Same-Sex Marriage Amendments

It's all the rage now to amend state constitutions--and maybe the federal constitution, too--to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman and no other relationship gets the same benefits. That, we are told, is the way to stay true to the country's Christian roots. What the religious fanatics promoting these amendments overlook is the serious risk to separation of church and state.
I'm (nominally) an Episcopalian. My church, through its orderly processes, has ordained gays, and I believe there's a liturgy for the blessing of same-sex unions that can be used at local option. There are other churches that have such rites. I don't want the government--any level--stepping in to tell any religious body who can receive the benefits of its blessings. A government doing so would materially infringe on the barrier between church and state. The state, as Sir Thomas More says in A Man for All Seasons, "hath not the competency to do it." That is, the state can't possibly put together a law that adequately respect the beliefs of all of the churches. If it could, it couldn't possibly enforce the law equitably.
The question for the religious fanatics, then, is this: are you so eager to deprive people in committed same sex unions of their civil rights that you are willing to open the door for government to tell your church what and whom it may and may not bless? Let's take marriage--a sacrament or a blessing administered by a religious body--out of this debate unless we acknowledge that the import of these proposed amendments is to take as much from religious bodies as it takes from homosexuals.

English as National Language Amendment

The Senate, displaying what they hope voters will regard as a display of testicularity, approved an amendment to make English the national language of the United States.
These morons--the Republicans and eleven DINOs who voted with them--don't know anything about language acquisition. I once asked a friend of mine at work, a woman who came here from Persia as a child and heard Persian spoken at home while she was growing up, whether she thought in English or Persian. Mind you, this is a woman in her thirties--maybe forties--with a Master's degree. She thought about it for a minute and said that things pertaining to home and family, she thought of in Persian because she had first encountered them in Persian. That is, if she asked a student she was counseling "How's your mother?" or "Did you get a new sofa?" she was probably translating because she would think of the mother or the sofa in Persian first. She thinks of things that she learned in school in English. If you showed her an article in her professional field of counseling, she would struggle with it because all of her education took place in English-speaking schools. She might not even have the Persian words for some of the concepts that are easy for her to explain in English.
Another friend, this one an ESL teacher who came here fairly recently from the Netherlands, goes to lunch once a week with another friend from Holland. The primary purpose, she tells me, is to spend the lunch speaking Dutch. She wants to be able to talk to her nieces and nephews in the Netherlands without having to struggle with translation.
And then there are the parents of my wife's students. They're legal. They want to learn English, but their mobility is limited, and they can't find English classes at times when they are free and able to attend. The school, fortunately, has a translator. Are these women stubbornly refusing to learn English? Hell no. They are worried, they explain through the translator, that their children, who are fluent in English, will speak English to hide things from them.
And my wife, whose great-grandfathers left Holland and came to the United States, thinks with some frustration about the decision that was supposedly made by one of them as he stepped off the ship to never speak Dutch again. It may not have been quite that easy; the teaching of English wasn't as widespread as it is now in Europe. And maybe the decision not to speak Dutch made upward mobility easier, but the result is that the great grandchildren know very little about their Dutch ancestry.
So senators, not everyone who speaks a foreign language does it as a political statement. Not everyone who speaks English has banished other languages from their brains. And if you had really had any guts, you would have voted for an amendment that prohibited official translation of any United States government document into any language other than English or perhaps American Sign Language. But, of course, that would have been wrong. I hope the voters recognize you for the cowardly hypocrites you are. I wish that the Hispanics who work for you would realize how mean-spirited you are and quit tomorrow.