Duopoly

How to Spot a Liberal (If you must)

In Defense of Marriage

Since 1996's "Defense of Marriage Act" and before, the acolytes of hate theology, in the name of "protecting marriage" (from whom?), have touted slogans praising bride and groom (heterosexual, of course) as the epitome of human relationships. James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" holds it in such high esteem that they assert "Any efforts to redefine marriage destroy the institution - and ultimately - civil and healthy society." (Though one has to call all conclusions suspect from an organization that feels the need to clarify that "Marriage is not an American invention.") The "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" armies have propagandized the entire movement against acceptance of loving relationships -- between anyone, regardless of gender -- into a fight to stoically defend the very sanctity of marriage itself!

Massachusetts defied God in 2003 and ruled that narrow theological interpretations could not dictate the definition of secular marriage. California did the same this year, though a November "ballot initiative" may threaten that freedom. With these advancements in equal rights for same-sex couples, those rallying to marriage's defense are ratcheting up the war cries. This faction includes John McCain.

With all the rhetoric about saving marriage, this chronology of America's destruction of that institution -- and cold murder of more than 100 innocent people -- from TomDispatch provides a horrifying description of how America's military intervention is snuffing out marriage in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the numbers of brides, grooms, and wedding parties documented by TomDispatch is a minuscule percentage of the more than 90,000 dead Iraqi civilians (estimates of Afghani civilian casualties are almost impossible to find, though recent news stories suggest a "62%" rise in innocent deaths), the irony is dumbfounding. The same hawks who installed the Administration of G-W are the first to argue in "defense of marriage," according to their propagandized message. The G-W uber-conservative constituency was the first to push the Iraqi invasion, and are still those who gush at McCain's rosy calls for "victory." Thus, through their votes and their activism, the defenders of marriage in America are responsible for the destruction of marriage abroad -- heterosexual marriages between of-age, religious men and women. Perhaps, as with cigarette imports to Iran, maybe that's a way of killing them. It not only kills this generation of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, it prevents couples from birthing a new one.

A New Independence

This Independence Day afforded many Americans a long holiday weekend, a three-day binge of burgers, bottle rockets, and beer. But taking a break from Grandma’s potato salad, some of us paused to consider the depth of our independence and to ask “How free are we?” For a holiday choked with tradition, the Fourth of July has lost sight of the substance of that tradition, wrapping Old Glory around hollow Nationalism. To counter this, we must declare a new Independence.

For our right to Life, we must declare our Independence from profit-driven healthcare and pharmaceutical corporations. According to the Institute of Medicine, nearly 20,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to a lack of health insurance. This number does not account for the thousands whom insurance companies label “high risk” or whose treatments are considered “experimental,” those thousands murdered by corporate bureaucracies’ deliberate inaction. This number does not include the thousands of infants who die annually as statistics in the second-highest infant-mortality rate in the developed world, beaten only by Latvia. This number does not account for the thousands of senior citizens who, even on government subsidy programs and Social Security checks, can barely afford to pay rising pharmaceutical prices in addition to living expenses, often shifting the burden of these costs to younger generations—a burden that disproportionately weighs on poorer families.

For our right to Life, we must declare our Independence from monopolistic agribusiness and energy syndicates. A 2006 report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revealed that 35.5 million Americans live in hungry households, an uneven ratio belonging to minorities. Since the disastrous Welfare reform of the Clinton Administration, government aid to these families has decreased, with aid disbursed limited to a strict time period, after which parents are pushed into minimum-wage jobs, away from their struggling families, with few recipients benefiting from vocational programs. As welfare participation has plummeted, the U.S. boasts one of the highest poverty levels among the world’s developed nations. Meanwhile, U.S. agribusiness reaps profits from rising food costs, ethanol development (now 30% of U.S. corn crop, according to International Food Policy Research Institute), and massive tax breaks and subsidies, such as the $25 billion in this year’s Food, Conservation, and Energy Act (HR 2419), very little of which will aid small farms. While agribusiness engulfs the arable land of the continental heartland in Steinbeckian style, small farmers around the world grow poorer, causing global economic instability, worker migration, and hunger. Energy companies, too, profit from exploiting public necessities. Oil giant Chevron, Condi Rice’s former employer, posted a nearly 30% rise in revenues at the end of 2007—a $14 billion increase in a single quarter. Exxon-Mobil, BP, and the rest posted similar gains, despite customer frustration and congressional posturing. These are the same companies positioned to benefit from no-bid contracts in America’s Iraqi conquest. Capitalist competition is appropriate for soda-pop peddlers and knick-knack fads. Where would we be if Clear Pepsi or Pet Rocks had been socialized? However, our basic right to Life, as enshrined in Jefferson’s Declaration, depends on the necessities of healthcare, food, and energy. These necessities should not be exploited for financial gain.

