The tyranny of the minority

There's been much talk recently about the fate of the US Senate's filibuster.

The filibuster has been most often used to preserve white supremacy and to obstruct voting rights. And both remain its primary uses today. 

The filibuster should have been abolished a long time ago. There's a reason why no other legislative body in the country has anything like it.

It's also worth remembering that the filibuster is not indicating anywhere in the Constitution. It was also never used during the first 50 years of the Senate's history.

The pretext used to cover up the white supremacy-preserving purpose of the filibuster is gobbledygook about "preserving minority rights." 

In deviously gaslighting fashion, "minority" in this context means white elites.

Our constitutional system was designed to protect the rights of the (white) minority. But 'preserving minority [sic] rights' has been corrupted into something far more sinister: a minority veto.

Our system already has plenty of protections from the so-called tyranny of the majority.

In order for a bill to become law, it needs to...

1) Pass the House 

2) Pass the Senate, whose very structure is already tilted in favor of states where few people choose to live

3) Be signed by the president, who himself is elected as the result of a system already tilted in favor of states where few people choose to live.

4) If vetoed by the president, it requires a 2/3 majority of each house of Congress to become law.

5) We also have a federal Constitution with certain safeguards. Even if a bill passes all those hurdles, those offended by a 'tyrannical' law can appeal to the judiciary to overturn said law on constitutional grounds.

Giving 41 senators outright veto power over all legislation is unjustifiable and further corrodes confidence in our already teetering republican democracy. It would be absurd even if the Senate didn't have a nihilistic minority of members.

People have talked about returning to the old filibuster where you could only block legislation by actually standing on your feet and talking. Or about requiring 41 votes to block rather than 60 to approve. These are but band aids on a gaping flesh wound. They don't address the fundamental injustice of a minority veto.

You could argue that the problem is not the existence of the filibuster but the low character of the current crop of senators. But the filibuster has been used in this fashion for most of our country's history. It's impossible to plausibly argue that the filibuster has done more good than harm.

I admit, the existence of the filibuster isn't as corrosive to public confidence as the suffocating influence of money in politics. But the sclerosis it ensures is one more giant hurdle preventing a truly representative political system from emerging.

The Constitution begins with pious words about 'forming a more perfect union." It's long past time we got back to working on that task.

The pathogen is gone but the poison remains

Most Americans have breathed a sigh of relief that Trump's reign is finally over, that the Confederate coup attempts failed and that Biden got through day one without being assassinated.

But don't you dare say that you want things to go back to how they used to be. Because "how it used to be" is the conditions that led to Trump and, more dangerously, Trumpism in the first place.

Trump did not change us. He caused many to reveal who they really were. He goaded people to remove the mask. The tinder was there; he just lit the match and kept adding kindling.

He did not invent white supremacy and other forms of bigotry. He did not invent misogyny. He did not invent cult behavior. He did not invent nihilism. He did not invent contempt for the scientific method and for the environment. He merely exploited those things which already existed. They will remain even after he's hopefully thrown in prison or, at the very least, banned from all future public office.

We need to be better people as individuals. And we need a better system, better public policies as a country. Both need to be more human and more humane. Either by itself is not good enough.

Medicare for All - getting what we're already paying for via our taxes - and right-sizing our military - making it serve primarily as the national self-defense unit our Founding Fathers intended - are two good starts.

But whether it's these two specific policies or others. Our tax money should be used to help people - primarily American citizens. I've no problem with the current small percentage being used to help refugees or other foreigners in need.

Our tax money should not be subsidize corporations. And it should never be used to harm foreigners in far away lands who've committed no sin against the United States and her people.

Trumpism came about because people felt the political system was fundamentally broken and that Trump would be the Lord and Savior who could fix it all. They were catastrophically wrong in their prescription but spot on in their diagnosis. We must implement a better remedy.

The Nazis failed in their first attempt to seize power. But the sclerotic, out of touch mainstream parties of Weimar Germany never learned the lesson. The Nazis did not fail the second time.

We cannot "go back to the way things were" because we are certain to get another Trumpist monster. And the next one may be smarter and more disciplined. And then we truly will be screwed.

Stop blaming working class people for fascism

One of the laziest liberal conceits is that the core of Trumpism is fundamentally people who one might snobbishly refer to as white trash. 

How often do you hear someone from the professional or pundit classes bemoan "poorer people voting against their interests"? The clear implication is they are too stupid to know they're being screwed. 

