DOMA and Proposition 8: The Long War

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The Supreme Court of the United States dealt a major blow today to anti-equality proponents everywhere by striking down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor and dismissing Hollingsworth v. Perry, effectively invalidating California's Proposition 8 and legalizing same-sex marriage in California.  A momentous day, to be sure - and we liberals should be proud of what we have accomplished in such a short time to bring marriage equality to all fifty states.  This was a victory well-earned, in a battle well-fought.

However, one battle is not enough to decide who wins the war for equality.  The danger of SCOTUS' dismissal of Hollingsworth v. Perry is in that the dismissal does not strike down other anti-equality laws already in place in many conservative states, and those conservative states that do not already have same-sex marriage bans will soon start the process - there is no better way to rile up a social conservative than making him look like a fool in the Supreme Court.  The Republican Party is now gunning for a fight - and they'll beat this dead horse to a pulp to ensure their Bible-thumping ideology will be adhered to in as many states as possible.

It is for this reason that, as a good friend noted to me today, I am not nearly as excited as my fellow liberals when it comes to SCOTUS' decisions today.  Call me a cynic, but I truly believe that the fight for marriage equality in all fifty states is just about to get tougher.  Conservatives do not take getting beat easily, and they excel at mobilizing in support of a cause, no matter how misguided that cause may be.  It is the blessing of being a social conservative - the lack of an informed social conservative base makes it very easy to see complex issues in black-and-white.

What this all comes down to is that we liberals are in for a long, hard slog to ensure that LBGTQ individuals are treated as equals across all fifty states.  DOMA's execution is a big step in the right direction, but true equality can only be reached when same-sex couples can be treated the same as heterosexual couples in the eyes of the law - and I am not talking just about the right to marry.

In 27 states, a gay man can be fired just for who he loves.  In 10 states, gay individuals and couples are not allowed to adopt, while 16 states are ambiguous as to whether they want to allow LBGTQ individuals and couples to adopt.  Across the United States, LBGTQ individuals are degraded and humiliated in schools, the workplace, and at home just because of who they love.  How is that fair?  How does that fit into our immortal Declaration that "all men are created equal?"  How dare we, the self-declared paragon of freedom and equality, be so heinously hypocritical as to demand one thing from other countries on the international stage while simultaneously denying a large portion of Americans the same rights?  It is a tragedy, it is a travesty, and it means that us, as progressives, have a long fight ahead of us, and, while we may celebrate in our victory, we must understand that this victory is small, and we cannot rest - no, we WILL not rest - until we ensure that all men are truly equal.

I stand before you, my fellow liberals, and the rest of America, and declare that I am, always have, and forever will be, a soldier for the cause of equality for all, in the spirit of that immortal Declaration that made us Americans, and I hope you will all join me in the fight to ensure that our LBGTQ brethren, from Hawaii to Maine, from Anchorage to El Paso, can stand with the rest of us as equals in the eyes of the law.

That is all for today.  Class dismissed.

Infernal Revenue?

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last week or so, the floodgates have opened (and the "-gate" suffix re-re-re-revived) over reports that the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, have been giving "special consideration" to right-wing and Tea Party-affiliated organizations applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status as "social welfare" non-profits.  From both sides of the aisle, accusations of unfair treatment by the Obama administration on those organizations that seem hell-bent on destroying progressivism under the auspices of Old Glory and Jesus Christ have come out of the ground like an emerging volcano; congressional hearings, on top of the hearings already being done to beat the Benghazi embassy attack into something closely resembling a dead horse, are being launched by the Tea Party sweethearts: Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), just to name a few; and calls of impeachment from right-wing pundits who are clearly orgasming over the opportunity to bash the President and his administration over yet another "grievous violation of the rights of all Americans."  Between Benghazi, the drones, and now this, President Obama and the White House are clearly longing for the sunnier days of 2009 (again).

But hold on just one second - why are we even considering this IRS situation a scandal?  If you look closely, it is not, nor was it ever, nor will it ever be, a scandal - especially a scandal that can be considered "Nixonian," as one particularly hawkish Fox and Friends pundit put it the other day.  The Internal Revenue Service, which is charged with the proper enforcement of the United States tax code and the collections of said tax levies from the American people (because how else is the government going to function?), has the authority to audit and inspect any individual or entity that it deems likely of trying to cheat the tax system (outside of the loopholes placed by Republicans to allow themselves and their wealthy benefactors to have massive piles of cash in the Cayman Islands).  It's job is to ensure that everyone who must pay taxes does so.  Furthermore, the IRS must make determinations of who is eligible for exemption from taxes and what requirements are needed to maintain that tax-exempt status - for example, a 501(c)(3) organization is tax-exempt because it provides services to fulfill an educational, religious, or charitable need (but it cannot spend its money in heavy lobbying), while a 527 organization is exempt because it lobbies to influence elections and is required to disclose its donors.  You can't fault a government institution for doing its job.

On the other hand, however, you have your right-wing and Tea Party groups: most of these groups consist of a mix of tobacco-chewing NASCAR fanatics who still think our President is a Kenyan Muslim socialist from the fiery pits of Hell and well-groomed, wealthy tycoons who, oddly enough, also think our President is a Kenyan Muslim socialist from the fiery pits of Hell.  There's also one other thing they both have in common - their severe dislike of taxes.  A major tenet of Tea Party ideology is the lowering or abolishment of taxes and, for some, the abolishment of the IRS itself.  One could even go so far as to say that the abolishment of taxes would lead to the abolishment of the American government as we know it - without tax revenue, a government cannot provide services to its citizenry, such as smooth roads, fire departments, law enforcement, mass transit, sanitation, and free public education.  The beauty of the government providing these services (and a concept many libertarians and right-wingers do not fully understand) is that the government is not motivated by a profit margin.  As a matter of fact, they should never, ever, ever consider turning a profit on its services, because then the government no longer treats its citizenry as people, but as faceless consumers who are only as important as the dollar bills in their pockets.  Yet, the right-wing factions of our population would rather the private sector run these operations, and who is to stop the private industry, in the spirit of free-market capitalism, from charging you to leave your driveway and drive in your own neighborhood, or bar your children from getting a basic high school education because you cannot afford it?

Given the ethos of these right-wing groups to insist on the abolishment of taxes, as well as their public declaration that they seek to influence elections to achieve that end (as well as many others that seem to be, for lack of a more polite term, "ass-backwards"), it is only reasonable to believe that the Internal Revenue Service, which is charged, by many acts of Congress, to administer the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26 of the U.S. Code), to collect such revenue from the citizenry, and to determine who and what should be exempt from this collection, would take a keen interest as to the tax-exempt status of such organizations, particularly ones looking for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status, to make sure laws are being followed.  Any organization who declares that it is a charitable or "social welfare" organization but acts (or intends to act) as a (Super) Political Action Committee, or PAC, just to get out of disclosing their financial benefactors, is actively attempting to flout the law and should be called out by the IRS for doing so.  The Internal Revenue Code, under Section 527, accounts for (Super) PACs, and declares them tax-exempt as long as they publicly disclose who their donors are - which should make you wonder: what exactly are these right-wing organizations so keen to hide from public scrutiny?

As I've said before: this "scandal" is nothing more than a Republican fantasy designed to discredit the Obama administration and to distort the reality of what the IRS is designed to do in order to take attention away from the fact that, by obstructing the proper functioning of government, the Republican Party is effectively committing treason, and this really needs to be nipped in the bud before it infects the collective American consciousness further than it already has.

That's all for today.  Class dismissed.