Bishop Harry Jackson strikes again.

Suburban Maryland's favorite religious flim-flam man has blessed us with a tirade that turns the concept of equal protection of the laws on its head. In Jackson's alternate universe, we have a "core civil right to vote for marriage" that Judge Vaughn Walker took away from us. If you didn't know about such a right, don't feel bad; neither, I suspect, did just about anyone who had stayed awake during first-year constitutional law. Then again, I have yet to see any evidence that Bishop Jackson lets the truth get in way of his dogmas.

Jackson also accuses Walker of having "misread history and the Constitution...." That comment alone contains toxic levels of irony.

Quote of the week

"For if the constitutional conception of 'equal protection of the laws' means anything, it must, at the very least, mean that a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest." - United States Dept. of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U.S. 528, 534 (1973)

Today's vocabulary word: democracy

democracy, n. the right of the voters to run the government however I want. We must defend democracy on the subject of marriage, just as surely as we must defend the Second Amendment and religious groups' freedom of expressive association to discriminate.

"Contradictory" marriage rulings actually aren't.

In light of recent rulings on same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and California, some people have asked how those rulings can be reconciled. If one court says that the state has the right to define marriage, while another limits that right, are those courts not saying exactly the opposite things? Actually, no, they are not.

The Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments are both the law; the former protects the rights of the states against the federal government, while the latter protects the rights of individuals against the states. Since states have rights against the federal government that they do not have against their own people, the rulings can easily be reconciled.

In the machinery of government, the Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments can be envisioned as ratchets connected in series. Each can turn in only one direction, namely, the direction of greater protection for rights against government. The turning of both of the ratchets controls the machine's output.

At least our side is better on this issue.

People like to excuse the excesses of their party by saying that at least their party is better on certain issues than is the other party. Even when that would be a valid excuse if true, it isn't always true.

For example, Republicans like to say that their party is better at holding down the growth of government. Alas, the factual basis for that assertion seems to have escaped Veronique de Rugy, who has actually analyzed the growth of the federal government and come to a somewhat different conclusion. For example, federal spending increased more under George W. Bush than even under Lyndon B. Johnson.

Similarly, Democrats like to say that their party is better at protecting civil liberties, including Fourth Amendment rights. By some accounts, however, Obama is outdoing Bush on such issues.

On same-sex marriage, we're still behind Argentina ...

... but less far behind Argentina than we were this morning. In response, people are still whining about their supposed right to vote away the rights of whomever they don't like. We therefore need to make the case that in a constitutional republic based on individual liberty, people do have certain rights that are beyond the reach of the majority. It won't hurt if we point out that those who sing the praises of unfettered majoritarianism don't believe their own talking point.

You might be a liberal if ...

(A companion to "You might be a conservative if ...")

• You think that ATM fees are too high and that taxes are too low.
• You think that prosperity is something that politicians can just decree into existence and that some politicians refuse to do so because the plutocrats keep lobbying for poverty.
• You want politicians at the national level to decree prosperity into existence and politicians at the county level to protect you from it.
• You give all of the credit for the 1990’s Clinton and Gore and all of the blame to someone else. You insist that the Clinton-Gore new economy and the dot-com Dutch tulip mania had nothing to do with each other.
• You think that small is beautiful, except in government.
• You regard local home rule as an outmoded, unworkable, and even racist concept, except in the District of Columbia.
• You think that while the point of diversity is to let people of differing viewpoints learn from one another, the way to achieve diversity is to suppress those same differing viewpoints.
• You want to improve our public schools by doing the things that made them a mess in the first place.
• You oppose road construction but support the tax increases proposed to fund that road construction.
• You think that corporations frequently oppress us and are often monopolistic, whereas government never does and never is.
• You consider yourself to be down with the working class, even though you never interact with any actual working-class persons except those whom you are paying to serve you. You regard people less economically fortunate than you as the virtuous working class when they say what you want to hear and evil redneck trailer trash otherwise.
• You think that tax cuts cause deficits in a way that spending increases don’t.
• You are sure that the plutocrats are behind everything bad. You resent that big companies like P&G and HP lobby for anti-gay laws, over the objections of the Joe the Plumbers of the world.
• On those many occasions when a member of the religious right and a member of the P.C. left say exactly the same thing, you have no problem simultaneously disbelieving and believing it.