Blaming poorer people for those doing them harm is not simply lazy, it's incredibly damaging and helps the agents of fascism.

The core of Trumpism is not people working three jobs to barely make ends meet. 

 

The core of Trumpism is people so comfortable they can take several days off, buy a plane ticket, spend money to buy tactical gear and go to Washington, DC to play Rambo. 

Trumpism, like Trump himself, is not the workers; it's the bosses.

Exit polls reveal that those who made less than $100,000 voted for Biden by a margin of 13 points. Those who made under $50,000 voted for Biden by an 11 point margin. Those who made more than $100,000 voted for Trump by a margin of 12 points. 

Margins in US House races were almost identical.

These were much higher margins than the relatively small difference in voting between those with a college degree and those without.

Hannah Arrendt described the working class as "the only class in Germany which…had never been wholeheartedly Nazi.” 

This ties in to a recent article in The Nation about a 40 year old book Who Voted for Hitler?

The book exams data in German elections in the 1920s and 1930s to chart the Nazi Party's rise from a marginal faction to seizing control of the country.

The article states: Three-quarters of a century have passed now since Hitler came to power in Germany, leaving in place two enduring myths about how it happened. One claims that Hitler’s rise was born of the frustrations of the middle class in post-WWI Germany. The other holds that Hitler’s support came from the disenfranchised and uneducated working and out-of-work poor. But neither myth is accurate, and both are based on hearsay—half-truths people are comfortable with, rather than hard truths that emerge from the data.

Hitler, like Trump, never came close to enjoying majority support in any election. The book's author finds that the Nazis were a party that organized people, especially in rural communities; that it was largely a Protestant phenomenon; and that it coincided with an with an inability and disinterest on the part of the major parties of the left to organize.

The Democrats have largely abandoned rural America, ceding it to a Republican monopoly. This has played perfectly into Trump's martyr scam.

The failure of the complacent mainstream parties in Weimar Germany to respond to changing social conditions led to the rise of extremism and bolstered the demand for a strongman, someone the public might describe as "He may be crude, but he's a man of action." Sound familiar?

The press of the time may not have all supported the Nazis but they did not condemn them outright either, treating them more as rascals whose heart was in the right place.

The book adds: As for the violence, these newspapers provided an easy excuse: it was a justified response to the provocations or attacks that had come first from the other side.

Cue the old objectivity vs neutrality debate in journalism - sometimes called "both sides-ism" - an abject failure in the face of unvarnished evil.

The data consistently showed below-average support for Hitler in working-class districts, and higher support in upper-middle-class and wealthy ones. There were pockets of rabid support for the Nazis in rural areas.

Protecting the elites from the Communist boogeyman was central to the Nazi sales pitch, perhaps explaining why several members of the deposed Kaiser's family joined the party.

Eventually, the traditional conservative parties surrendered to the Nazi cult: one after another, the traditional conservative parties...  began in the late 1920s and early ’30s, as the worldwide economic depression took its toll, to form alliances with the Nazis.

The article concludes that the greatest danger with a movement like the one embodied by Hitler’s militant National Socialists does not stem from the movement itself, always a minority, but rather within the larger society and its halfhearted disavowal of the Nazis, together with a kind of secret brainwashing of the educated and well-off middle class that is vulnerable precisely because they think they aren’t.

Fascism is not for the unwashed masses. It's the last gasp rage of elites who feel their privilege threatened.

But fascism  needs just enough minoritarian support from non-elites to gain a critical mass. And that's precisely why blaming the poor for their own oppression is catastrophically counterproductive for us all. 

The Nazis' first putsch failed. Their second didn't.

A sliver of optimism in a dark time

The coup attempt of Jan. 6 and its aftermath have been distressing, but upon historical reflection, I think there *could* be a cause for a tiny sliver of optimism.  

The unearned privilege of a group always ends. But it's usually ugly. Apartheid South Africa. The French and Russian Revolutions. The partial evolution that was the end of legal segregation in the US.

It never ends with the group voluntarily giving up their privilege - ie: sharing the wealth and power with everyone - because they think it's the right thing to do. It ends with the rest of the people demanding a fairer system and the privileged group realizing they can no longer stand against the inexorable march of history.

The end is often the most turbulent and violent period, as the privileged lash out vainly fighting the inevitable. It's unfortunate but this seems to be the only path from which more equitable societies emerge.

