Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

Charles Merrill is a 71 year-old millionaire who has decided not to file tax returns for the years 2004 and 2005 in order to protest the idea of a Constitutional amendment that would prohibit same-sex marriage. I agree with Mr. Merrill’s opposition to the amendment, and his choice to sacrifice his fortune and what remains of his life, in the event the IRS should pursue him, demonstrates his seriousness. However, I think Mr. Merrill’s protest will be largely ineffectual, not because he’s only one man, but because his resistance is aimed at the wrong person, and his sloganeering is inaccurate at best, if not grating to those who know history and wish to more directly address the subject at hand.

Here are some clips from Mr. Merrill’s site:

Charles Merrill says President Bush’s endorsement of a same-sex marriage ban is discrimination against American citizens.
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“By not paying taxes, this is a deliberate act of civil disobedience towards a president that wants to make an amendment to the Constitution to only allow marriage between a man and woman, rather than two people who love each other, and that discriminates against us as full citizens of the United States.”
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According to Merrill, his efforts in challenging the government may just kick the wind out of the Bush administration’s continued rallying cry for a same-sex marriage amendment.
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“This is all about President Bush,” says Merrill (emphasis added). “He’s catering to the religious right and our society is moving back to the times of scarlet letters.”

I couldn’t disagree more - this is not all about President Bush, or any other President for that matter. I’d like to introduce some facts, in the form of Article V of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Article. V.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Proposed amendments become law when approved by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of states, either via legislature or convention. Please notice that the word “President” does not appear in Article V, as the President plays no role in enacting or otherwise approving a Constitutional amendment. A President can certainly recommend an amendment, and he can publicly endorse one, but when it comes to making that amendment law, the President casts no vote.

Mr. Merrill is firing at the wrong target. As fashionable as Bush bashing is among liberals, and certainly homosexuals, the President, regardless of who he is, is not the proper government entity at which to direct this particular protest. If Mr. Merrill and other homosexuals wish their protest to be truly effective, it must be directed at members of Congress and state legislatures, the people who actually cast votes to enact any amendment against same-sex marriage. The players on the field, not the cheerleader, must be convinced of the misanthropic nature of this amendment.

A similar misguided scenario played out in Ohio in 2004. A citizen-driven initiative put a state constitutional amendment on the November ballot, giving Ohio voters the right to prohibit same-sex marriage. Homosexual groups in Ohio immediately started their Bush bashing, and did virtually nothing to appeal to the citizens of their own state with reasoned arguments grounded in conservatism, law, and logic. (Yes, same-sex marriage is conservative. Think small government.) Consequently, the prohibition passed by a 2:1 margin. On a national level, homosexual groups aren’t doing any better than groups in Ohio did, as Mr. Merrill demonstrates. They’re simply not concentrating on the machinery of government that would make such an amendment happen, and instead are releasing their emotional vitriol for a single man who plays no part in the process. Continuing down this path will certainly lead to failure again. Who will this emotion be directed toward when, 31 months from now, George Bush is no longer the President, but the idea of an amendment survives?

At the beginning of this article, I also mentioned something about sloganeering. Here’s another excerpt from Mr. Merrill’s site.

“No taxation without representation” was a rallying cry for advocates of American independence from Great Britain in the eighteenth century. The American colonies were required to pay taxes to London, yet had no representatives in Parliament, and felt they were being forced to fund a government into which they had no input.

In keeping with Merrill’s assertions — that’s not too far off the mark when used to describe what’s happening to America’s LGBT population (emphasis added). With the current conservative regime in control, gays and lesbians, in effect, have no input in this government.

Correction: It’s severely off the mark, and in fact, it’s not even analogous. Colonists at the time of the American Revolution had no representatives in Parliament. There were local governments that citizens participated in which ran the individual colonies, but those colonists had no say in national government. Today, in the United States, homosexuals certainly do have a say in national government, assuming they vote. There is no law prohibiting homosexuals from voting, and homosexuals have every right and opportunity to endorse, influence, and fund candidates who represent their state, district, and viewpoint. Government likely does something everyone dislikes, and it’s reasonable to say that no taxpayer completely approves of how their money is spent. But claiming to be taxed without representation is absurd and disingenuous. It’s a catchy slogan, but it certainly doesn’t apply, and the case against an amendment opposing same-sex marriage can be effectively made without inaccurate hyperbole and a gross misunderstanding of history.

