Civil Commotion

Election day is one week away and, already, early-voting numbers are approaching the 2016 vote totals; clearly, many Americans have strong feelings about the election. Assuming the good guys win and Donald Trump is sent to Outer Darkness, it seems to me that the country might have a strong majority for settling some important business.

• Get rid of the Electoral College. Much is made routinely of the College’s important role in preventing large-population states from overwhelming low-population states, but the Electoral College has two purposes. The second reason for creating the College is that the Founders didn’t trust the great mass of people to resist seduction by a demagogue — and on that score the College failed miserably, and at terrible cost.

  The system that seems likely to me to produce the best, most representative result is a general election followed by a runoff between the two top vote-getters when one candidate fails to win more than 50% of the vote. There are other schemes out there and I’m not married to any particular idea, however, but this: The Electoral College is not merely a failure, but an existential danger, and we must get rid of it.

• Enact legislation formalizing the right to an abortion. It is indefensible that the courts have been politicized by backward-looking, poorly-educated evangelicals determined to impose the tribal exigencies of the Bronze Age upon the rest of us. Enough is enough; it’s time to drive a stake right through the heart of those superstitions — and the richly-deserved contempt that evangelicals have earned makes this the right time.

• We should formalize, make nationwide, and permanent, the easy-voting innovations occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic. We should, at very least, assure every worker a half-day off with pay in order to vote.

• Clean-out Trump appointees who do not have lifetime appointments. He has cynically displaced competence with inept sycophancy, with the result that essential government agencies are suffering — think, CDC. We have to get rid of the pretentious boobs he has elevated to responsibilities they can’t handle, restrict the use of ‘acting’ department heads, and formally impose and enforce qualifications for government jobs.

• The Founders made plain in the Federalist Papers that the right to bear arms is a corporate right vested in the states, and that its purpose was to overcome objections to the two-year appropriation specified for the military — a vestige of the difficulties George Washington had paying his troops during the Revolutionary War. We must displace the lies of the NRA and restore a proper understanding of the Second Amendment — and get firearms under control. Certainly, nobody sane can possibly believe that the point of the Second Amendment is to empower armed yahoos to swarm into state legislatures — Michigan’s, say.

A last suggestion, about which I have mixed feelings: Pursue criminal charges against Donald Trump and the corruption which has flourished under him. That there is plenty of corruption is well-documented fact; a lot of the folk drawing generous government salaries ought to be cracking-rocks at Fort Leavenworth. And it isn’t difficult to argue that sending a lot of those clowns to jail would have a salutary effect on our public life and the government’s operation.

But: I know a lot of people who will never accept that Donald Trump is no more than an accomplished con-man and, arguably, a traitor. They will insist that prosecuting him is deep-state wickedness and grow correspondingly more disaffected and hostile and wed to their firearms. I have no difficulty imagining civil violence rooted in prosecution of Donald Trump.

Nobody sane believes in the literary figure of Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack who had a colossal pet blue ox. But, it so happens, most folklorists and historians who have looked into the Paul Bunyan figure believe the tall-tales are grounded in the life of a genuine lumberjack. That is, there was an actual human being around whom stories began to accrete and, in the inevitable way of men sitting around a campfire drinking and telling stories, the fantastical figure of Paul Bunyan emerged.

For the record, my favorite Paul Bunyan story is the one that claims it was so cold one winter night that words froze in the air just as soon as they were spoken, and it wasn’t until the next morning that anybody knew what they had been talking about. Heh.

Anyway, I’ve long thought that Jesus is like Paul Bunyan, that the literary Jesus is undoubtedly a fraud but there probably was an actual Jewish rabble-rouser who assembled a small group of followers and came to a bad end. Happens all the time, right? Jim Jones, Charles Manson, on and on.

I’m reading Jesus From Outer Space just now, by Richard Carrier, and he doesn’t go that far; he doubts that there was a historical Jesus at all.

I’m not competent to judge Carrier’s scholarship, so I’m reserving judgment. That said, he seems to make a strong case and, really, the only objection to Carrier’s argument that I can mount is that I have a tough time imagining all the influence Christianity enjoys resting upon no more that a Bronze Age analog to Slender Man. So I’m open to being persuaded, I guess.

Let’s just look at what Pope Francis said. He said, according to this documentary and according to his own words in the transcript, he said that he is in favor of legalizing civil unions.

Now what would that mean morally? It would mean giving sanction, state government sanction to same sex relationships. And according to those relationships, a formal recognition that would include virtually all of the rights of marriage, but without the name of marriage. Now, how exactly did that turn out, for instance, in Western nations? Well, it didn’t turn out to be very stable and we predicted it at the time. These halfway measures, indeed, they’re more than halfway, but not all the way to declaring marriage at this point, they were unstable. They’re unstable because even though they did grant to same sex couples, the opportunity for a legal recognition, it was not a legal recognition that was exactly the same as marriage. Now you go to the Supreme court of the United States. One year after the Pope is reported to have made those statements about endorsing civil unions. In 2015, the United States Supreme court handed down the Obergefell decision legalizing same sex marriage in all 50 States, it was a legal and moral atrocity.

Albert Mohler

For Pope Francis to attempt to normalize homosexuality is to say that Holy Scriptures are false, that our sins really don’t matter, and that we can continue living in them,” Graham told his nine million Facebook followers. “If that were true, then Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection wouldn’t have been needed. The cross would have been for nothing.

Franklin Graham

These comments about Pope Francis’ support for civil unions are an incandescent display of a point I’ve made repeatedly through the years: the Evangelical Right is intensely hostile to the notion of a secular state; they want, in fact, a theocracy.

Marriage is not a sacrament in the secular state, but something more akin to a contract. What is more, except for the protection of minors, the secular state has no licit interest in the sex lives of its citizens — even if Our Invisible Friend is obsessed with the whereabouts of some 3.5-billion whatsits. If such as Mohler and Graham actually believed in the Enlightenment ideals that America is founded upon, they’d get that.

The unhappy but uncomplicated truth is that the Evangelical Right has the spirit of a Fifth Column, intensely hostile to American ideals and determined to see them undone. If it were otherwise, they would recognize that the Obergefell decision is a step toward fulfillment of America’s promise.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had the identical thoughts, of the times I’ve wondered if so-and-so would have been comfortable at a Nazi rally. Trump has unleashed, and then exploited, a lot of hidden, subterranean malice.

Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable because of it.

Pope Francis

Civil unions are intended to be marriage in all but name, and have an expansive, generous sound — but the name is of crucial importance because the laws of virtually every country on earth specify rights and privileges that accompany marriage exclusively. It’s a step forward for LGBT recognition, and from an unexpected place, but not so big a step as it may sound.