Paul Ryan v Reality

THE SECRET WEAPON IN THE BUDGET TALKS … 

Soon the negotiators in Congress will sit down and try to agree on a federal budget, before we run into the next set of cutoffs and risk shutdowns and defaults again. The negotiating deadline is mid-December. 

Leading the Republican side in the talks is Paul Ryan, the self-proclaimed deficit hawk from the House; on the other side, the liberals will be led by Patty Murray. Ryan insists we need to move toward a balanced budget, by cutting Social Security and Medicare. There are two problems with this.

First, Social Security and Medicare are not Ryan’s to dispose of. It’s not his money, or the government’s. It’s ours. Take a good look at your paycheck: the deductions for those two programs are right there. You already paid for your Social Security and Medicare, and you have every right to expect it will be there for you when you retire.

Which brings me to the second point. Astoundingly, everyone has lost sight of the fact that the real drivers of the deficit, the legitimate targets for cuts, are conservative policies. It is the right wing that has insisted on policies that have blown up the deficit.

So all Patty Murray needs to do, is push Ryan into a corner. Force him to choose between what he says he wants, cutting the deficit, and what he really wants, to help his conservative allies.

“So, Mister Ryan, are your conservative buddies willing to give up the subsidies and tax breaks the oil companies get? Estimates range from 5 to 50 billion dollars a year, but we’ll be conservative and call it 10 billion saved.

“So, Mister Ryan, are your conservative pals willing to enact policies to fight climate change? The Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of radicalism, says Eastern Asia alone will pay 23 billion a year for not preparing for climate change. Let’s assume our bill would be about the same.

“So, Mister Ryan, are your conservative friends willing to change course on health care, stop fighting Obamacare, and go beyond that to a single-payer plan? That saves us 100 billion a year.

"So, Mister Ryan, can your tobacco buddies like McConnell and Paul and Alexander let go of tobacco? If we ban tobacco, we save 100 billion a year in health care costs.

“So, Mister Ryan, can your conservative pals let go of the tax issue, and put the tax rates for rich back up where they were when the economy was booming? There’s perhaps 50 billion a year, depending on how high we go.

"So, Mister Ryan, are your conservative friends willing to fix Bush’s mess on Medicare Part D so that drug prices can be negotiated? 50 billion a year.

“So, Mister Ryan, are all those southern Senators willing to reform Pentagon procurement, even if it hurts some of their pork-addicted congressional districts? The GAO says the cost overruns alone are 35 billion, so when you add the stuff the Pentagon is forced to buy even when they don’t need it, it’s something like 40 billion.

"Mister Ryan, add up all these conservative policies, and then revoke them, and we save 373 billion a year. Then add the benefits of putting all this money back into the economy, and the resulting reductions in interest payments, and we’re up to at least 400 billion annually. Bush’s last budget year gave us a deficit of almost two trillion dollars; Obama, even while paying off all of Bush’s unfunded projects such as the wars and Medicare, got the deficit down to 750 billion. Get rid of those conservative policies, and we’re halfway to a balanced budget! And if your buddies like Boehner and McConnell can stop blocking all efforts to create jobs, the resulting tax revenue will cut the deficit even more! So…there ya go! Sign the deal and we can send it to McConnell and go get lunch!”

Warning sign for Team Blue

WARNING SIGN FOR DEMOCRATS

Here is something that looks small at first glance, but could become huge in two years.

Earlier I noted that the potential Republican candidates for president in 2016 fall, roughly speaking, into two categories: the mildly obnoxious people like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, and the tea-drinking loons like Ted “Calgary” Cruz and Rand Paul. I suggested that given the current climate within the GOP, with the tea-flavored loons beating the mild moderates into submission and leading the whole country to the brink of ruin in the process, it was more likely that someone like Cruz or Paul or Ryan would wrap up the GOP nomination in 2016.

Here’s a new sign that I have been wrong.

The mild moderates get their money from the same place Republicans have always gone for campaign money: corporate America, the banks, the rich.

The tea-party loons are getting their money from the tea coalition and the far-right think tanks: the Big Four are Freedomworks (Armey and Kibbe), Crossroads GPS (Rove), Americans for Prosperity (the Koch brothers) and Heritage Foundation (Jim deMint). The Big Four far-right groups are mostly what we call astro-turf groups: groups that pretend to be grassroots ideological movements, but really get their money from the same corporate donors who have owned the GOP for a century.

The problem for the tea-party candidates is that they began to believe their own rhetoric. They began to believe that the support they were getting was really coming from the grass roots, rather than the boardrooms and investment banks in New York.

Back when the tea-party movement was born, this misunderstanding didn’t matter. The “grass roots” and the corporate donors shared a goal, to destroy Obamacare. The corporate people, because the health care plan would crimp the profits of some key industries, and the grass roots, because they hated that colored feller in the White House. But they all had the same goal.

So when Ted Cruz and the tea people began their effort to drag the nation to the brink of default, they didn’t care that the banking community was horrified at the prospect of the nation crashing through the debt ceiling and creating a global recession. The tea people told themselves: we don’t care about corporate America, our support comes from the grass roots!

And now they are finding out how wrong they are. Only a few days after the tea party badly damaged the GOP brand and almost destroyed the economy in the process, the donors who have been the real source of tea-party power have closed their checkbooks. Freedomworks and Crossroads GPS are both running out of money because donors are freaked out at what the tea-party people are doing on Capitol Hill, and also the damage done by tea-party candidates like Todd Akin losing winnable elections. Donors, like everyone else, hate wasting their effort on losers. Will Americans For Prosperity and Heritage Foundation cut the purse strings too?