White people are going to be a minority in this country in the near future. Many are not white supremacists - overt or apologists for such a system - but a significant percentage are. And they are the most dangerous ones at this time.

Many assume that they, as a minority, will be treated in the same way that they themselves  have traditionally treated minorities. The thought of such karma terrifies them. They literally can't imagine a society in which minorities are treated fairly and decently.

I hope that we are in the death throes of a centuries-old white supremacist based society. White supremacy is often described as America's Original Sin, but it's more accurately referred to as America's Foundational Sin. It's not incidental to America's history. It's central to it.

There will not be magical transformation when the Biden administration is sworn in. It will probably get worse before it gets better, which is not a reassuring thought.  

Such evolution is not driven by politicians but by the people. I think the values of the younger generation may be what saves this country by ushering in a more open and meritocratic society. But a more humane society is not guaranteed. It must continue to be fought for by all who want it.

The achilles heal of liberal democracy

Camus said "totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of tyrants but on the faults of (classical) liberals."  We are in an illiberal time helped in part by the fault of classical liberals.

One of the bases of liberal democracy is that the way to change behavior is more public and civic education (not solely in the schooling sense). It's based on the premise that failure to make wise decisions is based on lack of information or lack of credible information and can be remedied simply by filling that void. 

 

What liberal democracy responds to poorly is situations like the country and world are in now where credible information and misinformation or deceptive information are widely accepted as being equally valid. 

 

I'm constantly recalling an essay in The Guardian describing Trumpism as reminiscent not of 1984 but of Brave New World. We suffer not from an absence of information but an overload of it making it harder to know what to believe). 

 

This occurs when widespread trust in public institutions declines precipitously. What happens - and we are certainly seeing this with the rise of conspiracy theories - is that people have legitimate and well-founded concerns (such as malfeasance by big corporations) but decide to make the leap from "X is plausible" to "X must be true" when there's little or no specific evidence to actually make that leap. 

 

It can't simply be remedied by official sources offering "education" because those official sources lack the trust on the part of the people who really need to hear it. This is why I've been advocating for key systemic reforms for years. Best to avoid getting here in the first place because liberal democracy not well equipped to deal with this situation once we get here.

The fundamental divide in America is not between left and right

I'm coming to believe that the fundamental divide in this country is not between left and right. It's between those who accept the need for credible public institutions and those who don't. 

"Accepting the need for" does not mean "automatically and mindlessly trust." Those who accept this need try to repair failing (or sabotaged) institutions. Those who don't accept this need add to the breakdown in social cohesion.

It has nothing to do with education or intelligence. I see many smart, educated people parroting the nihilistic rage. They know what public institutions are saying very well. They just knee-jerk disbelieve the institutions unthinkingly. My recent essay on the difference between skepticism vs cynicism is instructive here. Because many of them are smart, they are good at making their disbelief sound just pseudo-intellectual enough.

It's not just the fascists and Trump cultists. Many on the harder left are no different and it's causing a real breach between those who want to re-fortify sabotaged institutions and those who want to burn everything down and replace it with who knows what and who knows how..

I'm not sure how to resolve this breach. Once you reject the notion of anything public or common, even a set of facts (upon which opinions and strategies can be based), I'm not sure where you can go from there. 

Overturn Citizens United

Recently, Senate Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn to Citizens United abomination. Any candidate for federal office of whatever party who refuses to support this amendment will not get my vote.

Progress on any "bread and butter" issue you can name will continue to be stalled until we can start limiting the effect of legalized bribery, particularly by non-humans.

This is far more important to the future of our republic than impeachment of a particular president or publicizing tax returns.

The system was rotten long before Donald Trump and his fellow gangsters infested the White House.

What a racket: Crooked Donald and the family presidency

Donald Trump used a lot of rhetoric during the presidential campaign that resonated with people for reasons other than bigotry. Nearly all of his actions have betrayed that.

He talked about “draining the swamp” and taking on Wall Street, which he quickly betrayed by appointing a cabinet almost entirely madeup of Wall Street fat cats and other oligarchs.

He talked about reviving American manufacturing. Now he’s going after an American retailer for dropping his daughter’s failing line ofmerchandise which is… made in China.

The real purpose of Trump’s presidency is simple: to be an extension of his and his family’s businesses.

He bellowed non-stop about “crooked Hillary” but what he’s doing is worse. Far worse

It started with him violating the Constitution since the moment he swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend that Constitution.

