The Substantially Similar Weblog

Here’s the latest salvo from the Christian Coalition. I was trying to think up some witty commentary on this, but I think it’s funny enough without any exegesis:

LEFT-WING FEDERAL JUDGE JOSEPH TAURO AFFIRMS 4 RENEGADE MASSACHUSETTS SUPREME COURT JUSTICES WHO ARE FORCING HOMOSEXUAL “MARRIAGES” ON AMERICA SET TO BEGIN ON MONDAY, MAY 17TH
On Thursday, a left-wing federal judge in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, declined to grant an emergency stay on homosexual “marriages” set to begin in Massachusetts on Monday, May 17th. Matthew Staver, who is one of the attorneys representing 11 Massachusetts lawmakers and a Catholic activist said regarding the federal judge’s decision: “We will appeal this case as far as necessary to ensure that the separation-of-powers principle is upheld in Massachusetts. The Republican form of government must be restored so the people can have a chance to define marriage”. Four Justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Court led by ultra-liberal Chief Justice Margaret Marshall in a 4-3 decision, tyrannically overstepped its authority as it unilaterally redefined marriage law to allow homosexual “marriages” in its November 18, 2003 Goodridge decision. Massachusetts Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw, leader of one of the most liberal Episcopal dioceses in the country, actually is banning his diocese clergy from solemnizing homosexual “marriages” stating that “…marriage in the Episcopal Church is between a man and a woman”. Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202-225-3121 or you can go to http://www.cc.org/legis/contactcongress.html and urge your Congressman and two Senators to co-sponsor the Federal Marriage Amendment that will finally help stop the judicial tyranny in America.

Nice use of adjectives, at least.

At this past weekend’s March for Women’s Lives, about 1,000 antiabortion counterprotesters heckled the marchers. I thought the following line of argument, as described in the Boston Globe, was fairly remarkable:

A few blocks down the street, Randall Terry, president of the antiabortion Society for Truth and Justice and founder of the Operation Rescue, stood atop Freedom Plaza and — with the help of loudspeakers — told marchers they should be ashamed: “Remember, Adolph Hitler had big crowds in the 1930s.”

Well, sure. Adolf Hitler also had a mustache. Not to mention that he is alleged by some to have been vegetarian. Does that mean vegetarians or mustached men (I fit into both categories) should be ashamed?

Moreover, the New York Yankees have big crowds. So do George Bush and Britney Spears.

Maybe the Globe took Terry’s quote out of context, but it’s hard to believe anyone would find that bit of the analogy even vaguely persuasive.

Democracy Now!, my favorite webcast radio news, has great coverage of the march, including several extended video segments of the speakers. If you couldn’t make it down to DC last weekend, I suggest watching this footage online to get at least a little taste of the events.

(Minor update: apparently the Boston Globe got the spelling wrong—it’s Adolf, not Adolph. Fixed in my text.)

The Boston Globe, among other newspapers, did not run today’s Doonesbury comic strip, apparently because it includes the word ‘son of a bitch’:

A search of the last year of Boston Globe articles reveals 33 articles where the word ‘bitch’ appears. I suppose there’s some argument that the comics page is supposed to be especially kid friendly, but I can’t help but think the political overtones in this week’s story (where a major character loses a limb in the war in Iraq) played some part in the decision to censor today’s strip. I also don’t suppose there are many kids who read the newspaper who would be traumitized by exposure to the word ‘bitch’. If there are any such kids reading my blog, I suggest they go to the handful of sites registered in the government sponsored and sanitized kids.us domain.

On the other hand, the Globe ran this photo on the front page:

Two employees of a contractor in Iraq were just fired for providing a similar photo to the Seattle Times; however, this photo was the result of Freedom of Information Act request filed by Russ Kick, maintainer of The Memory Hole, a site dedicated to preserving and disseminating censored documents. I don’t know how the Bush Administration expected its media blackout on casket photos would really work in the modern information age.

In other news, we want to see Pat Humphries and Sandy O (now Emma’s Revolution—website not up yet), our favorite folk/justice/peace folksinging duo. Listen to some of their MP3s if you’ve never heard of them. They performed at Club Passim and gave a fantastic show with lots of audience participation. Coincidentally, Pat and Sandy’s Song Peace Salaam Shalom was mentioned yesterday during a Democracy Now story on Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear whistleblower who was just released from prison 18 years after revealing that Israel was building a nuclear arsenal. Supporters of Vanunu sang the song from behind a fence set up to keep them away from the prisoner of conscience.

Finally, I highly recommend Monday’s show celebrating the 55th anniversary of Pacifica Radio. It’s a great story, and should be particularly relevant to all you copyright activists among my readers. Lewis Hill, the founder of Pacifica, encountered great resistance and skepticism about the idea of noncommercial radio. No one could believe that people would willing pay for something they could just turn on their radio and get for free. Listen to the whole documentary for an illuminating history of a precursor to the modern Free Culture movement.

I attended a lecture· yesterday as part of the Spirit of Fès·, an interfaith festival of sacred music that started in Fès, Morocco, and has spread throughout the world. The discussion concerned the possibility of bridging the divide between the great faith traditions to achieve peace in the world. One of the panelists made a startling observation: after last week’s bombing in Madrid, Spain·, there was no official national moment of silence or mourning of the tragedy in the United States.

On September 14, 2001, all of Europe observed a three-minute silence to remember the victims of the September 11 attacks·, as did most of the rest of the world. Yet, even though this was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history, and Europe itself observed· a transnational moment of silence, there was no such response here.

Why is it that our tragedy is the world’s tragedy, but disaster elsewhere is reflected here primarily as fear of more terrorism on American soil?

