The United States Supreme Court, in its second attempt to make Scalia’s head explode in two days, has discovered that gays and lesbians are “people” and therefore protected by the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause which prohibits discrimination against any person.
So it’s official. No more gay marriage in America. From now on, there are only marriages.
Religious conservatives across the country are now screaming about “judicial activism” and claiming that the court ruled against the will of the people, completely ignoring the fact that the majority of Americans support marriage equality these days. (Hey kids! Today’s challenge: Find a conservative that complained about the Citizen’s United decision which definitely went against what the majority of Americans wanted!)
Half of the fun of decisions like this are reading Scalia’s dissents, which contradict previous decisions he’s made and read less like a learned treatise from a Supreme Court Justice and more like your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving: “Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality (whatever that means) were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.”
Pure comedy gold. And so, so satisfying to those of us who love to see this freedom-hater lose.
So now I can stop posting “such-and-such state enters the 21st century” whenever a new state embraced marriage equality. And I, for one, am thrilled.
It wasn’t that long ago that acts of pure racism brought about riots in Baltimore and Ferguson. I condemned them, and wrote that those things were counter productive.
Charleston Unity March
“When you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out,” said John Lennon.
Many of my liberal friends attacked me for that position, arguing that sometimes violence was needed to bring about change in America. I still disagreed with them.
The latest attack in South Carolina led to the victims’ families forgiving the shooter, asking for peace, and asking for understanding. They used the occasion to point out how harmful, insulting, and contributing the Confederate flag flying over their courthouse is, and they said it should be taken down. And there were no riots.
And you know what? It’s working. This may have been the tipping point that finally makes that insulting flag be treated with the same attitude in which we now view the “n” word. And it’s made many people look at how harmful it is to tolerate racist symbols and actions.
If the people of South Carolina had rioted it would not have been as successful.
And that’s because the people of America are good people. We want to do good things, and we want to help people who deserve to be helped. But when instead Americans see rioters and looters, it does the opposite; it makes people say, right or wrong, that they don’t deserve our help.
Welcome to my living room. Everyone is invited! Come on in, make yourself at home.
We’re having some interesting discussions and debates here, about politics, religion, music, society, television, movies — just about everything. You are welcome to join in.
Hey, come on in. Have some hors d’oeuvres. Vegetarian, of course. Watch out for the cats.
And I don’t mind debates. Heck, I love debates. I debate for a living. People pay me to debate.
However, I expect you to debate reasonably, using facts and logic, while citing reliable sources to support your position. I can be tough on you if you debate sloppily or make traditional debating errors, and will call you out on them.
That doesn’t mean I am insulting you, nor does it mean I don’t want you to be a friend any more.
Sometimes my friends (and I) can lose our tempers and say things we shouldn’t. I would hope it doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, a reminder usually helps. I am more willing to forgive friends who slip every once in a while than I am of someone I don’t know coming into the living room and immediately being impolite.
And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? I invite you in to participate in discussions, but if you walk in and the first thing you say is insulting and demeaning, it doesn’t say much about you, does it? Why should I welcome impolite people into my living room? I think I am fully within my right to ask these people to leave and eject them by force if necessary.
Remember: You don’t have a right to come into my house and argue with me and my guests. Quite often, when I make people leave, they complain that I am violating their freedom of speech — which only goes to show that I was probably right to eject them. If you don’t understand how freedom of speech works, it’s unlikely you were going to present any sort of reasonable debate anyway.
Bottom line: Everyone is welcome. But if you come in my room for the sole purpose of arguing, yelling, and insulting people, that welcome is rescinded and you will be removed.
I’m not going to waste space here today trying to convince people that the Confederate flag you see flying all over the place is the flag of treason and slavery — you know it is, and the people who fly it know it is. That’s why they fly it. Oh, they may say it’s about “southern heritage” but I never see southern liberals or blacks flying that flag, only racists or people who are are so clueless that they have been misled by racists. It’s no more a flag of southern pride than the swastika is a symbol of German pride.
But the real fact is that the flag — which only came into being during the treasonous rebellion — isn’t even the real flag that flew over the Confederacy.
No, indeed. This Tennessee flag was the one adopted by the Ku Klux Klan after the war to support their attempts to keep the purpose of the war alive — the subjugation (and murder) of fellow Americans. It’s the flag of racist, treasonous, evil people who, I might add, also fought against anyone who wasn’t a Christian.
When you display that flag today, you are saying you agree with them. You are showing your support for slavery, prejudice, and hatred.
No, no, no. You don’t get to decide what that flag means. You don’t get to say “Yeah, for everyone else it means hatred but for me it means something else.” If you have that argument, then allow me to shoot you the middle finger. Oh, sorry, were you insulted? Well, for me, the middle finger means something entirely different. What do you mean, I don’t get to define what it means?
Just kidding of course. My middle finger to you means exactly what you think it does.
It’s bad enough that some conservatives are trying to pretend this latest attack had nothing to do with racism when the shooter himself told everyone before and during the attack that it was all about racism. It’s bad enough that people in South Carolina are pretending like this has nothing to do with a culture that rewards racism while flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol.
But we are once again getting the asinine argument that this all could have been stopped if only everyone had a gun.
Yes, that’s right — the solution to too many guns is more guns. 
In this weird alternate fantasy reality, gun nuts are convinced that more guns will solve everything and if we have more guns, there will be less gun violence.
This runs counter to every single fact you can find on the subject. States that have placed restrictions on guns (like Connecticut) have found that gun deaths have dropped by huge amounts. States that weakened gun laws (like Missouri) have found that their gun deaths have increased by huge amounts. Countries that had problems like ours that put into place strict gun laws (such as Australia) also saw their gun deaths fall by huge amounts.
The numbers don’t lie — the NRA does though, all the time.
Somehow the idea that “An armed society is a polite society” appeals to these people. Think about it — these people believe that you need to be afraid of dying in order to be a polite person. What does that say about them?
This fantasy that “if we all had guns we could have stopped the bad guy” is also not supported by any facts. Oh sure, you can find that one-in-a-hundred example where that happened, but in the vast majority of cases, both sides having guns only escalated the matter and caused more deaths and injuries. Even trained police have been hurt and have hurt innocent bystanders in shoot-outs, so imagine what havoc untrained Billy Bob can cause.
Despite the facts, the gun nuts believe that if everyone had a gun, the good guys would always hit, the bad guys would always miss, no one would ever get hurt, and then the hero will walk away, put on a pair of sunglasses, and make a witty comment. That’s how it works in the movies, right?
This is the same mentality that believes torture is successful at getting information even though every single study ever done in the history of the world has found the opposite. But it works on “24”!
The inability to distinguish fiction from reality puts many people in secure hospitals. However, it is a requirement for being an NRA leader.
ventrellaquest.com 