I received one of those political chain letters today.  You know, the kind that takes some article or another, totally misrepresents it and then urges people to “send this to everyone you know”.  These things circulate for years and do nothing other than piss people off.

The one I received this morning was about an article that appeared in the Washington Post in January of 2000.  Yeah, this thing has been making the rounds for almost 10 years.  I’m guessing that it hasn’t really been in active circulation for 10 years and that someone dug it up to prove some point about the current administration not doing enough for the troops and to get people worked up.

This is what passes for discourse today.  People dig up the most poorly written crap that they can find and throw it up as a straw man to be taken down.

I generally try to ignore these types of things, but there was something about this one that made me keep reading.  Perhaps I was in a bad mood this morning.  Whatever it was, I had to respond.  The following is what came out.  Perhaps in 10 years it will still be circulating.

More...

This started as a simple Facebook status , but for some reason, a Facebook status can only be 420 characters long.  My submission was 628 characters long and when that wasn’t accepted I was forced to move the whole thing here.

It all started with a few expressions of disappointment some friends made about Maine voters repealing a state law that would have allowed same-sex couples to marry. While I shared their disappointment, I was becoming increasingly offended by the descriptions of the repealed law that all included something similar to the description above about “allowing” or “permitting” same-sex couples to get married as if “we” all knew better and had decided that it was OK for “them”.  I found myself in a weird situation of being offended by a law that I had hoped would stand. 

Here is my original status message:

Why does same-sex marriage need to be legalized? Was mixed-sex marriage ever legalized? Was mixed-race marriage ever legalized? Trying to “make it legal” assumes that without legislation it is illegal. That's backwards.  It's ceding the right and then asking for it back. Freedom to marry, or not marry, resides with the individual and cannot be granted or infringed by the State. We need to insist on this and take down any laws that say otherwise.  We can't legalize marriage any more than we can legalize happiness.  It is one of our unalienable rights.  As unfortunate as the decision in Maine is, I think it's for the best.

The law legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine has been repealed, but I think it was a dangerous law to begin with.  It’s because laws can be repealed that something as important as marriage shouldn’t be legislated.  It opens up to debate that which should not be debated.  Rather than fighting for something that should already be, we need to defeat that which denies it.  Rather than passing laws that legalize same-sex marriage we need to rewrite or repeal laws that say it is illegal.  We need to challenge the people and institutions that stand in the way of what is already ours. 

So, while I’m disappointed that people in Maine have voted to deny rights to same-sex couples, I’m even more disappointed that they thought that this was something they could vote on in the first place. 

This American Life presents an excellent primer on the current economic crisis.  If you haven’t already listened to this episode of This American Life, listen to it right now!

 

From the show website:
The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team—the guys who explained the mortgage crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson—are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.

Link: This American Life # 375: Bad Bank

There seems to be three popular plans for dealing with the current economic situation. The plan coming from the right calls for lots of tax cuts. The idea is that the people who receive the tax cuts will use this savings to invest and these investments will spur business growth and this growth will create jobs and generally help the economy. It seems to me that the savings we are talking about is really money that people already have and that there's nothing preventing them from investing it right now. Also, let's assume that some people are reluctant to spend this money because they might need it to pay their enormous tax bills. If we lower those tax bills there is no guarantee that they will go out and spend that money. They could sit on it just like they are doing right now. Obviously, I am not a big fan of this plan, so I will leave it to others who do support it to explain it better.

The plan coming from the left calls for lots of government spending. The idea is that the government, instead of lowering taxes, takes the money it gets from taxes and spends it in all kinds of ways. I like this plan because it guarantees that the money is actually spent. Now there are good ways to spend money and there are bad ways to spend money. It seems to me that the government could very easily spend lots of money without creating very many jobs. However, that could easily be said about any investments made by those receiving tax cuts. In fact, as I've already noted, there's nothing preventing the recipients of the tax cuts from sitting on the money, or worse investing it in foreign business where it would create few if any jobs at home. By having the government spend the money directly, we have a chance to legislate how the money is spent. It seems to me that rather than arguing whether the government should spend money or arguing how much it should spend, the congress would be much more effective if they spent their time arguing about how to spend the money. They can argue over whether the money is spent on infrastructure or construction, or on education or energy independence, or anything else. Pick something. Pick them all for all I care, just get the money out there.

More...