{"id":9050,"date":"2012-02-09T14:57:14","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T21:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=9050"},"modified":"2012-02-09T14:57:14","modified_gmt":"2012-02-09T21:57:14","slug":"ground-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=9050","title":{"rendered":"Ground Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up thinking there were a couple of ground rules to the sport of democracy as it is played in the United States.\u00a0 One is the separation of church and state, the other is the protection of minority rights.<\/p>\n

If you’re a typical American, you don’t want your government taken over by a religious faction that’s going to outlaw birth control. If you’re a Jew, a Muslim, or an atheist, you don’t want a Christian majority telling you how you must live.<\/p>\n

When religious busybodies try to impose church rules on everyone else, they break ground rule # 1: the establishment clause of the First Amendment.\u00a0 Or, as I put it<\/a> a few months ago:<\/p>\n

You want to pray to Jesus?\u00a0 Fine with me.\u00a0 Go to your house of worship and knock yourself out.\u00a0 Roll on the floor, speak in tongues, sing hallelujah.\u00a0 Just keep it off the street and out of my face.\u00a0 Which means: out of the public square, out of the schools, out of civil law.\u00a0 To paraphrase one of your favorite arguments, what is it about the separation of church and state you don\u2019t understand?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The two ground rules are closely related.\u00a0 When you violate the separation of church and state by imposing religious rules on everyone, you also violate minority rights.\u00a0 Look at the thought process in the following Twitter post from Rick Santorum<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The majority of Californians (the majority who bothered to vote in the last election, that is) approved Proposition 8 and thereby banned same-sex marriage (previously legal in California).\u00a0 The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has declared Proposition 8 unconstitutional, precisely because it took rights away from a minority for no good reason.\u00a0 Santorum says the court took rights away from the majority — by which he means the majority’s right to deny rights to a minority it doesn’t like.<\/p>\n

Of course no one has the right to harm others.\u00a0 Too bad for you if you think murder should be legal.\u00a0 You don’t get a minority right to practice murder, because that will harm others and violate their<\/em> rights.<\/p>\n

But in the case of same-sex marriage, there’s no harm.\u00a0 Gay marriage doesn’t affect me, or you, or anyone.\u00a0 It’s none of our business what consenting adults do behind closed doors.\u00a0 In this case, the minority should be allowed to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in its own way.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the Santorums reject the ground rules.\u00a0 They don’t believe the First Amendment means what it says.\u00a0 They actually argue that the founding fathers really intended America to be a theocracy.\u00a0 Equally dangerously, they think the majority should rule, period.\u00a0 They don’t buy into the concept of minority rights (unless, of course, the minority is them … and come to think of it, Santorum’s tribe is fast becoming a minority, though it’s not yet ready to face that fact).<\/p>\n

Rules are worthless if only one side plays by them.\u00a0 I’m not saying we should abandon the ground rules.\u00a0 That would just make us them.\u00a0 I’m saying we have to play the game hard, and play to win … if we lose, we lose everything, and the religious busybodies will run our lives.\u00a0 And perhaps even decide our lives aren’t worth living<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Word.<\/p>\n

Of course another good reason to keep these sorts of people suppressed is that they’re so goddamned stupid they’d unravel Western civilization within one generation and destroy us all, themselves included.\u00a0 Witness Congressman John Fleming, Republican of Louisiana<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Or (shudder) this guy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A few years ago I had a driving job.\u00a0 Sometimes on those long lonely desert stretches I’d tune in AM talk radio just to hear what the haters were saying.\u00a0 I could never listen to Rush Limbaugh for more than five minutes.\u00a0 A smart man, clearly, but nasty to the bone and cynically insincere, making a killing off credulous rubes in trailer parks all across America.\u00a0 But there was this one guy who came on right after, and the minute he’d start talking I’d feel like a two-ton boulder of stupid had just dropped on my head.\u00a0 A man who made Doug Feith … famously described by General Tommy Franks as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet<\/a>” … look like Albert Einstein.\u00a0 That man, of course, was Sean Hannity.\u00a0 I knew it was time to turn the radio off when he came on.<\/p>\n

Imagine being ruled by the likes of Rick Santorum, Congressman John Fleming, Sean Hannity.\u00a0\u00a0 No.\u00a0 We can’t lose this game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grew up thinking there were a couple of ground rules to the sport of democracy as it is played in the United States.\u00a0 One is the separation of church and state, the other is the protection of minority rights. If you’re a typical American, you don’t want your government taken over by a religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,8],"tags":[574,575,576,577,579,578],"class_list":["post-9050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-politics","tag-establishment-clause","tag-first-amendment","tag-minority-rights","tag-santorum","tag-sean-hannity","tag-the-onion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9050"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9096,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050\/revisions\/9096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}