When I found out California and Florida were state's #29 and #30 in the banning of same-sex marriage, I was aghast. Yet what really pissed me off was the fact that the Church of Latter Days Saints alone spent 20 million dollars in pushing for a ban on same-sex "marriage" in California.

Why the outrage? Because it proves my point about the anti-gay marriage laws : they are laws meant to use civil law to enforce a Christian Nationalist and Dominionist article of faith. The passing of Proposition 8 shows The Church's hand in legislating, crossing the constitutional line that is meant to separate Church and State.

It's not the only reason why I believe anti-gay marriage laws, including the Defense of Marriage Act, are anti-constitutional. I believe all marital rites performed by the state should be banned. The word "marriage" should be stricken out of the books and replaced with "civil union" and "marriage" and marital rites should be the domain of churches. For that matter, civil "marriages" should be replaced by civil unions that would not be able to discriminate based on sex, gender, ability or citizenship status as well have full "family rights" under domestic, family and inheritance law. You want a "marriage"? Then go to your church, temple, mosque or sinagogue to get one.

This takes me to the obvious question : Why in the world are gays fighting for marriage by the state if it is absolutely obvious that marriage is a religious construct?
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Via Andrew Sullivan who is also reporting that the single biggest contributor to the anti-gay marriage brigade has ties to the Blackwater Corporation --the one that has raped and pillaged Iraq with the blessings of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

California's extreme right successfully pushed for a state constitutional referendum on same-sex marriage. Known as Proposition 8, it's the latest effort by Republicans to "move the base" and get them out to vote in November.

This from Ballotpedia : 

Proposition 8, also known as the Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry Act, will appear on the November 2008 ballot in California. It was previously titled the Protect Marriage Act. It has also been known as the Same-Sex Marriage Ban or the Limit on Marriage Amendment. If it passes, it will add a new constitutional amendment to the California Constitution that will have the following text: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." The ballot title for the measure says that Prop. 8 "eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry".
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If you thought that Hillary Clinton's increasingly directionless campaign did not have some further reservoirs of self-immolating malice to draw upon, please disabuse yourself of the notion. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Exhibit A: a new television spot being run in Texas in advance of that state's primary on March 4th. The conventional wisdom is that, simply, Team Hillary needs a clear victory to even stay in the race. So here's the spot, titled "Children":

To place that in context, here's one of the final ads from Team Bush in 2004, "Wolves":

How astonishingly depraved: after eight years of fear-mongering, a leading Democratic candidate embraces the Rovian playbook. They're not even being subtle about it.

Vote for me or your children die.
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It was probably inevitable that a major Presidential candidate with an Arabic name would, sooner or later, be confronted with questions about the relationship between the United States and its closest Middle Eastern ally. Equally inevitably, after five years of war in an Arab country and seven after a terrorist attack carried out on this country by an Islamist terror network, that discussion will touch on America's fractured relationship with the Islamic world in general and our posture towards the Jewish state in particular.

A look back is in order. In 1820, New York State's Grand Island was proposed as the location of a new Jewish homeland, understood as a gathering place for Jews before aliyah to Zion became possible. Emma Lazarus, author of The New Colossus, was an agitator for proto-Zionist and proto-feminist ideas in New York's 19th Century Gilded Age. The connection between New York and the idea of Zionism is long and deep.

The United States was one of the first countries to recognize Israel itself, somewhat to the chagrin of the British Empire; and before Washington endorsed the fact of Israel's independence, there had been a bipartisan consensus of sympathy to the Zionist experiment.

President Wilson expressed his support for the Balfour Declaration when he stated on March 3, 1919:

The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.

After Wilson left office, his successors expressed similar support for the Zionist enterprise. "It is impossible for one who has studied at all the services of the Hebrew people to avoid the faith that they will one day be restored to their historic national home and there enter on a new and yet greater phase of their contribution to the advance of humanity," said President Warren Harding.

Calvin Coolidge expressed his "sympathy with the deep and intense longing which finds such fine expression in the Jewish National Homeland in Palestine."

"Palestine which, desolate for centuries, is now renewing its youth and vitality through enthusiasm, hard work, and self-sacrifice of the Jewish pioneers who toil there in a spirit of peace and social justice," observed Herbert Hoover.

Of course, Hoover's observation rested on one glaring error: that the Cis-Jordanian Imperial mandate of Palestine was terra nullius, an empty land awaiting settlement. The land was not empty, and the question of how to reconcile the legitimate claims of competing (and, one could argue, complementary) nationalisms has been contentious and unresolved ever since.

Following independence, the relationship between the United States and the new nation of Israel quickly cooled, responding to the patterns of alignment set in the developing Cold War. A major portion of the weaponry that secured the new state's independence came from Czechoslovakia prior to that country's complete absorption into the Soviet orbit. In 1956, President Eisenhower forced an Anglo-French-Israeli expedition force to retreat from the Suez Canal, recently seized by Egypt's Arab nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Further frost was added to the bilateral relationship by the conservative Eisenhower administration's distrust of Israel's nascent structure as a socialist economy characterized by strong labor unions, led by the labor coalition Histadrut, and a parallel internal economy of collectivist enterprises in the Kibbutzim. A rapprochement of sorts between the Labour government of Levi Eshkol and the Kennedy/Johnson administration was capped in the 1967 Six Day War, another Cold War proxy battle, when American arms shipments to Israel obviated comparable shipments to Arab combatant states by the Soviet Union and resulted in a stunning Israeli victory.

As a result of that victory, Israel became an occupying power over territories previously belonging, de facto or de iure, to Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It is the fate of these territories that ultimately will decide a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In 2004, the Democratic Party platform embraced the concept of a two-state solution for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, following in the footsteps of the Clinton administration's developing Middle Eastern policy. The current republican administration embraced the idea of two states for two peoples some time into its first term as well. Despite the overall fraying of the post-war foreign policy consensus along partisan lines, therefore, it can be considered settled American policy that the legitimate national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians, to live in peace, security, within recognized borders as fully sovereign members of the international community, are an objective of the American national interest. Firmly embedded within that consensus is the assumption that America, due to the kinship between our domestic institutions and Weltanschauung with those of Israel as a Western democracy, will continue to support Israel's security and aid that country's defense.

Barack Obama stands equally firmly within this consensus. So why the controversy?
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...we need to talk. I'm worried about this campaign you're running.

Let's start with the basics: I've voted for you three times. The first time, in 2000, with absolute enthusiasm. The second and third times, in 2006, because you were so far superior to your primary and general election opponents that it really wasn't a contest. Sure, I was somewhat disappointed over your lack of desire to really speak out against the Bush administration, but hey, the Senate is a more collegial body than the House. Sure, your war vote was troubling, too, but I figured you'd come around sooner or later.

Now, however, you're doing things that fill me and many others with astonished dismay. Your chief strategist, Mark Penn, is talking about states that don't matter. Now, if there's one thing we've learned in the last seven years - and in the 2006 elections - it's that all states matter in a political contest you're trying to win. That's why we now have Democratic Senators in places like Montana and Virginia. This Fifty State Strategy stuff? It really works.
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