Documentary Evidence

I'm a little worried that no major US news outlet has picked up on this story about documentary evidence that proves the Bush administration was making plans to go to war in Iraq as early as summer 2002, a claim the President and his government have consistently denied.

Why is nobody outraged anymore? Are we just exhausted, or what?

For more on this topic, please visit Tom's Dispatch.

It Seems I've Done It

So, I guess I got myself into law school. This is the statment that got me there:

The United States of America have been grounded in dual commitments to freedom and to justice, and while the breadth and applicability of those concepts have changed, they have been expanded in important and valuable ways because people have had the courage to stand up and speak truth to power. The US judicial system continues to be one of the most important venues in which such conversations take place, and attorneys and other legal scholars occupy dominant positions in those conversations. My compelling desire to participate fully and intelligently in those conversations, particularly conversations regarding definitions of family and the continued disestablishment of religion, motivates my interest in the study of jurisprudence.

As an out gay man, I’ve followed not only the events that led to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas and the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health, but also the deliberations of the United States Congress and the choice by the electorate of eleven states in November to enact constitutional amendments barring same sex marriages and civil unions. While I am gratified by the opinions of the courts, particularly Justice O’Connor’s use of the equal protection clause in her concurring opinion in Lawrence and the use of the same principle in Chief Justice Marshall’s majority opinion in Goodridge, I am dismayed by the actions of the several legislative branches. It is objectionable that the rights to organize and to dispose of property by means of the creation of a family should be proscribed by an act of legislation and unconscionable that such action should be enshrined in documents that underpin the fabric of community life. If marriage is considered as a legal arrangement to define property rights and lines of inheritance, government need to protect and preserve that institution for the benefit of all persons. If marriage is considered as a religious institution, government need to excuse themselves from the conversation all together.

I have recently learned that there are those so close to me as even my mother who would rather that I should “sit down and shut up” rather than voice such a disestablishmentarian opinion, if only because such a position is controversial. I choose to speak up precisely because the topic invites controversy. Controversy signals that an issue is important to many persons for many reasons and that I might learn something that will cause me to reconsider my opinion if the question can be addressed in an open, honest, and respectful forum. I do not have the opportunity to learn anything, I lose a chance to grow, if I am told to sit down, shut up, and keep to my place. The only way I have ever learned anything is by asking questions, and now I find that holding an opinion, asking people questions about theirs and inviting them to ask questions about mine and their own is getting me shoved into a corner.

This is offensive not least because it betrays a profound lack of respect for the minds of anyone with the courage to voice an opinion contrary to the dominant worldview, but also because such disrespect tramples on the rights of all persons to be religious as they choose. This right includes the freedom to do no religion at all. When the government of the United States establish through their various functions that a belief in one God is the necessary condition for full and complete citizenship in this country, every religious belief and practice is threatened because it would be at the whim of the majority. While a Christian majority might now—and might have always—prevailed in the United States, that does not give them the authority to assert their dominion over minorities, other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and other non-Christians among them. To let religion, understood as both beliefs and practices, be a function of an electoral plurality or even an overwhelming majority cuts at the very heart of the plural, democratic, respectful community the people of the United States purport to value and that our Constitution enables.

It is not God that offends me. Quite the contrary is true. It is not an open and forthright conversation about religions that worries me. I’m worried that my family and neighbors do not respect me enough to have those conversations with me—that it seems to be easier for them to tell me to sit down and shut up. It can be difficult enough to challenge the religious mores of one’s family. One ought not have to challenge the religious mores of the state as well because the state ought to have no such mores.

I look specifically to Seton Hall and its history of intellectual rigor to help me to continue to hone the analytical skills I have developed so that I can dissect an argument to its basic assumptions and then rationally interrogate those assumptions and their compatibility with the rule of law. I will bring to my studies an articulate, passionate voice for the positions I choose, a discerning mind open to the respectful, well-reasoned arguments of my peers, a critical intellect that has been schooled in cultural theory and criticism, the belief that constitutional law represents the basic assumptions upon which the rule of law is predicated, and the conviction that the rule of law is the fundamental expression of a civil society. I look forward to the opportunity to continue this conversation when classes begin.

Now, If I can just find a way to afford to relocate.