If corporate America uses its financial muscle to reclaim control of the GOP from their future-former allies in the tea party movement, then the “grass roots” will really be all the tea party has left to rely on. And that means they probably lose, because winning a presidential election costs, literally, a billion dollars these days. When 2016 comes around, the corporate boys will steer their money toward some relatively sane Romney clone like Chris Christie, and all the tea party boys can do is hope that one of their own can capitalize on the far-right voters in Iowa and the Super Tuesday states, and resist the tide of corporate money backing the moderate candidate.

Somebody like Ted Cruz could try to model 2016 fund-raising on Obama’s brilliant effort to raise cash in 2008. But Obama actually got plenty of money from corporate America, just like the GOP did: contrary to myth, Team Obama wasn’t driven by ten million bus drivers and housekeepers sending in their lunch money. Also, as Hillary can attest, Obama and his team proved themselves to be brilliant strategists, in funding as in everything else: Ted Cruz’s ham-handed effort to destroy the global economy was clearly the work of a strategic novice, and the people he would surround himself with are more likely to be dewy-eyed true believers than campaign pros who can raise and bundle money without going to jail.

The corporate boys will have even more reason to keep the nomination away from the tea people, if the tea party wants someone like Cruz, who did all he could to drag the financial community back to 1929, or Paul Ryan, whose notions of national finance betoken dangerous incompetence, or Rand Paul, a reckless iconoclast who wants to blow up big parts of America – entire cabinet departments -- just to hear the bang. Big Money is afraid of Big Crazy, particularly after coming within inches of seeing the Dow and the financial markets crash.

So this should be a warning for Democrats. The grownups in the GOP are very quickly going to steer their money and support toward candidates who can actually win, like Chris Christie. And that means that the Democrats can lose the White House if they nominate anyone but their best candidate. If Christie is matched up with a second-tier Democratic candidate, a race that should be in the bag for Team Blue becomes a real race.

So who is the best Democrat for the race?

Just how bad does Boehner suck at his job?

A little perspective for you.

The best Speaker in history was Tom Reed. Czar Reed, 1890s. Must have weighed 300 pounds, and smart as a whip – in a debate he could cut you down with a single sentence, quicker than his good friend Mark Twain. When Reed became Speaker, the House was total chaos. The Democrats were in the minority, and they stopped the whole House dead with a thing called the disappearing quorum. Reed needed a quorum to vote on anything, so the Democrats would just tell the clerk to list them absent, even though they were sitting right there. So Reed called a vote one day, and the Democrats tried to list themselves absent. Reed told the clerk to list them present anyway. The Democrats started screaming at him. Reed said something like “McCreary, I am ruling that you’re present. Are you going to stand right in front of me and tell me you’re not standing there?”

Then the Democrats tried to run out of the building, but Reed locked the doors. One old codger managed to kick his way through the door and run away. Then they tried to hide under their desks, but Reed could still see them. Then they tried rulebook tricks to block the vote. Took three days but Reed beat them. New rules, the Reed Rules. When the Democrats took over the House, they got rid of the Reed Rules. But Reed was still there, and he always managed to get his Republicans out of the building before a big vote, so the Democrats were forced to admit they were wrong, and they put the Reed Rules back. Since then, the House has run much more smoothly….until Boehner.

There are those who argue that Henry Clay was the best Speaker. Although Clay did make the position a very powerful one, he mostly did it in aid of his real goal, unnecessary wars with England. That, and using the power of his position to help his own banks.

A good nominee for second best Speaker was Nicholas Longworth, 1920s. Like Reed he was a Republican, but he listened to the Democrats. Longworth even set up a thing called the “Board of Education”, which was actually an alcohol-fueled poker game in a tiny room in the Capitol, for both Republicans and Democrats. While they were drinking and playing, they also settled pretty much all the nation’s business by figuring out the legislation that needed to get through the House. They invited young members to take a look at them and see how they handled poker and whiskey, and they occasionally invited key political players from outside the House. Harry Truman was with them when got the call that FDR had died. Two other members of the “Board” also became speakers who did great service to their country, Jack Garner and Sam Rayburn, both of whom learned plenty from Longworth. The point being that Longworth could talk easily to both parties and get things done, something which was at least theoretically the standard….until Boehner.

Boehner, as of tonight, can’t even unite his own GOP caucus to get their own bill passed on the floor. Even though they have a majority. And his inability to lead even the Republicans in the House, is going to destroy the economy. His party’s obstructive efforts on things like budgets and the debt have already cost almost a million jobs, and now even a short default will cost more than two million more jobs. For my money, he is our worst Speaker ever, even worse than Newt.

Impeachment, 2014

In 2014 there will be a serious effort in the House to impeach Obama. 

House Republicans know that their antics during the government shutdown have put control of the House in jeopardy. Team Blue could regain control in 2014. So they know this could be their last chance to impeach Obama, the man they hate even more than they hated Clinton. 

Boehner will go along with it, because he knows the teabaggers will throw him out of his job otherwise. Boehner doesn’t love Obama enough to throw himself on a grenade for him. Perhaps he even dreams that they could successfully impeach both Obama and Biden, which would mean….President Boehner. 

Yes, I know, my sphincter puckered too. 

Now, you may be thinking “There’s no way they could be that crazy and self-destructive”. First of all, these are the same guys who immolated themselves in the shutdown. The same guys who have indulged themselves in progressively crazier expressions of anti-Obama hate and conspiracy theories. And most of all, they are much, much crazier than the guys who impeached Clinton. 

Take a look at the Clinton impeachment team, and they look like sages of sanity compared to the current House teabaggers. Bob Barr got fed up with the Patriot Act and Bush’s wiretapping and left the GOP entirely. Asa Hutchinson ran the DEA. Jim Sensenbrenner, still in the House, wants to repair the damage done to the Voting Rights Act, so blacks can vote. Henry Hyde warned against Bush’s plan to invade Iraq. Lindsey Graham has so often played the moderate Voice of Reason that teabaggers want to throw Graham himself out of office. Today, the Clinton impeachment managers would be the sane, liberal wing of the GOP. 

Any impeachment plan would be considered by the House Judiciary Committee. You know who’s on that committee? Darrell Issa, the House’s main conspiracy theorist. Steve King and Louis Gohmert and Trent Franks, whose public attacks on Obama are so insane that they are practically keeping Rachel Maddow in business. And Jason Chaffetz, author of the Extortion 17 theory. These guys dream of impeaching Obama every night. They would love to be on television all summer as the impeachment managers, telling all of America, for weeks, how much they hate Obama. 

“Well, perhaps because these guys have no credibility, wiser heads will prevail and they won’t go forward.” Again, there are no wiser heads to stop them. Wiser heads would have stopped the shutdown. This is the House. And in the Clinton impeachment, the people driving the case had no credibility either: remember that the Clinton case was all about oral sex, and was driven by men who also had a long list of infidelities themselves. They knew this, and went forward anyway. They also knew that the votes weren’t there, to remove Clinton in the Senate, and they still never even slowed down. There is no brake pedal on this. 

The Obama impeachment effort itself will actually make it easier for the Republicans to lose the House, but the tea caucus doesn’t care. They are now being led by the Nihilists from The Big Lebowski. 

“We believe in nothing, Obama! Nothing! And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your Chonson!”

When the Republicans build their case, they will try to build a coalition, or rather two coalitions: people in the House who hate Obama for different reasons, and people in the national population at large who also have a wide range of beefs against Obama. They hope, in this way, to cobble together enough votes in the House to impeach, and enough supporters across the country to stem the current anti-GOP tide and even hold on to the House. They will see this as a winning strategy. 

And of course, they need a wide range of issues, because they need to impeach Obama on a long list of alleged offenses. Because each accusation, by itself, is laughably flimsy and easy to refute. 

So they will round up the people who still consider themselves national-security conservatives even after the Bush fiascos, with accusations about murdering our boys in Benghazi; Egypt; Libya; Syria; the War Powers Act; and a thing called Extortion 17, wherein Obama allegedly leaked information to the Taliban which led to the killing of the SEALs who killed bin Laden. 

People who fear Latinos: accusations about Fast and Furious, immigration and the border; promoting food stamps for illegals.

People who believe the “Obama = dictator” meme: accusations about the IRS probes; the Czars; executive orders; the AP reporters; NSA surveillance; detentions; the magical kill switch that can turn off the entire internet; planning for martial law.

People who believe all the lies about Obamacare.

People who hate Eric Holder: accusations about filing lawsuits against states; DOMA; fighting on the voting laws.

Solyndra. No one really understands what their point is on this one, but certain teabaggers still jump out of their chairs, Pavlov-like, when they hear this word. 

People who don’t understand how money works: accusations about refusing to give in to the teabaggers on the government shutdown; the auto bailout; nationalizing industries; deficits; the debt ceiling; the stimulus.

People who loathe Obama himself, just because: the birth certificate; faked college history; being a Muslim, being a Communist, the alleged Apology Tour.

People who believe everything Big Oil tells them: EPA regulation; oil drilling; the Keystone pipeline.

Gun nuts: small arms treaty; faking gun data; plotting to take our guns.

People who still don’t want blacks voting: voter fraud.

And people who don’t understand what the Constitution actually says. 

So get the popcorn ready. The Impeachment Circus is coming to town.

In praise of Yoho

Florida Congressman Ted Yoho said recently that he is totally okay with the government defaulting on its loans. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets.”

Wow.

Remember our man Ted. We will come back to him later.

Initially America was a simple place, dominated by farmers as Thomas Jefferson intended, and needed little government. The Constitution was so simple it could be printed on a few pages. The first officials mostly concerned themselves with figuring out how to do their own jobs, test-driving the powers and tools enumerated in the Constitution, thinking up an Amendment or two, appointing judges, forming parties, and occasionally passing an actual law or two. They had modest impact outside their own world.

Congress was so small and lean that it could wander up and down the Atlantic seaboard before finally settling in Washington in 1800, the same year John Adams moved into the unfinished, messy White House. In its first two years, the ninety-man Congress passed very few bills, which is astounding since they had the entire government to erect. They set up the cabinet departments and courts, and passed a few laws on oaths, tariffs and duties, the census, citizenship and residence, patents and copyrights, banks, crimes and whisky, and Native Americans. That’s about it. And then they went home.  

When they set up the government two centuries ago, they began with a presidential cabinet of four people. They picked a few ambassadors to go to a few capitals, tried to figure out how to print money, and picked a chief attorney, who initially had little to do. The government also tried to set up a national bank which was shortly shut down, and a tiny permanent army of a few thousand, which was also quickly shut down. The Supreme Court wasn’t even established until two years after the Constitution and only had six members; it was another year before they even heard their first case. Early on, they could have fit the entire federal government into a good-size theater.

It was, as intended, the smallest government run by the greatest men. The men who set it all up and ran it were equal to the task. Alexander Hamilton was running an import firm at age 16 and by 22 he was helping to run Washington’s army. Jefferson had a dazzling range of skills and experience – lawyer, architect, scientist, farmer; Franklin was similarly multi-talented, with a string of inventions to his credit. The men who wrote the Constitution and peopled the first Congresses and administrations were generally the cream of the crop, and their worked showed it.

Over the next century, government got bigger and more complicated, and the caliber of the men running it deteriorated. Those facts are connected. The government grew, to reflect the rapidly growing nation, the wildly growing economy especially in industry and finance, the proliferation of new technologies such as the railroads and the telegraph, and federal offices spending more effort creating new positions, and spending government money. Accordingly men of indifferent ethical standards became more attracted to government work. When Andrew Jackson came along and sketched out the power of the executive branch on terms very favorable to himself, a key tool he created for himself was the power of patronage: the power to put his supporters in place as postmasters, toll collectors, tax collectors, hundreds of positions in which enterprising men of elastic morals could make a nice living, regardless of their actual salary, and regardless of their actual ability. Government work, formerly intended as the domain of citizen philosopher-kings like Jefferson, became a playground for the greedy and hungry.

As the scope of government operations began to exceed the abilities of the men running it, things sometimes went awry, particularly when the nation chose leaders who only had one narrow area of expertise (army generals were a particular problem) or who turned a blind eye to corruption and embraced laissez-faire government too enthusiastically (which led to financial panics several times). It wasn’t as though Americans who followed politics were unaware of the corruption problem: they initially expressed dismay when machine politician Chester Arthur became president after Garfield was shot (although Arthur turned out to be more honest than his prior career would suggest), and the reform efforts of Cleveland and Roosevelt were popular.

In the nation’s second century it became obvious that the men they were sending to do the nation’s work weren’t falling short only in character, but also in competence. Following the Second World War, as America rose to the summit of world power and set to work feeding and rebuilding much of the world, as new challenges were posed by the arrival of radio and television, the telephone and the automobile, new advances in medicine and consumer goods, the Cold War and the rise of thorny new global issues across the third world, the internet revolution – the gap between the complexity of the government’s efforts, and the caliber of the people running it all, visibly widened. The “best and the brightest” committed more and more shockingly inept errors: the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Watergate, Reaganomics, Iran-Contra, the Bush tax cuts, and the Yellow-Cake-Mushroom-Cloud soup of Iraq. Mission Accomplished!

Now the government is grappling with a stunning array of incredibly complex issues, many of which require expert-level knowledge in order to make policy competently in those areas: the dozens of legal aspects of gay marriage, the scientific realities of global warming, the morass of the health insurance world, military technology and contracting, the hundred-headed monster of Middle East policy, the two dozen nasty issues we have with China, the inner workings of the financial world, the many factors at work in the voting process, job creation in a depressed economy, surmounting the mountain of debt, and responding to military crises and natural disasters.

Members of Congress have, sometimes, tried to keep up. Senators, who formerly had no staff people at all, now have staffers helping them, although often as not the staffers are lawyers and political hucksters just like their bosses, rather than experts in any particular field. Some members of Congress have, in fact, made it their business to gain expertise in a particular field.

But the current crop, not so much. We have had an influx of new members who work hard at keeping themselves ignorant by refusing to learn anything, by socializing mainly with people who think like they do, and then driving home listening to Rush and turning on Fox News at home. And many of them knew little of the workings of the real world in the first place: they went straight from adolescence into politics and the law, and know nothing of the world outside that realm. Look on the floor of the House or Senate for an expert who really knows the drill on climate change or the financial system, and….once you’re done talking with Elizabeth Warren, it’s a short list.

Just look at them!

Todd Akin, self-appointed expert on the female reproductive tract, the guy who said that rape doesn’t cause pregnancy? He worked for his family’s steel firm, before getting a divinity degree and getting thrown in jail eight times for harassing women’s clinics. His status in the profession of gynecology is, to say the least, amateur.

Darrell Issa, self-appointed expert on military operations, made his bones selling car alarms.

Steve King, fond of pronunciamentos on social issues and global warming, sold earth moving machinery.

Joe “You Lie!” Wilson, flacking real estate; likewise Randy Neugebauer and Johnny Isakson.

Michele Bachmann, who truly believed she was qualified to be president, was an unlicensed “counselor” claiming to convert gays to heterosexuality, and ran a farm which is now under investigation.

And it just goes on and on. Jim Inhofe, ran an insurance firm into the ground. John McCain, whose main non-political distinction is wrecking half a dozen Navy planes. Rob Portman was Bush’s budget man, author of historic deficits. Allen West, army officer punished for beating a prisoner. Rand Paul, eye doctor. Mike Enzi, shoe salesman. Jason Chaffetz, football player and marketing spokesman.

And our pal Ted Yoho, self-appointed expert on the global financing market, the guy who said a federal default would have a positive effect?

Yoho is a horse doctor. A vet.

What if we demanded that the people who make policy on these complex issues…actually understood the issues?

What if one of the two major parties actually took government leadership seriously, instead of nominating people like George Bush and Sarah Palin to run the world?

