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A couple of my friends are posting about politics. My friend Keith mentions Obama and campaign promises:

The reality of ruling is much harder than making campaign promises. More importantly you can tell everyone what they want to hear but in the end, you can only deliver one path. Someone is going to be disappointed.

I agree completely. I alluded to this idea in my previous post about taxes. Now that Obama's in office, the very sticky situation of Guantanamo is going to be first on the block. Now that he gets to read the dossier on some of the evil people who are stored there-- and the sensitive nature of the intelligence we have to hold them on-- is it going to be as open-and-shut case as some on the left have made it out to be?

This is just one gray area here that Obama is going to have to face, partly because the current administration has refused to. Situations like Iraq, the environment, the economy.. All of these will pit Obama between his campaign promises and the stark reality that requires specific actions that may be contrary to them...

My friend Rus writes about Prop 8. He points out that the LDS church is often being singled out, whereas if the very populace that helped get Obama elected, particularly the black and latino vote, voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8. Without their votes, he argues, Prop 8 would have failed.

This is a valid point, but I think the reason why the focus is on the conservative organizations that helped finance Prop 8 (principally the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family rather than LDS-- see californiansagainsthate.com) is because the rank-and-file Obama supporter (who happens to be black or latino) is just expressing their personal opinion. Believe it or not, I think much of the "left-leaning" community doesn't have a problem with expression of personal political opinion. What is outrageous is that religious groups organize to inflict their religious views on others through the political process.

Rus quotes the LDS church:

It is important to understand that this issue for the Church has always been about the sacred and divine institution of marriage - a union between a man and a woman.

The fact of the matter is that the LDS church has only been in existence for less than 200 years, whereas the institution of marriage is many thousands of years older. Marriage predates the birth of Jesus Christ. Marriage predates the Jewish faith which is estimated to have appeared at 2000 BC. Marriage has been around longer than any particular religious faith's assertion of its sanctity and divinity.

If marriage was so beholden to the gods of these faiths, then perhaps it would have been important enough for these faiths to have received word from God predating marriage on what marriage meant? Yet no such historical record exists that warns people from entering into a marriage that God opposes. In fact there is no mention of marriage in the Genesis story (that I can recall), which would have been the perfect place for God to have defined it for the judeo-christian-muslim faiths.

The reality of the situation is that humans, like many mammals, establish a pair-bond for evolutionarily obvious reasons. And when religious faiths took over, much like Christmas was selected to coincide with the Roman winter solstice practices of Saturnalia (and much of the folklore with it), Judeo-Christian adoption of the "institution" of marriage was actually co-opting a concept that predated these faiths.

So I find it hard to believe that somehow, these faiths that have come several millenia too late to predate marriage, can insist on the divinity and sanctity of it.

We're left with the valid political debate about Prop 8. If it's what society defines it to be, as I've been arguing, and society (in California) has taken a very restrictive view of it, then let's talk about it on the merits of the argument.

Rus actually makes this point:

I subscribe to the political philosophy that rights can only be secured by legislative or plebiscite action primarily because I believe in honoring the fundamental principle of a constitutional republic... that the majority rules, subject only to those minority rights which are written down in the Constitution. If you discover a "new" right that you'd like included, you have available to you the process of amendment (or, uh, succession... or revolution). This involves a lot of work as your fellow citizens must be convinced, by way of persuasion and debate, that your cause is worthy of a majority vote.

This mimics the concept of a "social contract", where individuals negotiate their rights and restrictions in the interest of creating a "more perfect union", for example. I find it hard to disagree with this line of reasoning. However, it's undeniable that religious organizations had their impact on the outcome of Prop 8, and that reasoning-- that these religions have designs on the definition of marriage that serve to define it for everybody else-- is what I fundamentally disagree with.

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