Constitutional issue: religion

A case recently reported in my morning newspaper has to do with the rights of inmates in state prisons to assemble for the observance of unusual religions, such as Wicca and Satanism. Some prison administrators say they have no such rights.

The first amendment to the Constitution says, in full: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There are two parts here that have to do with religion. The first part says there can be no religious establishment. That means that if inmates are allowed to hold Jewish or Episcopalian services, for example (which they are), they should be allowed to hold services of any religion, not just "established" religions. That led one prison administrator to ask whether religious inmates were being given rights that inmates without religion did not have.

Yes, they are, and the Constitution supports those special rights. I said the first amendment has two parts that concern religion, and the second part protects the "free exercise" of religion. The Constitution does not protect the free exercise of, say, sports, or science. It does protect, as we see above, the free exercise of religion, as well as speech, the press, assembly, and petition. Any such activities that are so protected by the Consitution have special rights.

I suppose that means that in order to afford all citizens the equal protection of the laws (as prescribed in the fourteenth amendment), we have to define atheism as a religion. There is no such thing as an irreligious person. After all, atheism is a faith. Religious people have faith in the teachings of their religion. An atheist has faith in his own belief that they are all mistaken. So it's not such a stretch, after all.

Constitutional issue: Terri Schiavo

Terri Schiavo (pronounced shyvo) is a middle-aged woman who has been in a vegetative state for years. Her husband wants her feeding tube removed; her parents want her to be kept alive. The state and now the federal government side with the parents; the courts generally side with the husband. As I write, court decisions have resulted in the removal of the feeding tube, and Mrs. Schiavo will expire in at most a few weeks unless the decisions are reversed.

The constitutional issue is whether Congress had a right to pass a special act authorizing federal courts to take up the issue. Many people are saying Congress should not have done that, because whether the feeding tube should be removed is a state issue, not subject to federal jurisdiction.

I disagree on technical grounds. The fourteenth amendment says, in part: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The fourteenth amendment was adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of minorities, specifically former slaves. Before the war, the basic presumption behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was that a strong central government could become tyrannical, and therefore the states were the guardians of liberty. After the war, that presumption was reversed. When slavery was abolished, it was noted that some of the states, but not the federal government, had been supporters of slavery, and so the federal government became the guardian of liberty.

The fourteenth amendment has been interpreted to mean that any action by a state that might be construed as a deprivation of life, liberty, or property may be reviewed by the federal government or federal courts to determine whether a person's "civil rights" are being violated.

It's just ironic that the federal government is intervening to protect the life of an insentient white middle-class middle-aged woman, not to protect the lives of minorities unfairly sentenced to death in state courts. But that's how the ball bounces these days.

Tell a Marketer

Yesterday's New York Times carried a letter by Josh Nugent, of Amherst, MA, who wrote that he worked for a year as a telemarketer and doesn't like the dumb tricks people play on telemarketers who call them. "No, you're not entertaining us ... [s]top wasting our time and yours."

Listen up, telemarketers! I'm not trying to entertain you. You started by wasting my time. I'm just amusing myself so the time is not a total waste for me -- and so you can get a taste of what if feels like to have your time wasted.

I never spent a year at it, but I've spent a few evenings making political campaign calls. Most of the people who answered were polite. The few who were glad to hear from me made my day. The few were downright rude gave me a chuckle after they slammed down the phone. Cold calling is not for the thin-skinned.

The Retiree Burden

Being an old man, I get nervous whenever anybody starts talking about pensions, health care, or anything like that. So when this morning's paper reported that G.M. had lost money, the sentence about health care being a heavy burden on the company caught my eye.

G.M. (General Motors for short) is an old company. Old companies have a lot of retirees. In fact, when an old company gets in trouble and downsizes, it can have more retirees than active employees on its payroll! (I'm afraid the company I get my pension and health care from has already reached that point.) That can make it hard for the company to compete with upstart companies that don't yet have many retirees. And that in turn can make it hard for the company to keep up with its pension and health care obligations.

Pensions are hard for a company to keep up with, because people are living longer than they used to. Look at people who retired 20 years ago, at the age of 65, when they weren't expected to live much past 70 or 75. Now here they are (many of them, anyway), thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, still collecting their pensions (at the company's expense) at the age of 85! Pensions depend on the same life expectancy tables as life insurance. But life insurance companies have it easier. When people live longer, they keep on paying premiums longer before they die and collect on their insurance, so the insurance company gains. Insurance companies also sell annuities, which are like prepaid pensions, and they lose money on those when people live longer, but at least they have a balance; the profits on life insurance make up for the losses on annuities. Companies like G.M. have only the losses. And just when they thought the profits on their stock market investments would help them pay out on their pension obligations, the stock market took a dive. And when they thought their profits on production and sales would help them, the economy stalled.

