It's official. Prince has no soul.

Whichever company he ultimately goes with, he adds, will be the "most hyped about pushing the product."

So I've been doing a lot of thinking about this whole marriage issue, and it just gets more and more confusing. So I decided to sit down and do a little ground-floor philosophical examination.

What gets repeated incessantly is the need to protect the "sanctity of marriage." This is the bit that confuses me. And if it means what I think it means, why is it the business of any government -- federal, state, county, local -- in the U.S.?

So I looked up sanctity. First definition: Holiness of life and character. If we work from this definition, and this seems to me to be the most likely of the definitions, those who are trying to ban gay marriage are doing it on religious grounds. But it is specifically verboten to do so. I don't know of any gay marriage advocates who also advocate forcing churches who are ideologically opposed to gay marriage to bless such unions. That, I'm pretty certain, would fall under 'prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Necessarily, then, such an amendment would come into conflict with and would at least partially invalidate that clause of the first amendment. The degree to which it does so would depend on how conservative the Supreme Court is feeling the day it has to rule on the question. (I'll admit this is a little bit of a straw-man argument, since I know the FMA actually does not include the phrase 'sanctity of marriage' -- I'm pretending it does as a conceit to make my point)

I normally shun slippery-slope arguments, but in this case we're talking about precedent and Constitutional interpretation, and the implications of a situation like this reach far beyond this single issue to the fundamental relationship between our government and establishment of religion.

So we move on, then, to the second definition Merriam-Webster offers: The quality or state of being holy or sacred (pretty much the same thing as before), appended with a link indicating synonymity with 'inviolability'. Turning there, we see that something inviolable is something secure from profanation (as in, treated with abuse, irreverence or contempt; or, debased by a wrong, ugly or vulgar use).

Now we're getting somewhere. In order for the institution of marriage to be 'profaned', then gay people who want to get married can't be serious. They must be trying cynically to abuse the system. They can't be in love. They can't love the way a man and a woman can. For gay marriage to be 'wrong, ugly or vulgar,' homosexuality must itself be 'wrong, ugly or vulgar'. So I think now we're getting down to the nut of the issue.

Protestations to the contrary set aside, proponents of this ban are fundamentally opposed to homosexuality and are trying to enshrine this opposition, this discrimination, this prejudice, in the Constitution.

People don't like banning things, even if they don't agree with them. Look at the flag burning amendment.

Now is not the time to froth at the mouth over the blind indifference of the hopelessly conservative. At least now their agenda is out in the open.

They're going down in flames. Or I'm goin' to Canada. Simple as that.

In fire ...

I've been making a prediction for some time now, and now that it's front page news again, I make it again.

If nothing else does it first, the FMA will bring Bush down.

L'arbuste est mort. Vive le roi!

Reading through J. Michael Straczynski's past Usenet postings, I happened upon this fragment of Prayer for the '70s by Norman Corwin. I was pretty floored:

"We print your name on dollars
And are sure you stand over everything we say is under God
And all nations assume you are on their side and always
have been, war in and war out,
And every religion understands you better than every other religion,
and you in turn lean toward each with special inclinations.

You are called upon to bless babies and aircraft carriers
And you are ceremoniously and endlessly praised on the basis that
flattery will get us somewhere.

But there are those who pray as though tendering a bribe payable
on installments
So as to accumulate years in this life and credits in the next.
Some of us make you out a broker who supplieth needs and wants;
Attorney who defendeth against hard claims;
Expunger of guilts who cleareth the conscience so we may be free
to muck it up again;
Housekeeper of the soul who cometh in to clean once a week;
King of accountants auditing our secret selves,
Liquidating our trespasses as we liquidate those who trespass
against us,
Keeping batteries of books filled with fateful identifications,
Entering as much the fall of a sparrow as the crash of a plane.

We have heard it said you are not so smart after all, since it is
unlikely you could add as fast as a computer or remember half
so much;
And although you are known to be more than generous in the number and
variety of species, there seems to be little rationale for the
mosquito, and less for plague bacilli.

There have been complaints against you, charges of malfeasance,
Implications of sleeping on the job, trigger temper, pronenesss
to vengeance,
Tantrums of wrath that have consumed too many of the innocent with
too few of the heinous.

Some of your public begrudge you the benefit of doubt, and doubt
your beneficence
Protesting that it was antic of you to have sponsored us to begin
with, if we are to swarm like maggots on a rind too meager to
support our duplicating billions.
Some say the noblest ideas were set down by man
And that you have been served by holy ghost writers beyond your
desserts.

They say that the whole conspicuous distance between the worm and
Einstein, the drone of the bee and Beethoven,
The entire interval, has been filled with struggles trailing blood:
Ages of frightened proto-men, heavy with ignorance, recoiling from
fangs of fire, drowning in profligate floods, perishing in temblors,
staggering into the unknown,
Their wails and brute chants and broken grunts fructifying at last
into songs and sonnets and hallelujahs to your glory.
Well, dissidants suggest that during this grand span you sat it
out; that in the vast meanwhile you went off to fish in deeper
currents.

Lately it is announced that you are dead
Which means several things besides the receiver being off the hook
when we dial you.
It means that time must carry on by itself
And stars pinwheel through incandescent deserts and bottomless voids,
all on an orderly hunch;
It means the arching upward from the mud has been a drunken course,
and purposeless, and hardly worth the trip;
It means the very mansion of existence has no windows, and is just
a big white elephant, boarded up and haunted by your mistakes;
It means that springtime is a come-on and a put-on, and not at all
a show of dogged life, a riot of chlorophyll, a surge of sap and
elixers from wells so deep no radar can ever return to tell what
and where it touched;
It means that the love of man and woman is a table of percentages,
and their desire a disease of the id;
It means that birth is a happening between pills
And old age a phase held together by plastic parts;
It means the heart of a man is replaceable as soon as the donor is
legally dead
And death is a package deal with the best advertised mortuary.

So, God: if you are alive in that heaven we have come to know is
spotty with systems of gravity, each pulling for itself,
Then perhaps you must flex the muscle of divine authority to get
back into office
Because your antique miracles have been trumped by solemn science;
Daily the patent office registers intenser magic than the burning bush:
The serpent from the rod becomes a ruby laser;
The leper is healed by mycins;
The blind draw vision from an eye bank.

That being the case, dear busy God, please manifest thyself again
through one superlative, new-minted covenant:
Create for the lot of us -- all nations indivisible -- an Act of God
more stupendous than mere parting waters or a standing sun
A miracle harder to come by, that would, if consummated, cause dry
bones from all the hundred holocausts to meet and dance,
And charter stars to sing together in the brightest chancel of
imponderable space.

And this is what that miracle would be:

That man should love his kind in all his skins and pigments,
And kill no more.

Repeat:
That we should love our kind
And kill no more.

Yes, granted, such a miracle is asking very much of you
But it is long past time to ask."

Oddly timely, from John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany:

"Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves -- to anyone else's version. Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves. And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

Pretty neat, but Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and Bermuda are tiny little dots you can't see. Ach, well, it still makes me look pretty well-travelled. They have a US state one, too, but I figured that would be too boring since it would ALL be red.

Not to brag or anything.



create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide