(Link thanks to bean at Alas, a Blog 2004/10/15)

I don’t care about winning same-sex marriage privileges (for feminist reasons that I’ve laid out in comments and in my essay, The Cake is Rotten). But that doesn’t mean that I’m indifferent to electoral fights such as Oregon’s Measure 36, one of the latest rounds in the Religious Right campaign to write homophobia into federal and state constitutions. So I’m pleased as punch to have found (thanks to Alas, a Blog) the four arguments that M. Dennis Moore has managed to get published in the official Oregon voters’ pamphlet–in favor of the measure to ban same-sex marriage.

Yeah, you heard me. In favor. All of them are great, but my favorite by far is his fourth argument, Let’s Vote:

LET’S VOTE!

The recent OCA signature drive for the Divine Sovereignty Life Amendment, if successful, would have given Oregonians the extraordinary opportunity to vote on the existence of God, yes or no. Religious dogma would have been decided democratically by popular vote — essentially creating an official state religion with GOD ALMIGHTY enshrined in the Constitution as

Oregon State Deity!

Although this initiative drive failed, the Christian Coalition has now created a Commandment Amendment to the Constitution! Measure 36 ordains us to

VOTE ON THE THEOLOGICAL BELIEF

of whether churches, synagogues, and temples shalt not be permitted to marry gays and lesbians.

And this election thus establishes the glorious precedent for democratic electioneering on ALL of the

Official Oregon State Dogma!

COMING SOON
TO A THEOLOGY BALLOT NEAR YOU:

• Shall churches, synagogues, and temples be permitted to marry divorced persons (Luke 16:18)? Let’s vote!
• Shall baptism be by sprinkling, pouring, or dipping? Let’s vote!
• Shall the Lord’s Prayer be translated forgive us our debts or forgive us our trespasses? Let’s vote!
• Shall adulterers be stoned to death(Leviticus 20:10)? Let’s vote!
• Shall obnoxious religious-right hypocrites be allowed to marry? Hell no! Let’s vote!
• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hey, let’s just vote!

This is democracy! Religious beliefs belong on the ballot, and winning beliefs become public policy in the Constitutional Catechism! Minority adherents, straight and gay, should have the statesmanship to accept that religious freedom does not protect losing beliefs in a theological election.

Your special right to practice your moral beliefs (including marriage) is subject to the whims of popular vote!

It’s not discrimination, it’s electoral theology.

In Oregon, democratic dogma is inspired by initiative and referendum — in the

Holy Marriage
of the
One Official Oregon Church and State!

VOTE FOR OREGON:
State beaches, the bottle bill, land-use planning, and now
THE OREGON DOGMA!

(This information furnished by M. Dennis Moore, God for Oregon Deity-PAC [GOD-PAC], Family Alliance of God.)

Yes, that really will be going out on state letterhead to every voter in Oregon; you can confirm it at the Secretary of State’s website (the arguments he submitted are the first three arguments in favor and the next to last).

Electoral theology! Mmm, sacrelicious.

Further reading:

• GT 2004/03/10: Traditional marriage”
• GT 2001/08/07: Religious Right wants to write homophobia into the Constitution
• Comments on Civil Rights and Family Values: In Defense of Homosexual (and Heterosexual) Marriage: in which I trash my own argument for gay marriage
• Essay 2001/11/28: The Cake is Rotten: in which I give an extended version of the argument against marriage-privilege

Some more from Tolkien’s letters, to go along with his comments on the horrors of war:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically conceived, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to unconstitutional Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance at recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to King George’s council, Winston and his gang, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

–letter to his son Christopher Tolkien, 29 November 1943. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #52

I suppose that Hans-Hermann Hoppe would like the kind words for unrestrained Monarchy. Otherwise, though, a lovely statement.

In international politics, there is some good news and some bad news.

In international politics, the good news is that Cambodia’s king abdicated two days ago.

The bad news is that they’re going to get another one.

But even that cloud has a silver lining. Whatever the faults of quasi-hereditary monarchy, and whatever sort of political tool the new king may turn out to be, he is still someone other than old King Sihanouk.

BANGKOK — Southeast Asia’s wiliest political survivor yesterday completed his own intricately scripted exit from the stage. King Norodom Sihanouk, who first took Cambodia’s throne when Nazi-backed Vichy France controlled Indochina in 1941, stunned his subjects last week by announcing he would voluntarily abdicate and allow his untested son, Prince Norodom Sihamoni, to replace him.

The formal transfer, endorsed in yesterday’s unanimous decision by the country’s nine-member throne council in Phnom Penh, thrust the 51-year-old prince, a trained classical dancer based in Paris since the 1970s, into the international limelight and ended the reign of the only monarch most Cambodians have ever known.

It’s insufferable enough to read whitewashed obituaries of rotten people–let alone to read this kind of kid-glove treatment when the asshole isn’t even deceased yet. A certain degree of restraint toward the recently dead is one thing; shameless kissing of the royal rings is another. King Sihanouk spent the past 63 years as either a tyrant, a pretender, or a figurehead; during that time he consorted with and covered for the French colonialists, Imperial Japan, the Vietminh, North Vietnam and the Vietcong, the Khmer Rouge, and finally the United States and the United Nations. His “wily survival” consisted in murdering and suppressing political opposition, and ingratiating himself with the murderers of millions.

When communist fighters in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos achieved victory in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge immediately ordered all residents to leave Phnom Penh and all other cities overnight, inaugurating their killing fields regime.

But the king flew to New York in 1975 and told the United Nations that the Khmer Rouge evacuation of cities had been achieved without bloodshed and he convinced exiled Cambodian intellectuals, military officers and others to return home to support the new regime.

When they did, they were killed alongside more than 1 million other Cambodians, victims of the Khmer Rouge’s policies of mass executions, enslavement, torture and starvation.

After King Sihanouk’s return in 1976, the Khmer Rouge put him under house arrest and murdered several of his relatives.

Vietnam invaded in 1979 and ousted Pol Pot. In 1982, King Sihanouk lent his support to a loose, Khmer Rouge-led, U.S.-financed guerrilla alliance, to end the Vietnamese occupation.

The Washington Times describes such a man as Southeast Asia’s wiliest political survivor, a tough act … to follow, and a unique figure among world leaders (I suppose that Idi Amin was a unique figure, too.)

For Pete’s sake. Just what does a King have to do to get some disrespect around here?

The best news about the Vice Presidential debate tonight is that it will almost surely be the least significant of any of the debates held. Last week we got a serious, substantive debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush, and (to my wildly partisan eyes, at least) a confident and thorough stomping by Kerry all over Little Lord Bush. (I still would much rather that I could vote for John Kerry in 1971, but it’s a fallen world and you’ve got to take what you can get.) Tonight, what we got was a series of weak and poorly-connected attacks between two non-respsonsive soundbite machines, a vituperative bull session without any clear upshot for anyone. Dick Hordak Cheney was appalling as always; John Edwards surprised no-one (I hope) by turning out to be a smiley face atop an empty suit.

That’s not the main topic for this post, though; the Veep debate was way too lame to justify a post about it. Rather, I want to follow the candidates’ own procedure and talk for a while about some tangential point that happened to be raised along the way even though it has nothing to do with the question. During one of his most meandering answers, Edwards tried to run to the right of the Bush Administration on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Along the way he offered the following nugget of conventional wisdom about the predicament of the Sharon government:

They don’t have a partner for peace right now. They certainly don’t have a partner in Arafat, and they need a legitimate partner for peace.

But why in God’s name do they need that?

Israel did not look for a partner for peace in South Lebanon. They are not looking for a partner for peace in Gaza.

We need to think carefully about what trying to find a partner for peace means in this context. You might, of course, wonder whether the Palestinians have a legitimate partner for peace in the government of Ariel Sharon; you might well, on the other hand, agree that Arafat is a crook and a thug, that he has failed ordinary Palestinians countless times, and that there is little hope for any substantial progress of any sort with him. But how did Arafat come to hold the position of power that he holds now? What process legitimated his Fatah cops and his authoritarian regime? Oh yes, it was the negotiated peace process. When American or Israeli politicians talk about trying to find a partner for peace what that means is hand-picking someone who will be reliably agreeable in negotiating on behalf of all Palestinians. What it means is that the occupation has to keep on its long, bloody, deadly grind until politicians from Israel and from the U.S. have effectively handed over the reins of power in the Palestinian community to someone based on their negotiating priorities. What that means is giving tremendous power and resources to a select few and expecting this elite–created from the coercive pressure of the occupation, with no authorization from the Palestinians that the partner for peace claims to speak on behalf of. That’s what they did for Arafat and Fatah, and that’s what they are trying to do now for Fatah officials seen as more moderate or more reliable; but the whole history of the colonial and postcolonial world should tell you that hand-picked elites cannot be trusted not to abuse the power and resources they are given–least of all hand-picked elites whose claim to legitimacy derives from the occupying power. The record is as clear in the occupied territories as anywhere else: an Oslo-style negotiated process, and the requisite partner for peace propped up Yasser Arafat as the stand-in for the Palestinian people as a whole, and hand-picked Fatah as the government for the Palestinian Authority. It has not moved the peace process forward; it handed tremendous power and resources within the Palestinian community to bandits and street thugs. It has made a terrible situation worse, with every passing day, for ordinary Palestinians and ordinary Israelis.

Sooner or later Edwards and Cheney and Sharon and Barak and the rest of them are going to have to realize that peace through hand-picked partners for peace doesn’t work. It provides only the illusion of a peace process. There’s a moral here, for both the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. The answer is not negotiating (which legitimates and empowers any gangster who happens to attach himself to the peace-process teat). If you think that you can handpick a good government for the people underneath the boots of your military, and if you think that refusing to lift those boots from off their necks until you have found the right one for them, is a good way to promote peace, freedom and human flourishing, then you are on the wrong side of history. But continuing an indefinite occupation is intolerable (as the majority of Israelis already realize, and as most Americans are swiftly learning). So what is to be done?

Isn’t it obvious? Quit trying to negotiate and quit trying to stay; unilaterally withdraw, and let the once-occupied people decide their own fate rather than trying to hand-pick a new State for them before you leave. In Gaza, in the West Bank, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, what we all need to do is: quit trying to find a partner for peace, quit trying to win, and just get the hell out.

Getting the hell out and leaving people alone. Now that would be a nice model for that broader Middle East.

Further reading

• GT 2004/08/16: The Long Memory
• GT 2003/11/11: Winning the Peace

Greetings citizen! Today, our vigilance protected the Homeland Security of America from yet another looming danger. Thanks to the great patriotic efforts of Midwest Airlines employees in Milwaukee, a flight of 118 innocent passangers was saved from the terrifying threat of non-Latin scripts:

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Midwest Airlines canceled a flight ready to take off for San Francisco after a passenger found Arabic-style handwriting in the company’s in-flight magazine and alerted the crew.

The plane, carrying 118 passengers and five crew members, had already pulled away from the gate at Mitchell International Airport Sunday evening. It returned to the gate, the passengers got off, security authorities were notified, all luggage was checked and the aircraft was inspected. Nothing was found.

The passengers were put up in nearby hotels and booked on a Monday morning flight.

The writing was in Farsi, the language used in Iran, said airline spokeswoman Carol Skornicka. She said she didn’t know exactly what the writing said but was similar to a prayer, something of a contemplative nature.

You can rest easy tonight knowing that the War on Terror protects our freedom, our way of life, and our prosperity–by holding up all business for a day and detaining over 100 people over scribbled prayers in languages you don’t understand.