Gay Marriage in America, the First Redefinition of Marriage?

The debate over marriage equality in our country requires us to examine the psychological and cultural contexts that produce the political phenomenon surrounding it, which we inhabit today.  Like any issue that can produce major controversy, it cuts across all the planes of our experience; sexual, religious, political, cultural etc... While the majority of Americans and myself can agree that this is a human rights issue  which is self evident, we are left with a sizable percentage of our population that will be left to lament the moral, spiritual and social decay of the society around them.  We know the arguments for and the arguments against marriage equality.  Personally I seriously doubt that anyone with a solid opinion on the matter will have their minds changed by any such arguments.  But what I find more fascinating, is the complete lack of philosophical common definitions and common framework that exist, which impede any actual communication.  Where are the opponents of marriage equality coming from?  I mean besides traditional hate groups, where are they coming from?
Non religious opponents of marriage equality are engaging the debate on the very definition of marriage, its intrinsic purpose and form.  This is an essentialist approach, in that it attributes a specific and exclusive purpose of marriage, and by definition human sexuality and "the family".  This type of thinking aligns with most religious dogmas, in its consistent narrative of human sexuality.  It also aligns with baser forms of knowing, i.e. ignorance, bigotry, and fear (which are all essentially the same).
I am very interested to see how these hearings at the Supreme Court tomorrow will play out.  After all the rhetoric is over, it would seem to me that the basic question we can distill this debate down to is the definition of marriage.  Marriage has been being redefined, over the course of social evolution, for thousands of years. See "Origins of the Family Private Property and the State", by Fredreich Engels, or "Ancient Society" by Lewis H. Morgan or "The Bible", or the "The Quran" and you will find very diverse definitions for and purposes of marriage.  From historical materialism, to anthropology, to theology we can see the diversity of the history of legally enshrining and sanctifying different sexual relations.  While I am not building an argument here, I'm attesting to the fact that history has a very loose meaning for the word "traditional".  These are subjective mores dictated by power structures.  It would seem to me that attempts to make religious arguments against marriage equality, a-religious, by mounting a philosophical defense through a natural definition of marriage, fail because they are founded upon a subjectivity that has documented history of its malleability.  I feel that in addition to redefining marriage and family, attempts to define and legally control/permit forms of human sexuality have also been well documented.  Humanity's attempts to confine itself by narratives of morals, motivated by both fear and desire are universal.  It is clear we have a propensity for dictating different sexual morals through law, we are just another moment in history, the question is only whether we will move forward or let ourselves be dictated to by power structures that claim to explain the infinite depth of human sexuality.
Could the cultural opposition to gay marriage and homosexuality be, in itself, a libidinal response?  Fear of the unknown and the decision that something is unknowable, rejection, domination, and objectification are all part of both, the spectrum from homophobia to opposition to gay marriage, and the libidinal consciousness.  I find it ironic that one culture's sexual fears, or definitions or tensions would subjugate the sexual realizations of another to the realm of the disordered, illegitimate, and non-familial.  It is precisely in structuring homosexual persons out of the notion of family that our society does the most psychological and physical violence to the LGBT community.  In separating their love and their children from societal protection and recognition as a family, our culture all at once demeans their freedom, their love, and their children while at the same time attesting to its own disregard for freedom, love, and children. 

The Role of Non-Violence in a Society Without Recourse

Observing the alarming brokenness of our democratic system, it is growing increasingly harder to imagine true systemic justice, ever emerging out of any legal, current democratic recourse.  I believe I have some unique questions to discuss here, but I will begin with a quick bulleted preface, to give context to my analysis.

Whether we identify our government's obsolescence in empirical and documented failures:
-the direct influence of the free market on all branches of all levels of government i.e. revolving door, lobbyists, citizens united court decision (to cite a fairly current nail in the coffin)
-current inability to a pass a federal budget
-the pressure of multinational corporate intrests on our government
-the sequester
-2011 and 2012 National Defense Authorization Act
etc...
...Or documented cultural aberrations:
-nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty, 16% of the population, 20% among children according to November 2012 census statistics.
-skyrocketing unregulated costs of healthcare which is limiting access and bankrupting our budget
-the current financial infrastructure of the banks elevating themselves to a level of criminal immunity
-4,700 estimated civilians killed by drones. (that the government admits to)
-sustaining decade plus long wars on unidentified enemies
etc...
...Or documented political aberrations
-the 2012 election "voter ID" laws proposed
-"jerrymandering"
-time wasted in congress on reactionary and racist endeavors: attempted repealing Voter's Rights Act, stalling of Hurricane Sandy disaster relief (just to name a few brazen recent occurrences, etc..)
-blocking of third party debates from official presidential election discourse
etc...
...And all the other moral, philosophical, socio-economic catastrophes that could comprise hundreds of volumes of writing, taking all that into account,  can we not agree as a people that our situation is untenable?