According to several knowledgeable sources interviewed by Democracy Now!·, Jean-Bertrand Aristide did not resign but was abducted by American forces as part of a coup d’etat. This is a very different version of the events than that offered, for example, by the New York Times:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 29 President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the slum priest who became his country’s first democratically elected president, resigned today under intense pressure from the United States and the threat of an invasion of the capital by armed insurgents, fleeing by jet at dawn under heavy American guard.

You can download the whole show in ogg vorbis format or as a larger mp3 file. Whether or not you agree with Aristide’s lawyer, friend, and Congressmember Maxine Waters (D-CA), this version of the story needs to be more widely disseminated. It’s our duty as citizens of the blogosphere to correct these sorts of omissions and inaccuracies in the mainstream media.

The Marriott Hotel in Manhattan Beach, California provides a host of services through the television in the rooms. These include “movies on demand” at $14 a pop and Sony Playstation 2 for $8 per hour. I can’t imagine anyone paying that much for Playstation unless: (1) someone else is paying their costs (business travellers); (2) their kids are driving them crazy; or (3) money is no object. It’s incredibly frustrating to be charged an amount totally unrelated to the marginal cost of providing a service, but maybe Marriott enjoys a price-insensitive clientele.

My favorite part was when I tried to use the wireless keyboard to access the menu of services. I got the following message:

A required DLL was not found: FILTERS.DLL was not found.

The wireless keyboard provided no way to cancel the error message. In fact, there was no way to make any selections on the menu in the background. All you could do was look at this clever Microsoft error message.

You would think that a simple “black box” type program like a menu of services served over a television would be pretty rock solid. But not when the television server is running Windows NT!

I feel some obligation to perpetuate the Bush in 41.2 Seconds meme. Maybe I’m a little late. (Thanks to UG for the link).

I run my own little “rightwatch” organization by subscribing to the mailing lists of several right wing organizations. Although on occasion I find myself agreeing with the more economic/libertarian groups (e.g., the Cato Institute·), I always find the social right pretty funny. Here’s the latest press release from the Christian Coalition·:

Washington D.C. — Today’s decision by 4 out-of-control left-wing judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court to force homosexual “marriage” on the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the rest of America should be thoroughly ignored by the Massachusetts State Legislature. The American people who overwhelmingly oppose homosexual marriages (only 24% support such an abomination) — through their elected officials —- must make these important decisions, not a tiny minority of judicial tyrants.

This excerpt is striking because they admit that 24% of the population supports gay marriage. It’s astonishing that that’s the lowest number the Christian Coalition can reasonably claim. What might that number have been ten years ago? Twenty? The Christian Coalition is on pretty thin ice if one-quarter of the population supports an “abomination.” I’m not sure that can really be counted as “overwhelming.” Assuming the trend towards acceptance continues at anywhere near the current rate, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to continue to claim that these judges are way out in left field.

They also (unsurprisingly) neglect to mention that constitutional rights are almost always countermajoritarian: if the only issue were the will of the masses, then the only purpose of the constitution would be to insure proper (representative) functioning of the legislative branch. But that’s clearly not the case, and one only need to look to the school desegregation cases to see why courts must act against the will of the majority when the constitution so commands.

I’m sure the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (holding same sex marriage rights required under the Massachusetts Constitution in Goodridge·) and the United States Supreme Court (in holding sodomy prohibitions unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas·) have seen the writing on the wall: people will some day look back at this time and wonder how people could ever have harbored such homophobic views. By setting out bold precedent breaking with past practice, authors of these opinions must be hoping to establish themselves as visionaries in the eyes of future legal historians, just as we now see the Holmes and Brandeis dissents in the free speech cases of the late 1910’s·, or Holmes’ dissent in Lochner v. New York· in 1905. We realize now that Holmes and Brandeis understood what is now obvious, at a time when the rest of the court was stuck in an untenable (or unjust) conceptual framework.

I’m looking forward to the time when we can look back on all of this and laugh at the small-mindedness of the Christian Coalition. In any case, I feel better about getting married this May knowing that I live in a state where the right to marry isn’t predicated on the gender of the person one loves.

Slate· is running this entertaining and mildly insightful analysis· of the recent television advertisments by IBM promoting Linux· (I’d normally say GNU/Linux, but the ads just say “Linux”). If you haven’t seen the ads, check them out. Then read the commentary.

Whenever I talk with intellectual property attorneys who aren’t familiar with the particulars of the SCO v. IBM case, I mention SCO’s claim that the GPL is unconstitutional:

SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws.

This is a marvelous tidbit to have, because it signals the absurdity of SCO’s case. If SCO seriously intends to make this claim in court, anyone who practices copyright law understands immediately how desperate their case must be.

Larry explains quite clearly why the GPL can’t be unconstitutional. It boils down to two points:

• No state action. The constitution restricts the federal government, and the states (primarily through the Fourteenth Amendment), but says nothing about what private parties can do. Although some people think the world might be a better place if people had constitutional rights against private entities (e.g., free speech rights in the private workplace), this certainly isn’t how the constitution has been interpretted.
• In rare cases, the Court has held judicial enforcement of private contracts to constitute state action for constitutional purposes; e.g., racially restrictive covenants on property were held to be unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, a 1948 Supreme Court case. But this reasoning is quite rare outside of that particular context (another salient exception is the application of the First Amendment as a limitation on civil libel suits as in New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)), and certainly has never been applied to the enforcement of copyright licensing agreements.

If you’re ever trying to explain why SCO has little chance of winning to someone with intellectual property expertise, mention that SCO has argued that the GPL is unconstitutional. It should clarify things immediately.