Questions for pro-lifers

So….if the “clear-cut” argument against abortion is that if kills something that is human and alive….
Sperm and ova are human and alive, and life doesn’t ever “begin” – at best, a new life, the embryo, is created from two already-living things, the sperm and ovum….
So are the women using contraception murderers too?
Is masturbation murder?
Is everyone who has non-vaginal sex a murderer?
People who use the rhythm method?
Is a condom a murder weapon?
Women who have hysterectomies, men who have vasectomies… mass murderers?
Actually, anyone undergoing a procedure ending in –ectomy is probably killing living tissue – appendectomies, tonsillectomies, murder?  
And of course mastectomy and other cancer surgery: cancer cells are human life!
Haircuts, shaving, trimming toenails, plastic surgery?
Not quite so clear-cut, is it?

Why do anti-abortion zealots insist that life begins at conception, when Genesis says life begins when you take your first breath? Leviticus 27 goes even further: it says life has no value before the infant is a month old.

So God kills a million living breathing innocent babies a year, but opposes abortion? When he had Noah build the Ark and hit the world with the flood, God killed every fetus on planet earth. Every one. Over a million children die from diarrhea alone, every year. And 260,000 die of AIDS. And 90,000 from cancer. Oh, and by the way, a pregnancy has one chance in five of ending in miscarriage; in other words, God has caused two billion abortions. Let us worship him!

Oh, and by the way, after killing all the fetuses in the Flood and prescribing abortion in Numbers, there's this, from Hosea, 13:16, "The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.” In other words, not only does God approve of abortion, he approves abortion on a large scale as an instrument of war. Large, large numbers of abortions, just as in the Flood. Authored by God, in the Bible. Do you people even read the Bible?

What if we introduced a constitutional amendment that a state can only have as many gun stores as it has abortion clinics?

If you want to stop abortion, why fight contraception too? Contraception would stop two thirds of all abortions. Or is this just another way to stick it to women because they don’t vote the way you like?

All you guys who hate abortion – why don’t you get vasectomies, or pledge to give up sex entirely? Or not pressure a woman into sex when neither of you is ready to be a parent? That would absolutely cut down the abortion rate. What if your wives decided that since you’ve banned abortion and contraception, their only alternative is abstinence? Say goodnight, Mister Happy!

If a newly fertilized ovum is a person….is an egg a chicken, too? Is an acorn a tree?

If conservatives want to stop the deaths of the unborn, why do they refuse to fight things that kill the unborn, such as poverty, poor nutrition, pollutants, lack of access to prenatal care, domestic violence, poor maternal health, and gun violence?

Questions for homophobes

I have so many questions, I had to divide them into six piles. The first pile: Leviticus. 

LEVITICUS

I had a few questions about Leviticus in which, we are told, God bans gay marriage.

The alleged holy ban on gays comes to us in the book of Leviticus. According to the Bible, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, escaped, went to Sinai, sent Moses up the mountain to receive God’s law, and continued to receive the law on Sinai through Leviticus and into the book of Numbers. God’s decrees in Leviticus allegedly occurred at Sinai: see Leviticus 25. But scientists, historians and archaeologists have made clear to us that the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt was a myth: it never happened. The Jews were in the Holy Land the whole time, not in Egypt. If the enslavement was a myth, then the escape and the trip to Sinai were also myths. And therefore the story of God passing his laws to man on Sinai was also made up. So even if you believe in God, how can Leviticus really be the true word of God?

Also, Leviticus, and indeed the entire Torah, was allegedly written by Moses at the time of these alleged events. But the books themselves describe the death of Moses as something that occurred many years in the past, so the authorship of Moses is fraudulent. Leviticus wasn’t even completed until the many centuries of Jewish judges and kings were over, and Israel had fallen to the Babylonians and Persians. So even if you believe in God, how can Leviticus be the word of Moses?

Third, whoever did write the laws of Leviticus – some priest who was a subject of the conquering Persians – was obviously not thinking clearly. He not only hated gays, but prescribed the death penalty for gays. Execution! Someone who was mentally sound would have realized that such a sentence would be insanely disproportionate. It would never be carried out anyway under the ruling Persians, who were quite tolerant in terms of everything from food and drink to local religions. It wouldn’t even have been carried out under the Israelites, whose many violations of God’s laws, as told in the tales of judge and kings – murder, adultery, incest, rape, idolatry -- went unpunished. So how can this law even be the work of someone of sound mind? And that’s in terms of 500 BC, let alone today. 

Execution? How can anyone take the first part of the rule seriously – the ban on gays – when the second part, the death penalty, is so ludicrous? Which is perfectly in keeping with some of the other truly insane laws – laws on mildew and unclean things, whether you can eat vultures and bats, the ban on tattoos (which a lot of hard-core Christians ignore)? Or are the hard-core believers really advocating the death penalty, here in the 21st century?

Fourth, the founders of Christianity – Peter, Paul and James – decided that Christians do not need to follow the law of the Torah, including Leviticus. Paul said so in several of the epistles, including Romans, Ephesians, Galatians, Collossians, Hebrews, and the first Pope, Peter, agreed, as did James, the disciple who wrote the new rules that Christians should follow, instead of the Torah. The founders of Christianity said “set aside the Torah, follow these new rules instead!” 

And many of the Christian denominations acknowledged this, including the Catholics – the doctrine of supersessionism, the notion that the ministry of Jesus means we no longer have to take every word of the Torah literally. Thus all that ham and shrimp on Christian tables, the trimmed beards, the cotton/poly blends. So even if you believe in God, why are Christians insisting on literal word-for-word interpretation of the Torah, when the founders of Christianity and the churches that followed said you don’t need to do that?

Fifth, Leviticus is addressed to males. It says nothing about lesbians. So why are we trying to use Leviticus to stop lesbians from marrying?