Health care burdens are even worse. Longevity is increasing gradually, but the cost of medical care is increasing by (as they say) leaps and bounds. Each new miracle of modern medicine costs more than the previous one. He who falls ill and is cured today, lives to fall ill and be cured another day. The costs keep mounting. The back strain that put me in the hospital for over a week, the bleeding ulcer I got from the Vioxx I was taking for arthritis, my coronary bypass, and so on and so forth, all these things add up, and it's mostly paid for by employee benefits.

Why is our government talking about an "ownership society"? Nobody wants to own these problems! The Constitution was written to (among other things) "promote the general welfare." These are problems the government should own. Laying them off on private individuals or private companies does nothing to "secure the blessings of liberty for [them] and [their] posterity."

Shoot first, ask questions later

What's this I read about an Italian journalist who was taken hostage in Iraq a while ago, and was just released, and as she is going to the airport to go back home her car is shot at by American troops and one of the occupants (an Italian secret service agent protecting the journalist) is killed? Allegedly they were approaching a checkpoint at a high rate of speed. Well, darn it, they're in Iraq, you don't go poking along on a dangerous road, you get where you're going as fast as you can!

Anyway, I thought the whole idea of a checkpoint is that it's the point where you check on people passing through to see if they're entitled to proceed. How can you check them at the checkpoint if you shoot them before they get to the checkpoint?

The excuse is that they're worried about suicide bombers. A suicide bomber will stop at the checkpoint without intending to proceed, and will blow himself up to destroy the checkpoint and kill as many Americans as possible at the checkpoint. So you have to stop everybody and check up on them before they get to the checkpoint. You shoot at them if they're going at a high rate of speed, you shoot at them if they're going very slowly because they're trying not to approach at a high rate of speed, and you shoot at them if they're going at normal speed because you know they're just trying not to appear conspicuous. Why not just stand at a safe distance and shoot everybody, and not have a checkpoint?

If you really don't want people approaching the checkpoint at a high rate of speed, why build a smooth straight road toward the checkpoint? Be sensible. To begin with, post a speed limit. Next you have to enforce the speed limit. Make the road viciously twisty, give it a washboard surface so their tires can't hold traction at high speed, and put heavy rubble on both sides of the road so if a vehicle goes off the road it can't move at all. Anybody who goes too fast will go off the road, with the possible exception of race drivers. Now you can shoot at any vehicle that goes off the road, as well as any vehicle that goes through the esses with a race driver at the wheel.

But if you say you're there to bring democracy to Iraq, and you find yourself shooting at Iraqis before you know who they are or why they're on the road, and even shooting at Italians because they might be Iraqis, then maybe, just maybe, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. Yes, there's a job to be done, and somebody's got to do it. But you don't have the ability, and the people you're trying to help don't have the confidence in you, to do the job. There's such a thing as recusing yourself, and it's high time for the Americans in Iraq to do just that.

What's an old man to do?

It's been a month since my last post. Sorry about that. It's been a bad month. To begin with, I've got involved in some volunteer work where I've made myself indispensable, so there are times in each month when I'm pretty busy. But besides that, an awful lot has happened.

To begin with, my wireless access point died. That meant that my laptops, on which I do my volunteer work, lost contact with the printers on the wired network. So I contact the manufacturer for a warranty replacement, get on eBay to get a spare -- and see which one arrives first (the warranty replacement), and meanwhile rig the laptops into the wired network so I can keep on working.

Then my wife's computer quits, and won't restart. Won't even power up. After a while it's OK again, but then it quits again. After a couple of repeats of this I figure out that the fan in the power supply has seized; I can start it by pushing it with a pencil, but after a shutdown overnight it won't restart. So it's a trip to the local computer shop to get the power supply replaced so she can get on with her work.

Some time in the same month I broke a front tooth. Not an accident, just that my bite has been going off kilter and applying pressure to the tooth until the front surface came off. That took several trips to the dentist to get a temporary crown and several fittings and finally the permanent crown.

For the last several months we had been negotiating with workmen to get our kitchen cabinets refinished, and that job was scheduled for late February, so we spent the week before "Kramming the Kontents of our Kapacious Kitchen Kabinets into Kartons and Karting" them into the dining room and living room.

Then, the day the work on the kitchen started, my wife's centenarian mother died! So now we are moving stuff out of the assisted living place where she had spent the last few years, and trying to figure out where it will go. This, while moving our own stuff back into the kitchen.

Am I glad that month is over! We have our living room back (though not the dining room, and the garage is still a mess -- but it has been for months) and the kitchen is pretty near back to normal and we can get on with our lives.