It was followed quickly using the White House website topimp his wife’s jewelry line.

He hired his son-in-law to be his unaccountable taxpayer-paid advisor.

Now, he’s using his taxpayer-paid spokestools to defend hisdaughter’s private business interests.

All this and he’s only been in the job for three weeks.

Any one of these things might excusable.

But put them all together and you who is acting like some two-bit banana republic dictator.

Then again, we’ve devolved into a political culture where big business has successfully bought politicians to advance their corporate interests at the expense of the public. I guess Trump is just skipping the middle man. Maybe that’s where Betsy DeVos got the idea from.

The biggest loser of this presidential election: journalism

I’ve been saying for a long time that the decline of journalism would have a major impact on civic life in America. It was not an original though... Chris Hedges even wrote a book about it. 

This decline did not start in 2016 nor did its effects.

My dad pointed out the start of this trend about 20 years ago. It was reinforced to me when I lived abroad and listened on shortwave to foreign radio stations and noticed how differently they covered issues.

The decline is essentially the increasing emphasis on polls and “analysis” and opinion at the expense of in-depth factual reporting. Journalism has become less about revealing what’s going on beneath the surface and mostly dominated by parroting of superficial conventional wisdom. It’s shallow b.s. and the media that pats itself on the bdack as watchdog is suffocated by it.

For the last several years, Nate Silver has been canonized by adherents of the analysis school of “journalism.” I think only a week before the election, I checked his site. It said that Hillary Clinton had at least a 95% chance of winning (might have been 99%). It said that she had 268 electoral votes in the bag and Trump 210. And that basically Trump had to win every single swing state, bar none, to win the election. Clinton will end up far short of even that 268 that Mr. Infallible predicted. He epitomizes the failure of modern journalism. He’s a statistician yet the media treated what he did as journalism.

Trump/Pence’s fascist bigoted agenda was only endorsed by one of every four Americans. Trump is our president but the overwhelming majority did not endorse his agenda. Only one of our four

Nearly half of all Americans did not vote. This shows how sick our democracy is far more so than the identity of the winning ticket. The media only reports on two choices. And despite overwhelming disgust with those two, they almost completely ignore the two (national ones) that offer something meaningfully different. “Conventional wisdom” was that you were wasting your vote if you voted for a smaller party candidate. Even on those rare occasions a smaller party candidate gets media attention, there is NEVER an occasion where s/he isn’t asked about being a “spoiler” or chances of winning or other horse race garbage. S/he is lucky if meaningful policy discussion is even half of the interview.

So when you are told that your choices are to waste your vote on a good candidate or support someone you find morally repugnant, it is any surprise nearly half of Americans said “the heck with all this”? When they find out that the person who gets the most votes doesn’t win – unlike EVERY OTHER OFFICE IN AMERICA – it makes the process seem even more pointless. When “experts” and the professional pundit class tell them must vote for the “lesser of two evils” and to vote for A because B sucks even more, does that really inspire them with a deep sense of patriotic and civic pride?

If you want those half of Americans to actually vote, don’t lecture them. Don’t condescend to them. Give them a positive reason to do so.

 

Why the 'spoiler' and 'wasted vote' smears are so resented

"The reality of Washington, D.C., today is that we have one party, the Republican Party, completely dominated by big money and right wing folks. And you have another party, the Democratic Party, too much controlled by corporate money...” –Sen. Bernie Sanders. This is presumably why he himself is not a registered Democrat. This is definitely why I am not one.

A lot of mainstream Democrats and Republicans do not understand why phrases like 'spoiler' and 'wasted vote' are so resented by smaller party and independent voters. The reason is simple: it profoundly offends our notions of fair play and of what democracy is supposed to be about.

I think voting is supposed to be an expression of your values and priorities. If you vote this way, you, by definition, cannot spoil democracy because this IS democracy. If you honestly believe that a Democrat or Republican better corresponds with your values and priorities than a smaller party opponent, then by all means vote for him or her.

Somebody saying, "[Democrat/Republican] is the best choice because of positions on x, y and z and is superior to [smaller party candidate] because of a, b and c" is not only fair game but exactly how democracy is supposed to work.

Whereas, somebody saying, "Vote for [smaller party candidate] is a wasted vote" or "... is only running to feed his ego" is offensive. It's saying that ideas are irrelevant to how one should vote.