So the Leviticus rule is not the word of God, is not the word of Moses, is not even the word of someone in his right mind, it was repudiated by the founders of Christianity, and it says nothing about lesbians. The entire argument for using the Bible to ban gay marriage is based on error. So why are hard-core Christians making this laughable scriptural mistake the centerpiece of their political “ministry”?

And sixth, even if you believe in God, since when do we use the Bible to make the laws in America? You want to use religion to write the laws, go to Iran or Saudi Arabia, or join the Taleban. This is America.

PAUL AND HIS FRIENDS

When the hard-core homophobes are pushed into a corner, they fall back on the language of Leviticus, the law of the Torah. They use that anti-gay passage in the Bible to justify banning gay marriage. As far as they are concerned, Torah is paramount, and no other argument is needed.

With that in mind, I have a few trivia questions to throw at you.

QUESTION 1: Which famous figure said, over and over, in speech after speech, in letter after letter, that it is okay for Christians to ignore Torah law, that blessedness is independent of the law, that we are now discharged and set free from Torah law, that people who ignore the law will still receive God’s glory, that Jesus put an end to Torah law? Torah law, which includes Leviticus?

Clues – he said this --  “Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish?... Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law…. Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.”

And this --  “Listen! I am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace…. I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!...For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.… But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.”

And this -- “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths…. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch”?  All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings.”

Answer: Saint Paul, the man who did more than anyone to build the Christian faith.

QUESTION 2: Which famous figure argued that one of the Torah’s most important laws, the law on circumcision, was a Jewish law, and that it was stupid to make Christians obey it? Ignoring Torah law is okay, even on the major rules?

Answer: Saint Peter, the first Pope.

QUESTION 3: Which famous figure told Christians to throw out the Torah laws, and instead wrote a much shorter list of social rules for Christians, and sent the list to Christian churches all across Europe?

Answer: Saint James, the man who ran the infant Christian church in the early days.

QUESTION 4: Which famous figure said that doing good was more important than following Torah law, that the hard-core protectors of the law were worthy of contempt, who told people to ignore Torah law on food and divorce and adultery and circumcision and cleanliness and the Sabbath? And repeatedly violated Torah law by doing work and helping people on the Sabbath, put wine in the water jars used for the Jewish holy rites of purification, caused a riot inside the center of Jewish law -- holy temple of Jerusalem, and said the temple would be destroyed? And praised a man who emphasized doing good rather than following the rituals of Torah law?

Answer: Jesus of Nazareth. A figure who is kinda important to the whole Christianity thing. Jesus was actually echoing the sentiments of Isaiah, Zechariah and Ezekiel, three important Jewish prophets who said people needed to stop focusing on the law and start living better lives.

QUESTION 5: Following the establishment of Christianity, name at least three people or institutions which approved the doctrine that at least some of Torah law is no longer valid.

Answer: acceptable answers include the Catholic church. Church of England, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, dispensationalists, followers of New Covenant Theology, and two of the great formative thinkers of the faith, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Bonus points if you know the name of that doctrine: Supersessionism.

Bonus points if you knew which denominations were already fighting for LGBT equality -- the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and Methodists. The Anglicans are likely to follow suit soon.

QUESTION 6: Which famous figure said that not only is he okay with gays, but even atheists can be saved if they follow their own conscience?

Answer: the current Pope. The Bishop of Rome.

In other words, people who insist that we must shun gay people because it’s God’s immutable law, are flying in the face of Jesus, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint James, Isaiah, Zechariah, Ezekiel, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, and the current Pope.

The only people who are sticking to the “ban the gays” doctrine are the hard-core white-folks churches – the most extreme Baptists, Pentecostals, snake-handlers etc – and the hard-core Muslims, and some of the more backward African countries, and Russia under its current knuckle-dragging dictator, Vladimir Putin. In other words, the world’s ghettoes. So if you are trying to keep gays as second-class citizens forever, these are the people you’re keeping company with.

BESTIALITY AND OTHER WORKS OF GOD

“The Bible says ‘one man, one woman’!”

Well, is that all the book says on the subject?

All you Christians out there who really believe that God’s plan is for marriage to involve one man and one woman, I’ve got a test for you. Look at this group of 33 names – the great names of the Bible – and tell me which two names don’t belong with the other 31.

Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Esau, Gideon, Saul, David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Ahab, Lamech, Caleb, Belshazzar, Ezra, Manasseh, Nahor, Simeon, Zedekiah, Joash, Elkanah, Ashur, Abijah, Jehoiada, Ahasuerus, Benhadad, Eliphaz, Jehoiachin, Jehoram, Jerahmeel, Machir Mered, Jesus

The answer? Adam and Jesus. The other 31 men all practiced polygamy. Adam had sex with Eve, but since they were made from the same flesh, technically that was not marriage, it was incest. Jesus never married at all.

The norm for men in the Old Testament was not one-man-one-woman marriage. It was polygamy.

First, in Genesis, God’s original plan was for Adam to “partner” with an animal. No women were contemplated at all, originally. 

When that didn’t work, God made Adam a wife out of his own rib. 

When God was forced to reboot all of mankind in the Flood, he re-peopled the world using Noah’s family. A rather tiny gene pool. 

When the patriarchs of the Old Testament came along, God allowed them to marry multiple wives, as we saw earlier; one such patriarch gave away his wife to be raped.

When the apostles came along, Jesus told them to leave their families behind, to go out and preach the gospels; most of them did just that. All but one of the twelve was killed on the road, their wives many miles away. 