Proving that proposition is not the aim of this article.  If, after careful observation of their social environment, the reader feels that the status quo, or some kind of purer adherence to a freer free market capitalism and more American style democracy as such, is the answer to our current national and global crisis, then we have little context for discussion.  My goal, here, is to pose questions about how truly the public wants change, and to examine approaches to extensive and fundamental political and economic rearrangement.

The current state of affairs that we have in America, beyond being untenable, seems to be unfixable within the current governmental structure. So what recourse does this nation have to stem the explosion of the complex crisis, just beginning to emerge?  Outside of democratic recourse lies a chaotic morass of interests and methodologies.  The shortcomings of the Occupy movement highlight this point.  Do we, as a population, even recognize the extent of the crisis before us and the destruction we sustain by participating in its reproduction?  Or would we identify fundamental and dramatic political and economic restructuring as unnecessary and not worth its risks?  What would a non violent transition of power and political paradigm look like?

In response to these questions and challenges, I would humbly suggest one small element of perspective.  Love, that which harnesses empathy and action, is the guiding force of successful revolution.  Radical love (and all true love is radical) that compels justice, is the ethos of true change.  Love, which always recognizes human dignity as the pivot of justice, this is the objectivity that demands revolution.  The will to power is subjective.  Love, in this sense, is objective.  Despite countless attempts to mechanize love as a rationale for oppression and condemnation, it remains a universally identifiable phenomenon, its antithesis equally universally identifiable.  Thus a true revolutionary spirit demands a justice springing from love.  While righteous anger has its role in mobilizing action and challenging injustice, it is philosophically static.  Compassion and empathy is procreative.   A subjugation of the weak by the strong, overturned by a subjugation of the strong by the weak  results in the same inequity.  The methodology and goal of a true revolution must respect the dignity of life, even in those who exploit and oppress.  But where is the role of the tradition of non-violence in a society whose population is often without shame, attention span, context, or empathy?  Where is the role of nonviolence in a global community governed by banks and their political organs?  Gandhi shamed the British out of their colonization of India because the philosophical tide of the world was on the side of independence.  Who is there to shame the exploitation and violence of our government to, when the rest of the industrialized world is on the same system?

I present these thoughts not because I have answers but because I have more questions than I have answers to.  I hope to stimulate your thoughts to respond to some of these suggestions and questions in the hopes of greater understanding and future peace and justice.  I would greatly appreciate your comments and discussion.

American Exceptionalism and Dehumanization Laid Bare

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has revealed what he says is the death toll in the U.S. drone war overseas. At a speech in South Carolina Wednesday night, Graham said: "We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaeda." Graham’s comments mark the first time a U.S. official has offered a figure for those killed in nearly a decade of U.S. drone strikes abroad. The 4,700 figure matches the high end of an estimate by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has extensively covered the strikes and faced a concerted U.S. government effort to discredit its work.- Sen. Graham Reveals Toll of 4,700 in U.S. Drone War- Democracy Now

This quote witnesses to more than the soul-less blather of an obnoxious pseudo-statesman from a state, whose government, is dysfunctional as his frontal lobe.  This quote encapsulates the tacit justification of not only the drone program, but our greater military approach to not only its current campaigns, but its role in the world and our national interests.  I'd like to analyze this statement through several different lenses.

