Remember the Fourteenth Amendment

Does anybody remember the term "separate but equal?" That seems to be the argument for Proposition 8, which adds a line to the California State Constitution that says "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Proponents of Prop 8 state that gay couples will continue to have the rights associated with marriage because of the domestic partnership laws, but they shouldn't be able to call it marriage. Black people had drinking fountains that were supposed to work the same as the ones for white people. Proponents of Prop 8 say that the California Supreme Court decision to allow same-sex marriage goes against the will of the people. The people didn't vote to end racial segregation in the United States. The Supreme Court ended it. If it were left to the will of the people, black people would still have to sit in the back of the bus in the South.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution states the following:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All persons. The constitution only separates citizens from non-citizens. It makes no other distinction. Equal protection of the laws. The only way to ensure equal protection is to subject every person to the same laws. The civil rights movement demonstrated that separate is not equal, no matter what you call it. What crimes have gay couples committed that would allow the State to abridge their rights without violating the US Constitution? And leave God and the Bible out of this. This is a matter of state, not church.

Read my other column about same-sex marriage by clicking here.

What's the Opposite of Endorse?

Whatever it is, that's what I want to do with regards to the McCain/Palin ticket. Like I said yesterday, I have no intention of endorsing either Obama or McCain. I think either way, we're in big trouble. I'm not sure Barack Obama has what it takes to hoist this country out of the big hole George W. Bush has dug for us. John McCain is seventy-two years old, and he might not make it four years. Then Sarah Palin would be President of the United States. Please join me in a shudder. Rather than bore you with a nonsensical rant steeped in horror, I'm going to reprint an article that increased the degree to which I am appalled. Enjoy.

Sarah Palin's War on Science: The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.

Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008 at http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/ .

High-Speed Rail? Don't need it.

It's been a while since I wrote. I went on vacation. I moved. I sat on my ass a little in there too. But, now I'm back and writing again. I thought I'd do something a little different, with the election just a week away. I'm not going to endorse any of the presidential candidates. Neither Obama nor McCain are good candidates for the office of President, and I just can't bring myself to publicly endorse either of them. What I'm going to do is break away from the fortnightly column, and instead post a few articles over the next week about some of the referendums on the California ballot. I will start with Proposition 1A.

Proposition 1A is a bond measure to raise funds to build a high-speed rail line in California. The first phase will connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. The measure calls for a bond worth about $10 billion. The project is estimated to cost around $50 billion, but it is more likely we are looking at $90 billion. This bond measure would, therefore, cover about eleven percent of the cost of the project. The remaining eighty-nine percent of project funds are supposed to come from federal and private sources. None of these funds have been secured at this time. The project is open to the same brand of cost overruns that have plagued the Bay Bridge replacement.

Supporters of Proposition 1A say that a high-speed rail line will create jobs and fix some of California's woes in terms of congested transportation corridors. The supporters who wrote the arguments for Proposition 1A in the voter information booklet say that with high-speed rail, we could get to LA from San Francisco in two and a half hours for $50. Southwest Airlines can do it in one hour for $60. The road from LA to San Francisco is only congested on the ends. Traffic only gets really bad on Interstate 5 on major holidays or when there's a horrific accident. Getting between LA and San Francisco is not the problem. The problem is getting between Oakland and San Francisco, or Long Beach and Hollywood.

I think a high-speed rail line is a great idea. I would love to make that trip. It would make California look that much cooler to the rest of the world. But this state has worse transportation problems that need to bee addressed before we start fixing something that isn't broken. $10 billion could be better spent fixing and widening freeways, enhancing regional transit so we aren't so reliant on our cars, and reducing congestion where it occurs.