When the disciples took over Christianity, they said Christians could ignore all the laws in the Torah, and just try to live moral lives. Read Romans, Collossians, Ephesians, Galatians, Hebrews. That, incidentally invalidated the language in Leviticus on gays. And most Christian denominations have acknowledged this – the notion that you can’t take the whole Bible literally. 

So, in order, the Biblical tenets on marriage are….bestiality, incest with a clone, incest again after the Flood, polygamy, desertion, and – scariest of all! – tolerance, in defiance of Torah law. Happy marriages involving one man and one woman are actually extremely rare in the Bible.  And no, we’re not counting Joseph-Where-The-Hell-Did-That-Baby-Come-From, and Mary-That's-My-Story-And-I'm-Sticking-To-It.

See, this is what happens when you read the whole Bible, instead of cherry-picking the bits you like.

In addition to approving bestiality and incest and polygamy and desertion, the Bible also approves a long list of truly immoral behavior: genocide, cannibalism, ethnic cleansing, slavery, the murder of children, the pornography in Song of Songs, and rape as an instrument of war. But gays who love each other – THAT’S immoral. Do I have that right…?

IT’S UNNATURAL!

Imagine my joy to hear the wingnuts hollering: “You don’t see homosexuality in the natural world. It’s unnatural!”

So….how are you defining the word “natural”?

First of all, homosexuality has been seen in well over a thousand species, from the lower-order animals up to primates. Same-sex couples across the animal kingdom not only have sex – they court each other, show affection, pair off, and raise offspring. Sheep seem to be major “offenders”. Among black swans homosexual pairings may be as high as 25 percent; ten percent or more in mallards and western gulls; the practice is epidemic among penguins; dolphins have gay sex with their blow-holes. A majority of sex activity among bonobo apes is girl on girl, and homosexuality among primates is very high, suggesting the possibility that homosexuality is linked to higher intelligence. Asian elephants engage in gay sex almost half the time and form long-term gay relationships, and the rate is even higher among giraffes. Dragonflies have gay sex even though it can damage their heads (which suggests to me that maybe they’re doing it wrong). Some animals are asexual, and others indulge in cross-species sex.

Likewise it is dubious to argue that God, the maker of nature, hates gay people, when he made millions and millions of them, in addition to all those gay animals. Again -- just as it says in Corinthians: “However that may be, let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you.” In other words, you were Born That Way. Made That Way By God. Or, if you prefer, nature. 

And second, if we’re talking about unnatural things…can we talk about the Bible? A talking snake, totally unnatural. A wheel of fire in the sky, a violation of the laws of nature. A burning bush, a rain of blood, a magical massacre of children, water into wine, raising people from the dead, angels, dragons, demons, talking donkeys, a ladder climbing into the sky, witches talking to the dead, walking on water, feeding five thousand with one basket of food, curing the sick with the laying on of hands, sticks into snakes, parting of the Red Sea, water from a rock, the sun stopping in the sky, iron floating, manna from heaven, a man living in a whale’s stomach, a woman turned to salt. We are told of four-headed Cherubim, six-winged Seraphim, the many-eyed Ophanim, seductive Succubi, and giants.  Even Harry Potter didn’t give us such an incredible circus of nature-defying magic. The Bible is not only not natural, it is an insult to nature, violating nature’s laws in laughably fraudulent fables.

Oh, and by the way, if you go back to the original King James bible, it also has...unicorns. Isaiah, 34:7.

And nothing, nothing in the history of man or his literature, could ever be more unnatural than God deciding, in Genesis, to kill off almost all of mankind AND the animals and plants too. Then God did the same in Egypt – when he killed the first-born babies, he killed off the first-born animals too. And then God promises to do the same again in Revelation, kill off almost all of mankind while wreaking widespread destruction of the natural world on earth. God declares unrestricted war on nature. 

 And no gay man in history ever violated the laws of nature more than the Big Cheese himself, Jesus of Nazareth. Not only did Jesus violate nature over and over, his followers used those very violations of nature to prove his divinity. There is a causal relationship here – the way you prove you have God on your side is to violate nature with a miracle. The second most prolific miracle-monger in the Bible, after Jesus, is Moses, who flung all those nature-defying miracles at the Pharaoh, and Moses is the tent-pole for the entire Old Testament, handing down the laws (via miracle, of course) to the Jews, who then spent most of the Old Testament violating those very laws and receiving God’s punishment (again, via miracle).

The early founders of Christianity stressed this over and over: Jesus must be God because he rose from the dead and flew into heaven in violation of nature’s laws, and the disciples must be holy too because they performed miracles. The way you prove you’re on Team God, the way saints get their sainthoods from the pope, is to violate nature via a miracle. 

Taking the faithful at their word, then…if you don’t believe in miraculous violations of nature, you can’t really be counted as a Christian. Faith in miracles is what gets you in the door.

So, summing up, religious faith requires belief in miracles: it requires a belief that nature’s laws don’t matter -- except when it comes to gays. Who already exist in nature anyway. That’s religious “logic” for you. 

Being gay is perfectly in harmony with nature. The Bible is a violation of nature. Or do I have that wrong?

For extra fun, let’s remind the evangelicals of all the stuff they do every day, that is unnatural. Using indoor plumbing, wearing glasses, refrigeration, the microwave, the internet, the telephone, the TV, modern medicine so we don't all die when we're thirty, brushing our teeth, driving a car, wearing shoes, deodorant, tampons....solving our problems via democracy instead of hitting each other with sticks....