1. A thought experiment: If this statement had been referencing some kind of domestic war on drugs, and the senator was referring to Americans when he said: "We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of [insert cartel/gang here]" This would be on every news channel as a leading story, reviling the Senator for his lack of care or respect for the lives of American citizens.  Not to mention it would constitute political suicide.  This differentiation in audience response is simply because the men, women and children murdered were not American citizens.  I am just as grateful for and aware of the opportunities and securities guaranteed to me by the Constitution as anyone.  But in this case, it's interpretation seems to symbolize our government's gross misunderstanding of the universal nature of humans' right not to be murdered, and then cursorily disregarded by the ignorant and powerful as collateral damage.  The senator not only disregards the inherent worth of their lives, but also identifies their death as justified, in that it helped us kill other targets (whose aims, allies, groups, and names change every day) that we take for granted are legitimate threats, from a military with an historically bad track record on preemptive warfare.

2. Thought experiment: Had zero terrorist targets been "taken out"  would the 4,700 deaths be justified still under Senator Graham's thinking?  The answer to this question would remain contingent and debatable, not enough information is available but I believe the question illustrates a larger point.  The point being, that these foreign lives have become the means to an end, determined by the interests of a small group of men, remotely.  In addition to all those ethical quandaries, their involvement (the murdered people) is not only accidental, but inevitable, a known unknown if you will.  The "taking out" these particular terrorists seems to be the fully absolving end goal, so I would assume that had the drone program been ineffective at first, that the future goal would still act as a worthy justification, and the murdered civilians as necessary deaths. 

3. What is going on here, is that our government is engaging in , and creating a new kind of warfare.  It is one that is unprecedented:  fighting an enemy  that has no standing army, no state, no cohesive mission.  As this is a new framework of warfare, it is difficult to approach it with the "ethical" frameworks used to "structure" previous conflicts. i.e. Geneva convention, ICC (which the US is not a signatory to), etc... These are just well known examples of precedent for philosophical examination of warfare, though they could not begin to address the brazen adolescent imprudence that has characterized our warfare.  In short, we are making it up as we go along.  And the voices of the military industrial complex symbolized in both parties make the implicit injunction to not question the grave practices that are being carried out by our country.  In the case here, Senator Graham, is ideologically, presenting the ultimate good as fighting terror, a goal which is endless, implying consistent threat and fear, while implying that opposition to this paradigm is relegated to the Utopian idealism of a fantasy world.  I challenge not only his juevenille cynicism, lack of ethical scope, and disrespect for life, but also his use of the word: war, and the validity of the targets he identifies.  I would question whether defeating an organization that repoduces in correlation with Western agression can ever be achieved when our, citizen to "very senior members of al Qaeda" ratio, is what it is.  If the government is going to continue to set us up for a endless war on terror, I would advise a mindful population to begin to care.

4. As long as we can hear: "We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war" and let whoever said it go on as a legislator, and accept new undefined concepts of warfare to be simultaneously created and self regulated by the most powerful military in the world, I question whether it is "we" who are more deserving of the right to life, or the men, women, and children "we" murdered, and dismissed, in the same way one laments a broken egg in a carton one dropped.

"Drones: Seeing Ourselves for What We Really Are"

The recent publicity and controversy over the Obama administration's drone strikes in the Middle East forces a critical conversation on US foreign policy that before was far less pronounced or mainstream.  We have quietly transitioned into a constant state of war, because our war is a containment of terrorists, or "terrorism", spread across the world.  Our remote preemptive approach to perceived threats that has been cultivated in the past years, proceeds the US's interventionist nation building, and "containment policy" of the past decades.  This policy of "proactive" "safeguarding of our interests" has been publicly reaffirmed in the recent hearings concerning the nomination of Brennan to head the CIA.  But it is this very military perspective that our drone policy is simply the logical conclusion of.  Attempts to sugar coat a policy of globally murderous American exceptionalism, in calls for transparency and judicial oversight neglect the very core of the crime we commit.  This is the crime of the devaluation of human life, and the trauma we subject entire generations to, in the name of a war, whose enemies are whoever ends up dead at the end of the day.
The fact that remote killings from the sky are extra psychologically disturbing has brought our policy of preemptive attack to a philosophical trial that before might have been dismissed as pacifist idealism and lefty contrariness.
The obvious defense of the drone program is that they eliminate terrorist threats while keeping troops off the ground and so protect the American public and its armed services.  The clear criticism of this policy is that we are causing substantial civilian casualties, while terrorizing entire populations that live in fear and whose children are dying or surviving, to grow up in trauma.  To say nothing of the outrageous moral aberration  that these policies pose, it would seem strategically counterproductive to fight terrorism, not only in a endless campaign of acute covert raids and assassinations, but also in the inevitably indiscriminate bombings that will serve to cement not only present antiquated religious prejudices but also create new terror and justifiable rage in multiple generations in more countries across a region that is already the most volatile part of the globe.
To take a clear stance against our drone warfare policy is to indite our policy of preemptive warfare.
Our population has grown increasingly detached from our state of war.  We are isolated from the monetary burden (temporarily) via tax cuts that coincided with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are isolated from information by a media castrated and lobotomized by chasing ratings and pleasing sponsors.  And we are governed by inert legislative bodies muted by revolving door politics and powerful lobbies.  In short, we do not experience the fact that our country is at war.  Together with our presumed moral infallibility, the pervading fear inherent in a war on an enemy as amorphous as"terror" assures our population's complicity.  Now with a darker, louder, more sinister symbol of our military foreign policy, we may be able to engage its strategic failings and moral  horrors in a viable conversation with stronger political momentum.

