The Olson-Boies Gay Marriage Stunt

By using the word "stunt" in my title, I do not mean to imply that this is not a serious matter. Federal Courts are for serious matters, and gay marriage is no trivial affair. But this trial is a stunt in the sense that it has been designed by plaintiffs' counsel to gain the maximum in attention, both inside and outside the court system. In that regard, Perry v Schwarzenegger resembles the Scopes trial. The Economist article I earlier posted to facebook gives the essentials of the case.

For those who haven't heard, the nominal plaintiffs in Perry v Schwarzenegger are two gay couples who are arguing that they have been deprived of their right to marry, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The real plaintiffs are the attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson. Olson is a former Solicitor General of the United States, appointed by George W. Bush, and has been on every conservative short list for the Supreme Court for years. To add to his impeccable conservative credentials, Mr. Olson has even suffered from foreign terrorism; his wife, Barbara, was aboard the airplane that was crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. David Boies is a well-known liberal attorney; he and Mr. Olson were on opposing sides in Bush v Gore, the 2000 election case from which Mr. Bush emerged as President of the United States.

So, a conservative and a liberal have joined forces, and they have identified the perfect plaintiffs - handsome well-spoken people who can talk sincerely about family values. (Ms. Perry and her partner are raising four children.) They have a good venue, San Francisco, they know legal strategy and tactics inside and out, and they are funded to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court has already intervened in this case, barring its broadcast on You Tube at the request of the defense, which feared it would appear idiotic.)

My personal take on gay marriage is that it is unnecessary, but it isn't a major issue in any case. Virtually all of the rights any two (or more) people gain from being married to one another can be established by a well-written contract. Ownership, inheritance, child custody, and disposition of property upon death or divorce can all be put into a civil contract. The only thing is that marriage is a civil contract which takes care of these issues in accordance with pre-existing state law. In other words, marriage is a short-cut for achieving the determination of rights which could be established by one or a series of individual contracts. And to the degree that marriage is a contract determining property rights, I don't have any problem with same-sex couples partaking of the institution.

Of course, marriage is also a sacrament. The religious 70% among us believe that God ordained marriage, and many of them believe that God said that marriage should involve one man and one woman. (I would advise them to read the book of Genesis for the record of Jacob's family history: two wives, two concubines (described as his wives' servants), resulting in twelve sons and one daughter with four mothers. Gen. 35:22-26.) Okay, but these are parallel institutions, neither of which is necessary for the other. That is, one can be married and have all the privileges of marriage without the blessing of a church, and a church can perform its marriage ceremony without the formality of a marriage license (as long as the bride and groom can tolerate a certain amount of legal uncertainty).

The government should not be in the business of telling people whom they can or can not marry. I think that a marriage license and ceremony should be available to any couple who are of legal age, of sound mind, and not already married. On the other hand, I do think that churches have a perfect right to set their own rules for the use of their buildings and personnel, and if they don't want to perform marriages for same-sex couples, they are within their rights.

Knight's Reading List IX: September 2007

After the August 2007 reading list, you won’t be surprised to find another four Harry Potter novels on the September 2007 list. Two other novels – one good, one really bad – round out the fiction group. In non-fiction we have one computer techie book, one investment guide, one work on the Supreme Court of the United States, and one polemic on politics, religion and oil. A mixed bag, indeed, which won’t surprise those of you who know me.

Non-Fiction:

Maria Langer. Quicken 2007: The Official Guide. 2007. xxvii + 484 pages, including Index. If you use Quicken, the personal finances software from Intuit, this guide could be useful for you. It has major sections on Quicken functionality for cash flow, investing, managing property and debt, financial planning and tax management. It is, of course, more of a reference than a work to be read for pleasure, or even for general information. Read 21 August-7 September 2007.

Kevin Phillips. American Theocracy. 2006. xvi + 462 pages, including Notes and Index. Kevin Phillips became famous – famous in political junkie circles, anyway – back in the 1960s, when he published The Emerging Republican Majority. In that book, he accurately predicted some of the major trends in the partisan politics of the next forty years. The South became Republican territory, the Sun Belt became the core of conservative country, and the Republicans benefited from the racial and social tensions which riddled American society. Forty years later, Phillips’s youthful enthusiasm had turned to horror: His Republican majority had given rise to George W. Bush, the religious right, and an unholy alliance between the petroleum sector and foreign oil powers. Phillips seems to feel that, because he predicted the success of the Southern Strategy, he is somehow responsible for its results. So, he has turned to writing polemics attacking the political nexus of the Bushes, the evangelicals, and the oil producers. American Dynasty (which I have not read) preceded American Theocracy. American Theocracy is heavy reading, because Phillips is no prose stylist. But it is chockful of material to feed any conspiracy theorist’s hunger for tales of the evildoers behind it all. You can fill the breaks in reading American Theocracy watching Fahrenheit 911, Jesus Camp, or Crude Awakening. Read 29 July-16 September 2007.

Charles B. Carlson. The Smart Investor’s Survival Guide. 2002. xxiii + 325 pages. I wish I had read this one earlier, but I don't know that any individual's investment decisions could have affected the impact of the recent financial crisis. There have been bigger forces at work in the credit markets, in particular - and this does relate back to Kevin Phillips and his work - the set of policies designed to allow people to improve their standards of living, without increasing the incomes which ought to have been required to support those standards. At this point, "smart investor" sounds like an oxymoron. Read 3-26 September 2007.

