Open Letter to the Marriage Conservatives

As you're well aware no doubt tomorrow NJ legislature will be voting on the topic of Marriage Equality.

Now we already have Civil Unions in NJ. They're part of a half-measure that stinks of the 'separate but equal' bull the Black civil rights movement fought against in the late 1800's and early 1900's. It affords inferior legal rights de facto and serves only to reinforce the image of a culturally inferior demographic that homosexuals have struggled with.

Striking gender specificity from the definition of Marriage is the least evil solution. We make a bunch of gay and lesbian people happy and all us straight folks get to stay Married too. As an added bonus we enhance the parsimony of Marriage as it pertains to law and don't have to tread all over the cultural conditioning which prescribes such weight to 'being Married.' Plus we come one step closer to stomping out Bigotry. It's a win for humanity and evolution.

And for the record, reducing all non-religious Marriages to Civil Unions or some other form of psuedo-marriage discriminates against non-religious folks like myself.

If the logical argument doesn't work for you try the following Reductio Ad Hitlerum: The Nazis hated gay people too.

The Missing Link

Recently it came to my attention that the article on Wikipedia regarding the Electric Universe model had been deleted. I found this distressing and yet further evidence that Appeal to Popularity continues to dominate what is seen as valid information and what is dismissed as 'pseudoscience.' Nonetheless the lack of a Wikipedia presence is a minor setback and highlights one important point: There is no clear consensus view on just what constitutes the Electric Universe theory. I've watched the video put out by the Thunderbolts group and it still fails to present a solid cosmological model but rather relies heavily on covering the weakest points in the prevailing model. This is a shame because it gives the impression that EU theory orbits around Big Bang theory and that just makes it easier to ignore.

Self-Determination: The Crux of the Healthcare Debate

It has occured to me rather recently that the crux of the healthcare debate has been lost. Popular media regarding this issue has been faught with distractions of the most ingenius and disingenuous variety. The word 'death panels' invokes visions of jackbooted Nazis and mentioning the word 'socialism' in mixed company is likely to result in a lot of culturally conditioned anger. People talk about the US as if it were built on Capitalism, but nothing in the Constitution specifically protects this oft misappropriated economic philosophy. If anything, the Constitution simply determines the separation of powers between the federal and state level governments in regulating commerce, but makes no direct assertion as to just what sort of commerce shall take place. Capitalism is no more American than nationalsim, racism or any of the other isms that have been tossed about recently like verbal apples of Eris.

Ultimately the central Crux of the healthcare debate, aside from the reforms and regulations proposed for the established institution, is the Public Option. Nothing has polarized the public quite as much as this one piece of the legislation. And what is it really? I'm sure you've heard all the arguments about it being the first step in a government takeover of healthcare. I won't say it's an impossibility, but that argument is based on the assumption that a Public Option would have the same motivations as private insurers, and that's just not the case.

Let us consider a bill without the Public Option. By themselves, reforms which force private companies to insure all comers would probably have a detrimental effect on health insurance as an industry. Take as an example New Jersey's "take all comers" auto insurance law. That legislation was originally enacted with the intent of combating discriminatory insurance pricing and forcing private insurers to extend insurance to all but the worst drivers. It ultimately had the effect of financially damaging many NJ insurance companies. When the law expired at the beginning of this year several NJ insurers stopped taking new business and petitioned to leave the state. In this case, a public Auto Insurance option might be a better answer. I don't believe health insurance is any different.

Ultimately it boils down to self-determination -- a freedom which this country _was_ in fact founded on. Right now poor people in the United States have two choices: pay an exorbitant price for health insurance and suffer, or go without and suffer. The idea of a Public Option merely takes the latter choice and replaces it with something more humanitarian by far. The idea that a Public and Private companies can't find an economic equillibrium strikes me a ridiculous. They don't compete for the same demographic assets, nor do they have the same basic motivations.

Is it Socialism? Yes. But what is Socialism other than Politics with a Conscience? Of the people, by the people, and for the people.