On Constitutional Amendments

I'm trying hard to decide whether these people are completely devoid of any capacity for logical thought, or simply stupid. Heck, the idea of actually having facts to back up their blind assertions is apparently completely foreign to them.

Take, for example, this couple described in this article. They spend their vacation money to go to DC to hold up signs that say: Stop Same Sex Marriage: It Endorses Masturbation.

I think I speak for the rest of America when I say: WHAT!? Frankly, I seriously doubt any Amercan who has ever masturbated (which, I imagine, is pretty much all of 'em who ever passed the age of 12), has ever said "damn, if only gay Marriage were legal, I could do this without feeling guilty."

If you follow what the far-right has been saying in the US, gay marriage is somehow responsible for everything from drug abuse to decline in air quality.

Now, granted, it's a little hard to study this, since exactly one state in the US has been forward-thinking enough to legalize Gay marriage we don't have much in the way of sample size, but let's see what's happening in that hellhole they call Massachusetts, why don't we? Massachusetts is a pathetic dead-last in illiteracy, a pitiful 48th in per-capita poverty, and an abysmal 49th in the number of divorces. Those poor sods in Massachusetts, how can they live in such horrid conditions?

The reason I bring this up is that our esteemed president has again tried, and failed miserably, to push a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage through congress. It fell massively short of the required 2/3 majority to create a constitutional amendment. No surprise there. Frankly, I wasn't the least bit worried that the bill might pass. But frankly, the idea that the Constitution of the United States; a document I happen to take very seriously, a document which has been perverted more by the Bush Administration than just about any other; is being used as a blatant political ploy frankly turned my stomach.

Bush desperately needs to learn that the constitution is not just a piece of paper. It's not a set of loose guidelines that you can simply ignore whenever you feel like it. And it's certainly not a document meant to be used to score political points. The constitution is the document that makes America America. It's the collection of the founding principles of the nation. It's not a symbol to be perverted whenever the current party in power is lagging in the polls.

The constitution, to those who have actually read it, is a piece of history which presents everything that the US of A is supposed to represent. Freedom from tyrrany of all kinds, freedom to express onesself in whatever manner they choose, regardless of how offensive some may find it.

Freedom to be onesself, provided that they do no harm to anyone else.

By adding an amendment to the constitution which specifically limits one freedom to one group of people, the American government not only would have perverted the very freedom that the constitution enshrines and symbolizes, but they would have sent the message to the American people that they can no longer be assured of the protection the constitution guarantees. If they can deny marriage to one group of people constitutionally, then logically they can deny freedom of speech, or religion, or belief, or any of the rights assured by the constitution. A second set of McCarthy trials could, in principle, be constitutionally assured. In short, the government would be telling the American people that they could no longer look to the one document designed to protect them from the government.

The American government is founded on a very simple principle: the Constitution doesn't trust them. The power doesn't lie in the government, it lies in the document on which that government is founded. And that document places the power in the people's hands. The people have the power to choose one government over another, to hold opinions which are in the minority, to stand at center stage proclaiming at the top of their lungs what others would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of theirs. The American government was founded on the principle that it is far, far better to have a man wrap himself in the constitution so that he can burn the flag, than one who wraps himself in the flag so that he can burn the constitution.

There is a word for all of this: freedom. And we cannot promote freedom abroad by demolishing it at home.