in fact he wrote a dissenting opinion. Governor Rick Perry wants to begin action to amend the Constitution so that same sex marriage is prohibited. Not all Republican candidates made themselves look absurd: Jeb Bush said the he disagreed with the ruling but that it was important to respect religious freedom. Senator Graham said about the same thing. This is code for respecting the law but not requiring anyone to help in any gay marriage or any celebration thereof, assuming of course that such help would violate the helper’s religious freedom. Governor Kasich claims this is now settled law and we should move on. Oh well one out of fourteen isn’t bad; it’s unfortunate that Kasich is so far behind in the polls.

An increasing theme concerning this decision is that the court has intervened in an issue best left to the states. Regardless of any vote taken within a state, however, that state cannot pass any law that conflicts with the constitution. The constitution, and its interpreters on the Supreme Court, trump any statute passed by any state. No state can, by vote, re-institute slavery, nor can a state by vote have a hereditary monarch. The Supreme Court has simply decided that prohibiting same sex marriage violates the equal protection clause of the constitution. The only possible way around this ruling is to change the constitution. I would be very happy to bet against that happening at whatever odds anyone would care to give.

 

 

 

June 25^th

The day we’ve all been waiting for has arrived. The Supreme Court, by a six to three majority, has affirmed The Affordable Care Act’s constitutional right to continue to exist. The issue concerned the elimination of some subsidies which if allowed, would have eliminated medical care for over six million Americans. Can you imagine the Republicans going into this 2016 election if this decision had come out the other way? What do you say to those six million Americans who now have no health care because you have fought against this law until the Supreme Court has finally agreed with you and millions now have no health insurance? Conservatives should be thankful that the Supreme Court ruled as they did.

But they are not thankful; they are certain that this battle is not over, and it probably isn’t. If the Republicans can keep control of the Congress and get a conservative President in 2016, then they could simply repeal ACA. They might not want to do that because many of ACA’s features are very popular; particularly being able to keep your children on your policy until they are 26, and being able to keep your insurance in spite of catastrophic health changes. Whatever Republicans might decide to replace ACA with, it had better have those issues covered. On the other hand the Republicans have had some time to produce an alternative health care plan and nothing they want to talk about has yet to materialize.

All of the Republican candidates who have commented on this issue have consistently lambasted the Court’s decision, some going so far as to forget that the Chief Justice, who sided with the six person majority, is by no stretch a liberal. He was appointed by President Bush and he is a very conservative justice. No matter, if you come down on the side of liberals in an issue like this then you must have been brainwashed. I think that Chief Justice Roberts might well have seen what a disastrous trap a different decision would have been for his party’s chances in 2016. But that would imply that SCOTUS could be swayed by political influences and we know from the Presidential election in 2004 when SCOTUS intervened in the Bush vs. Gore election that no such thing could happen!