Gun Control Today

"law abiding gun owners will not accept blame for acts of violent or deranged criminals." wayne la pierre jan. 30 2013. The call for responsible control and oversight of the purchase of guns is aimed at creating a more safe and responsible culture. No one is blaming gun owners. No one is trying to take your guns. The only ones who profit from these ideas is the weapons industry and their ideological thugs (see above), who would turn a moment for a societal evolution and frank examination of its violence into a cheap and reactionary freedom wank, and a false victimization.

The intensified gun debate of these past months forces us to interact with our society in a way that before was relegated to college students and professors, your annoying friend, social workers and talking heads on cable.  I don't mean simply that our last year's irking surplus of massacres forces us to talk about the regulation of assault weapons and magazine sizes.  I point rather to the way the "camps" frame their debates. 
If our culture is going to push most of us to side one way or the other on the issue of gun control, then the underlying points of view that frame our opinions have a venue, now, to be analyzed.  These tragedies have pressed "us" to respond with calls for or against particular legislation or permutations therein.  But I would have to take this opportunity to call out both "sides" on their lack of scope.  

The overwhelming response on the left has been a call for gun control, adding increased oversight to gun transactions while creating a more peaceful culture through stigmatization of violence.  This is in reaction to a recent outbreak of massacres, and in the face of an extremely weakened ATF, and a culture of state laws waging the battle for gun rights (a la deranged and misdirected channeling of the founding fathers) with outrageous legislative concoctions borne of ideological symbolism.  Perhaps in such a moment more concrete regulation is needed to decrease the flow of guns to criminals and the mentally ill.

The overwhelming response of the right has been a call against gun control.  The aims of tighter regulation resulting in less available guns in the hands of less criminals and mentally ill people is framed as an assault on the second amendment, and the genesis of a new dawn of tyranny, while purveying a false notion of what gun control is really being proposed.  Perfecting our society via laws that can net an overall result of less massacres is juxtaposed to Hitler and Mao before the discussion can even be entertained by those who watch FOX news.  The right seems to be set on making the people believe that they are being victimized and that the government wants their guns.

What a smooth ideology that can all at once lull a culture into a symbolic distrust of the people they pay to govern themselves (symbolic, because the lobbyists and the money have major influence on the government) and at the same time be pushing the culture of a brand and a product that they themselves are physically selling.  (And at record high rates)  

Are conservatives really ready to do battle with the defense department?  Are they really going to take out the US army with their AK 47s?  No they are deluded and they are pacified by their guns. The notion that "this AK is for my government if they want to infringe on my rights" is laughable.  Coordinating a colonial era styled overthrow of tyranny would entail cooperating with your fellow man towards a common goal, it would be collectivist and infringe upon the individual.

As for those who would relegate our societal problems and propensity for violence to lack of gun control, I would argue that this is the same flawed logic of: "Main street, not wall street", when wall street creates the conditions for those on main street to buy electronics, finance a house and car, and retire with a pension.  

You can't vilify greed and separate its perpetrators from the larger issue, without acknowledging the fact that greed in inherent to the capitalist system.  You can't vilify  violence and separate its perpetrators from the larger issue without acknowledging the fact that it is a function of the culture we live in.