(Incidentally, you don't subject yourself to the grind and expense of an electoral campaign as a smaller party candidate with no money because of the glory. It's a fairly absurd implication)

In the last Congressional race in my area, nearly 20,000 citizens voted for the Green Party candidate Matt Funiciello. Everyone did so because they thought he reflected their values and beliefs better than his Democratic and Republican opponents. If you want to those citizens and told them to their face that they only cast their votes that way to 'spoil' the race, I suspect you'd get some unpleasant reactions.

Smaller party members are going against so-called conventional wisdom simply by joining a smaller party. Most do so because they still think elections should be governed by ideas, not polls, analysis, speculation and punditry. Telling them otherwise is usually going to be counterproductive. Make the case based on ideas or don't bother.

How corporate interests have taken over our politics

The Nation has a very good piece on how special interests dominate Washington (as well as the states) and undermine our democracy. This is not new - liberal hate figure and progressive hero Ralph Nader has been warning about this for years. But the extent to which our political process has been corroded keeps edging closer and closer to 100%, particularly since the fraudulent Citizens United ruling was decreed. The increasing replacement of serious journalism with transcription, talking point-saturated commentary and horse race analysis only makes things worse.

The piece also points out that the much vaunted 'tension' between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and tea partiers is mostly a sideshow, a narcissism of small differences. Both major parties are thoroughly corrupted by corporate cash. Neither wants any sort of fundamental change that would redefine their primary role back to representing real human beings. Their main argument is whether we should be speeding down a hill toward a cliff at 80 mph or 65 mph.

What are the solutions? There are no easy answers. But two that come to mind immediately are:

-Help support and build grass roots parties who are accountable to human beings. The Green Party is my choice. If you're of a different mind set, I believe the Libertarian Party also refuses legalized bribes ("donations") from corporations.

-Join the movement to amend the Constitution to repeal Citizens United and affirm that money is not speech (it is, in fact, property): We the people, not we the corporations.

If the major parties don't represent us, does that mean we're stupid?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” –Albert Einstein

 The Independent Voters Network had this op-ed piece which opined that the two major parties 'clearly and strikingly' do not represent most voters. It offers scant little evidence for this thesis, other than there are an increasing number of independent voters.

The sort of lazy excuse for analysis in this article bothers me. Giving the voters a free pass for their choices may be nice populism but does not serve the national interest.

100% of Americans are represented by either Democratic or Republican Congressmen (obviously except for two vacant seats). 

99.3% of Americans are represented exclusively by major party US senators.

100% of Americans are represented by Democrat or Republican state governors. 

All of them are the result of (sort of) free and fair elections. 

If Americans don’t feel these two parties represent them, why do they elect exclusively them virtually all the time from among the 3-6 choices available in the majority of elections?

One can reasonably infer from this situation one of two possibilities: either a) Democratic and GOP elected officials *do* generally represent the views of most Americans or b) that voters are so stupid or gutless as to overwhelmingly elect people who don't represent them even though, in the majority of cases, there are non-major party alternatives. 

Which is it?

You can bitch and moan about your cable company or your cell phone provider but as long as you keep buying their product, they don’t care. They will have no incentive to improve. 

Politics is the same way. The corporate parties don’t give a toss about your whining, so long as you keep buying what they sell. 

If you keep voting for them, they’ll never have an incentive to change in any meaningful way. Sometimes people whine when politicians break promises but more often, the moaning comes about when a polician acts exactly as he or she suggested in the campaign! 

As PJ O’Rourke concluded in his excellent book Parliament of Whores: [I]n a democracy such as ours, the whores are us.

I was wrong: people really are content with our political system

Looks like it's time for a mea culpa.

It seems Americans are overwhelmingly content with how our political system is functioning.

I believe there were only four candidates who were on the ballot in enough states to form an electoral college majority. Democrat Obama, Republican Romney, Green Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson.

If you wanted a candidate who represented real human beings (presuming you didn't consider corporations to be such), if you wanted someone who opposed militarism and if you wanted someone who opposed corporate control of government, there were only two choices: Stein and Johnson. They were very different candidates but they were the only candidates who were pushing those fundamental conditions needed to make America into a true republican democracy.