Earl M. Maltz. The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 1969-1986. 2000. xvi + 307 pages, including Appendix, Bibliography, Index of Cases, and Subject Index. This is a volume in a series from the University of South Carolina Press, Chief Justiceships of the United States Supreme Court. At the time this book was published, volumes had been published on Melville W. Fuller, John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth, John Marshall, Stone and Vinson, and Edward Douglass White. Read 17-29 September 2007.

Fiction:

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 2000. 734 pages. I suppose that one can sum up the difference between a literary novel and a genre novel written for young people in this fact: I read Goblet in eight days and Deathly Hallows in three, while it took me seven weeks to get through The Stone the Builder Refused. Read 26 August-2 September 2007.

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. 2003. 870 pages. Read 2-8 September 2007.

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. 2005. 652 pages. Read 8-10 September 2007.

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2007. 759 pages. Read 10-12 September 2007.

Elizabeth Peters. The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits. 1971. 247 pages. Elizabeth Peters, a cat fancier from Maryland, has become a prolific author of mystery novels, who is perhaps best known for her Amelia Peabody series set in late 19th- and early 20th-century Egypt. This was an early book, and it shows. Peters’ acceptance of a sort of Reefer Madness attitude toward drug use rings of Puritan disapproval. And that’s only one of the bad points in this improbable adventure set in Mexico. Read 17-19 September 2007.

Madison Smartt Bell. The Stone the Builder Refused. 2004. xvii + 747 pages. This is the third work in a trilogy on the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture. Bell does an amazing job of weaving French, Creole, and various African expression through the dialogue. His characterizations of both fictional and historical persons have depth and texture. Bell has a very solid grasp of the political realities of the relations between Haiti, Santo Domingo, France, and the United States. The title is taken from a Biblical citation, a Psalm quoted several times in the New Testament. Read 10 August-27 September 2007.

Justice and Religion

There’s a fine old country gospel song, “Farther Along,” I can recommend to any of you who are fans of hillbilly music. It’s been recorded by a number of people, including Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt on their Trio album. Look it up sometime.

The song has a question and answer structure. A typical verse runs:

When death has come and taken our loved ones,
Leaving our homes so lone and so drear;
Then do we wonder why others prosper,
Living as sinners year after year.

The answer is, of course, that “farther along” we’ll understand why the world works in this apparently unjust way.

This is just one expression of a question central to all religions. If the universe or its God is just, why do bad things happen to good people? And why, on the other hand, do good things happen to bad people? The answer is, of course, that the injustice is only apparent, because it will be rectified in another life. You may suffer in this world, but you will be rewarded in Heaven. The bad man may seem to prosper now, but he will end up in Hell, suffering the pangs of eternal damnation. (Or, in the Hindu framework of reincarnation, the good man will come back in a better situation in his next life, while the bad man will come back as a cockroach.)

We see this theme in Plato’s Republic, which may contain the first really clear expression of the afterworld as an instrument of justice. (Compare The Odyssey, in which the spirits of the dead wander aimlessly in the underworld, their past lives having no apparent influence upon their present circumstances. I might note that, as far as I can tell from limited reading, the Jewish concept of Sheol is closer to the underworld of Odyssey than to Christian images of the afterworld.) We see it in a very strong form in Christianity in the expression: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:31)

The concept of a retributive afterlife seems to arise from the need to reconcile evident present injustice with a basic intuition that life should be fair. There is, in fact, no evidence whatever that the books are, in fact, balanced on “the other side of the river.” But this belief appears to help people to tolerate their otherwise intolerable lives. Some people think that this is one of the most pernicious aspects of religion, in that it leads people to tolerate misery and oppression, instead of rising up to seize a better life. There’s a folk song on that theme too, “The Preacher and the Slave,” by Joe Hill, the chorus of which is:

You will eat, by and by,
In that glorious land above the sky,
(Way up high),
Work and pray,
Live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die,
(That’s a lie!)

Joe Hill may have been a little harsh; as a Marxist, he presumably thought of religion as the opiate of the people. Since it is quite evident that life isn’t fair, and since no religious organization I know of can guarantee to make life fair in this world, they are forced into promising justice in the world to come. So the churches won’t be held accountable now for the failings of society, but everyone will be held accountable in the world to come.

Take what comfort you can from that idea. Personally, I’ll just go with “Life isn’t fair.”

Meditation and Sacrificial Worship

I have begun practicing meditation. I am a rank beginner, but I'm finding meditation relaxing. It's a good way to shuck the strains of work and daily life.

Personally, I don't expect to achieve oneness with God or to see spiritual beings, but I may come to understand more of what mystics and sufis experience, or report that they have experienced.

The very personal, very inward practice of meditation makes a strong contrast with the public, representive, and formalistic religious practices prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus. There isn't a word about about Aaron and his sons achieving oneness with God, although there is a lot about the burning of unblemished sheep or goats creating an aroma pleasing to the Lord. And most of the congregation just sits or stands somewhere in the temple (or tabernacle) enclosure to watch the priests make the offerings to God on their behalf.

The practices defined at length in Exodus and Leviticus remind me strongly of the sacrifices described in the Iliad. Leviticus is more explicit about which parts of the animal must be burned (God's portion), and which parts can be eaten, and by whom, but there is very little doubt that the worship service bore a strong resemblance to a barbecue.

So far, my favorite mantra for meditation (although I usually don't use a mantra at all) is bismallah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim. (In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.) It's just about the right length to pronounce on a long breath.

Does anyone else have any meditative practices or experiences you'd like to share?