For our right to Liberty, we must declare our Independence from our narrow political duopoly, a system which panders to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex and America’s fervent theocratic radicals, while shutting out multifaceted political discussion. To choose between Democrats and Republicans is to choose between Pepsi and Coke—either way, the voter is drinking cola. Root beer, cream soda, even guava-carrot juice are forced out of the equation, severely limiting one’s ability to choose. Third parties face entrenched political factions working together in “bipartisan” efforts to gerrymander districts and impose cumbersome barriers, including high fees and ballot petitions that often require several times more signatures than those of either major party. In addition, as of March of 2008, oil companies had given a quarter million in hard donations to Barack Obama and almost half a million to John McCain. According to OpenSecrets.org, the pharmaceutical industry has given almost $8 million to each major political party since the beginning of 2008, a number that’s sure to grow as Election Day nears. With the inclusion of other parties, corporations would find their donations stretch thinner, along with their policy influence. In addition, parties would be forced to form coalitions to accomplish policy agendas, promoting compromise and nuance versus America’s current black-vs.-white stalemated system.

For our right to Liberty, we must assure that all Americans are free to think, to believe, and to love as they choose, unhindered by moralist or reactionary efforts to whitewash us into conformity. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, also wrote, “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest of ignorance of which their civil as well as their religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” As recent pandering by both Obama and McCain to right-wing clerics such as James Dobson and Billy Graham shows, religious fundamentalism aspires to the same influence in America as it has in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Despite Jefferson’s hope for a “separation of church and state,” church-based charities continue to drain secular programs of public funds, the Pledge of Allegiance (written by a 19^th-century socialist to sell the Stars-and-Stripes to schools) still bears the Cold War-era “one nation under God,” and anti-choice, anti-gay reactionaries gain traction with every “Defense of Marriage” ballot initiative, with every Republican activist judicial appointment. Pandering by the major parties to these divisive, radical factions fosters the historically ignorant notion that the United States was founded as a “Christian” nation, at the expense of the 24% percent of Americans who claim another—or no—affiliation. It also promotes an oppressive agenda against women’s rights, gay rights, and religious rights in an effort to homogenize the U.S. into submission to evangelical orthodoxy. Duopolistic politics leave America vulnerable to the special influences of corporate money and religious fundamentalism, subverting our Liberty for political expediency.

For our right to the Pursuit of Happiness, we must declare our Independence from economic and social inequality—and make education accessible to all willing students to ensure this inequality is erased. A recent Reuters article announced that Denmark is the “Happiest Country in the World.” The World Values Survey, a U.S.-government-funded organization and writers of the report, said, according to Reuters, “Denmark, with its democracy, social equality and peaceful atmosphere, is the happiest country in the world…while the world's richest nation, the United States, ranks 16th.” A researcher involved with the report argued that “the most important determinant of happiness is the extent to which people have free choice in how to live their lives,” a choice which many in America evidently find lacking. Extremeinequality.org reports that 22.9% of America’s wealth in 2006 went to the top 1% of the nation’s households—the highest since the stock collapse that precipitated the Great Depression. The top 10% own more than two-thirds of all American wealth, more than double the accumulated wealth of the bottom 90%. Couple that with the rising healthcare, food, and energy costs necessary to Life, with the inability to effect change a duopolistic government and the encroachment on civil freedoms necessary to Liberty, and our “16^th” ranking in the hierarchy of happiness is no surprise—a ranking no doubt buoyed by the promise of wealth and rampant Nationalism.

For our right to the Pursuit of Happiness, access to education must be unequivocally unobstructed. The New York Times reports public university tuition rising 7% to 13% and private tuition rising more than 5% annually, much higher than the average rate of inflation. In a country that prides itself on the increasingly uncommon Horatio Alger American Dream, education provides the only vehicle, outside Powerball, through which one can ascend the socio-economic ladder. Yet, the rising costs of post-secondary education mean that college is slowly becoming a luxury for the wealthy or that less-affluent students who attend school on college loans are burdened with crippling loan payments for 30 years or longer after graduation. These payments, often as high as $400, $500, or more a month, make scraping by on entry-level salaries (increasingly without benefits) a fight for survival and ascending to higher socio-economic status a pipedream. In the past, education has helped to pull women and minorities out of second-class citizenship and into the possibility of the American Dream. Education can close the gulf of inequality, bringing us closer to egalitarian Denmark and nearer the finish in our Pursuit of Happiness.

While many other forces seek to deprive Americans of their rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—domestic espionage, inequality in primary and secondary education, expensive imperialist wars, to name a few—we can take comfort in the words of Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the rest of America’s revolutionary heroes realized 232 years ago, a destructive government is not Divine and it is not Eternal. When a government endangers its citizens, it is the duty of the citizens to change that government. The power to defend our rights is unalienable—and we must not yield that power. Let us make Jefferson proud and declare a new Independence.