I thought the time was right for a decent smaller party showing. People were very lukewarm about Obama and Romney. The last few years saw some very significant grassroots movements in the Tea Party (which we forget really was grassroots originally before it was hijacked by the far right money machine), by Occupy movement and the Ron Paul insurgency inside the Republican Party. This was anti-establishment discontent we hadn't seen since the days of the Vietnam aggression. Johnson and Stein were two very active, substantive candidates. They were aggressive in their use of social media (whose influence on politics is vastly overstated but in the face of a media blacklist, it was the best they could do). Each represented a significant demographic: true small government advocates dissatisfied with Republican hypocrisy on the issue and progressives disillusioned with Obama's complete abandonment of their agenda. I knew the media blacklist would be a significant barrier but I still Johnson and Stein had a reasonable shot to get 5 or 6 percent of the vote between them.

They actually combined to get 1.3 percent of the vote; all smaller candidates only combined for 2 percent. Now, 1.3 and 2 percents were orders of magnitude greater than the amount of media coverage they received, but it was still only 2 percent who voted for real change of some sort or other to our political system. 

Thus 98 percent of voters voted to fundamentally preserve the status quo.

Americans complain about divided government but elected another divided government.

Congress has an approval rating of 21 percent but 90-something percent of incumbents were re-elected, as is usually the case.

People complain about both Democrats and Republicans but over 99 percent of members of Congress will be of those two parties.

Everything bad piece of public policy Americans complain about was enacted by Republicans, Democrats or, more often, both. Every 'onerous tax,' every 'job killing regulation,' every billion wasted on corporate welfare, every war of aggression that you complain about was enacted by one or both of the parties supported by 98 percent of the voters.

From this, I can draw one of two conclusions. Either Americans are actually fairly satisfied with the functioning of our political system or they are unhappy but aren't really interested in doing anything about it. Either way, the incessant whining is not compatible with either of these two options. If you're happy, why are you whining? If you're unhappy, then go beyond whining and try to do something about it.

I was wrong. I believed people when they said they wanted certain things or held certain values. But I guess was wrong to assume they'd vote for those things or values. And of course, some truly did. But from what I can tell, most didn't. Most voted against a candidate, not for one. That's their prerogative. And I'd be wrong to say I don't understand the reasoning. But I simply fail to see how change will every happen if only 2 percent of the people are willing to make it happen. 

Or maybe they really don't want it to happen. Maybe they are not interested in any sort of real change on the federal level. So be it. I accept that's democracy. Just quit whining when you get what you choose.

Now people need to take the next step and quit whining about what they don't want or are not willing to change.

The purpose of voting

"It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it." - Eugene V. Debs

Maybe we need a little *more* incivility

Civility and consensus are my default preferences, but boy, they make it hard sometime. In mainstream political analysis, the description 'bipartisan' is designed to make us turn our brains off, clap our hands like robots, squeal in joy like school girls and sing Kumbayah about 'cooperation,' 'civility' and the like. So imagine my reaction I read about this Congressional effort to invalidate the 5th Amendment by allowing the head of state to detain his nation's citizens indefinitely and without charge. Initially, I was outraged. This isn't possible. After all, wasn't such an abomination one of the main grievances in America's Declaration of Independence? But then, I just numbed my mind and intoned warm-over nothings about this joyous effort at bipartisanship and that made it all better.

'Cuz God says so' is not good enough anymore

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.” ~James Madison, one of the main authors of the US Constitution.

I read a comment on a blog that two people of the same gender living together, having kids and getting married was “the slippery slope to moral decline.” Ten years ago, cultural warriors were telling us that people living together, having kids and NOT getting married at all was the slippery slope to moral decline. It’s a mark of the culture warriors' adaptability that, as society evolves, they can switch scapegoats so easily.

And that's what the passage of marriage equality in New York was such an achievement. The main benefit is, of course, to gay couples who want their union recognized by law and thus to receive the attendant benefits. It's also important to legislation reflect the equal protection of the law provisions of the state and federal constitutions.

But one of the secondary benefits was to strike a blow against theocratic tendencies. In the NYS debate, the main argument against marriage equality was simple: "God's law says marriage is between one man and one woman. And Man does not have the right to change it."

Except that the debate was not about changing God's law. It was about changing Man's law. The NYS marriage law was written by men and thus men (and women) have it entirely within their power to change that law. "God's law" remains unaffected. Man's law ought to be democratic. God's law can't be.

One reason marriage equality was such an important victory is that it reminds us that we don't live in Iran or Saudi Arabia. We live in a state run by secular and constitutional values. If you are going to deny equal rights to a group of citizens, if you want to change or defend any piece of governmental action or inaction, you have to come up with a better reason than just "Cuz God says so."