If homosexuals want to counter this amendment, they must organize. They must appeal to their representatives in Washington and their state capitol. They must appeal to their conservative fellow citizens. The Constitution is meant to limit government and protect the rights of citizens, and amending it to bring it into citizens’ bedrooms is big government, counter to the Constitution’s purpose, the antithesis of conservatism. Government should be small and distant, and people should be free to live their lives in whatever way they please, as long as others’ rights to life, liberty, and property aren’t threatened. That’s conservatism in its purest form, and anyone who believes otherwise and claims to be conservative is as misguided as Mr. Merrill and his impotent protest.

I like this picture so much I wanted to share it.

That’s my grandfather asleep against a fence at his home in Muncie, Indiana, in the late 1930s or early 1940s. We have a whole collection of him asleep in funny places.

That’s all… No point, just a picture.

You wouldn’t know it from our drive-by media, but today was the 62nd anniversary of the D-day invasion, where unimaginable numbers of allied soldiers were mowed down by Nazi machine gun entrenchments as they literally disembarked from their boats in an effort to puncture the European mainland and free giant swaths of the continent from Nazi occupation. An event like this doesn’t get even a fraction of the attention as some other historical events from the same time period, such as the dropping of two atomic bombs in Japan. Every August we’re treated to yet another round of media hand-wringing and protests and somber people with lit candles, questioning the use of the bombs, pondering their effect on history, and castigating the United States for such barbarianism. The same intensity of feeling and media attention is absent each year on the D-day anniversary. For whatever reason, the lives lost at D-day aren’t as worthy of yearly commemoration.

I watched a program on the history channel this evening about the 72 hours immediately following D-day, and I thought of my grandfather, as those types of programs usually cause me to do. I’m 31 years old, and I live a comfortable life that most people in this world can only dream of. At worst, I’ve suffered temporary hardship and mild disappointment. When my grandfather (and maybe yours) was my age, he had lived through the Great Depression on a farm in Indiana. He had joined the navy (perhaps a bit under age) and served in Luzon, in the Philippines, where he was a surgical tech. He had earned his purple heart when a jeep he was in drove over a mine, temporarily blinding him. He earned a number of other awards helping victims of that same explosion while he was blinded. (Grandpa never talked about it much and nobody in the family knows all the details.) He had given up his dream of becoming a doctor in order to support his family after his own father died. He had earned his degree in Criminal Justice from Ball State University and was a few months away from marrying my grandmother. My first 31 years have been sparse in comparison.

Immediately after my show was over, Josh changed the channel to watch his show, Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D List. After spending an hour absorbed in D-day, Kathy Griffin’s self-involvement was hard to stomach. If you haven’t seen her show before, here’s the wrap-up: Ms. Griffin is a fourth-tier, but wealthy, celebrity who desperately wants the approval and recognition of other, more wealthy celebrities who wouldn’t take time to piss on her if she were on fire. Why she must have their approval is beyond reason. I realize her (feigned?) desire to be part of the in crowd may be nothing more than a premise to portray her as an underdog and a device to mock more pretentious people, but the whole show makes her seem exceedingly unappreciative of the charmed life that fortune, and people such as those from the D-day generation, have afforded her.

Ceaseless angst is equally unappealing both as a television premise and as history.

Some weeks ago, I said I was going to post something on this site about using my iSight camera with a big telescope. My friend Tim and I were going to build an adapter and I was going to post all the details right here so that all three other people on the web who would want to try to do such a thing could learn from our experience. I even managed to shoot a movie of Saturn, from which I was able to make a decent still picture.

And then, I posted something else that said I was going to do it, I swear… And this is another post like that.

The adapter exists. I’ve seen it. Tim showed it to me. But I don’t know how well it works, and I don’t want to publish some half-assed (as if this isn’t half-assed) description of the thing without some example pictures, of the adapter and from the camera… all of this assuming the damn thing works the way we think it should.

So hang in there. We have some clear nights and a waxing gibbous moon this week, so Tim and I are going to find some time in common to get some pics.