RITES AND RIGHTS

The right to marry isn’t just the right to the church, the limo, the rice, the rubber-chicken reception, the DJ, the cake. So, homophobes…If you think that giving LGBT couple equal rights isn’t important, are you willing to live the way they live?

Are you willing to have to fight for health insurance?

Are you willing to be treated like a freak every time you need to file paperwork for compensation for service-related deaths, income tax filing status and deductions, tax-free property transfers, Social Security, veteran’s pensions and disability, disabled vets tax exemptions, relocation benefits for military families, survivor benefits and continuation of health care for surviving spouses?

Are you willing to be treated like a criminal when you’re dealing with organ donor issues, next-of-kin status, parental rights, access to school records, alimony, child custody, adoption, foster care, homestead laws, water rights, spousal assets as a factor in determining need for government aid  including VA benefits, housing, educational loans and farm price supports, name changes, domestic violence laws, spousal privilege for criminal witnesses, prison visitation, hospital visitation, conflict-of-interest rules, medical decisions, funeral decisions, condominium laws, bankruptcy, child support, shared property, prenuptial agreements, wills and inheritance?

For five thousand years, straight people, and only straight people, have been entrusted with the institution of marriage. And for five thousand years they have made total hash of it, a record of disastrous failure. Marriages destroyed by infidelity, drinking, drug abuse, immaturity, domestic violence, abandonment, child abuse, incest, and mental cruelty. Straight marriage has a failure rate of fifty percent – if it was a toaster or a blow-dryer, they would have to recall it. Heterosexuals have proved that they cannot be trusted with this institution anymore. 

What if, the next five thousand years, only gays and lesbians can marry? Straight people will just have to get along with the same deal that gays have had to put up with. Fighting with lawyers and doctors over legal rights, health care, child custody, hospital visitation. Because opponents of gay marriage insist, vehemently, that it’s okay to force gay people who love each other to live like that, right? Force straight people to live in the shadows like that, if they think it's okay to treat gays that way. We’ll see how quickly their attitude changes. 

So for the next five thousand years it's the other team's turn. Gays get to marry and straights don't. They can still have kids, buy houses, make their lives, but no marriage. Who's with me?

And by the way, how wobbly is your traditional marriage, if it can be “threatened” by the two gay computer programmers living down the street?

Discriminating against an entire class of people, under the law, just because you’re clinging to the book of Leviticus, isn’t just unfair, it’s unconstitutional.

MORE QUESTIONS

Did you know that most Christians have the story of Sodom wrong? According to the Big Book (Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel), the city of Sodom was punished for mistreating foreigners and the poor, not gay sex.  

Did you know that once the Israelites finally built their own kingdom, the first great heroic king was gay? David, future king of the Jews, and his pal Jonathan “became one”. Jonathan loved David as he loved himself; the two men made a covenant together; Jonathan took off his clothes and gave them to David; he made David swear he loved him, and defied his father because of David, the father thinking the relationship shameful; they shared a love surpassing the love of women; they had secret meetings, kissed and wept. During this time David kept himself from women, although later he did his kingly duty and married so he could produce princes, which turned out badly. So….these two lads made a covenant? What sort of covenant do people make when they love each other? Round these parts they call it “marriage”.

So…according to the God People, we can teach a child how to use a gun, but not how to use a condom, to keep them safe?

Why do so many believers have tattoos, which are banned in the same book of the Bible that allegedly bans gays? Do the God People realize that if I came to their church on Sunday and tossed out all the people who were violating Biblical law – tattoos, eating ham and bacon, wearing cotton/polyester blends, trimming the corners of their beards and goatees, fornication, adultery, disobedient wives – I would be standing in the church by myself? In fact, isn’t that what Jesus was doing that day at the Temple, just before they arrested him?

When God made millions of gay people and thousands of species with gay behavior – was that a mistake?

What kind of “loving God” would put love in our hearts and then force us to choose between loving the person we love, and loving God?

So the imaginary gay effort to convert straights to homosexuality is an abomination, but the very real Christian effort to brainwash gays to become straight is critical to saving America?

A religious group which tried to take people’s money for “gay conversion” therapy has now found itself in court, for fraud and abuse. They made unsubstantiated claims about the scientific validity and success rates of their “cures”, claims rejected by the American Psychiatric Association (even other “gay converters” are finally giving up the game and apologizing). When does religious practice become fraud? A crime?

The “gay conversion” efforts in America are even less amusing when transplanted overseas. In South Africa, white supremacists, as a sideline, have built “gay conversion” camps, where children have died. “Conversion” by means of burns, beatings, starvation, dehydration, chaining children to their beds, forcing children to eat feces and cleansing powder, torturing children who beg to leave. Is this what you hope to impose in America? Huckabee already said he wants to put HIV patients in concentration camps – do you want that for all gays?

Gay and lesbian teens are five times as likely to commit suicide, because of persecution and bullying from people like you homophobes. Did you realize that your tyrannical effort to “save” the rest of us now has a body count?

Do you really think those high-schoolers come out as gay by choice, because they know the other students are going to be so wonderfully understanding? 

And finally, even if being gay was a choice….so what? Love is always a choice: unless you’re in some tribal third-world dump, you chose who you were going to marry. Gays want the same thing: the only difference is their body parts, which are none of your business.

And there you have it. I ask these questions because America’s homophobes are undertaking an entirely unconstitutional effort to take rights and privileges and money away from millions of Americans, because of a reading of the Bible which is selective and just plain wrong anyway.

So I pause for your reply. I fully expect the usual lies, evasions, attacks, straw-man arguments and cherry-picking, but perhaps Team God can surprise us for once.