The Mormons have one of the most complete genealogical databases in the world My dad he wanted to surprise my mom with her family tree, something she's always wondered about.

Looking at some of the branches, I found an ancestor with the name Ourana Fenandez De Temes. Ourana  that is a lovely name, perhaps I’ll use it in a story in the future.

According to this tree, my maternal grandfather descends from the Marquis de Santi, the Duchess of Armagnac, The count of Aza, King Alfonso XI, Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid Campeador),  Fernando Fernandez de Trava Count of Trastamara (who married a woman whose only record is the name “Briolange,” which is THIS close to being Brioche), and Doña ElviraManuel.  Eh, that’s ridiculous.

According to the ESL texbook I am reading (“Methodology in Language Teaching”) , the author picked up her 4th grade daughter and the little tot was distraught. "Mommy! I've never had none of the above before!" - she had had a test and the teacher used 'none of the above' as part of a multiple choice test for the first time. Result? This overly-analytical and overly-apologetic author is now trying to imply there was something wrong with the test, not the tot, because she thought that it meant she was not to circle any of the questions in which 'none of the above' featured.

I'm sorry, Ana Huerta-Macías, but if your fourth grader can't figure out what "none of the above" means in a test, what's lacking is not in the test. I really hate it when teachers who suffer a severe disconnect with reality try to come up with arguments based on things that have little relation whatsoever.

By Jeff Scialabba

The House of Representatives has already passed its health-care bill and now the Senate is preparing to vote on its own. Should it pass, the largest new entitlement program since the New Deal will be a reconciliation process and a President’s signature away from being enacted. This is Congress and President Obama’s proposed cure for the ills of our health-care system. But are we sure they have properly diagnosed the disease?

In his speech before Congress in early September, Obama noted that “more and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you'll lose your health insurance too,” and that “buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.” The obvious implication is that government must do something.

But missing from the speech were answers to the following questions: Why is individual insurance so pricey? And why are so many Americans--over half the population, including more than 90 percent of the privately insured--chained to their employer for health insurance?

The answers implicate government. Government policy has favored employer-based insurance through tax breaks dating back to WWII. Together with coercive labor laws arm-twisting companies into providing health benefits, these substantial tax breaks, which have never been extended to individuals purchasing insurance on their own, have distorted the health-insurance market. Employer-based plans now outnumber more limited and more expensive individual plans 10 to 1. 

Obama also decries “the problem of rising costs,” which is crippling businesses and pushing the federal deficit to stratospheric highs. But again, he fails to identify the real factors at work.

Health insurance in America is typically comprehensive, intended to cover almost any medical expense, including routine care. This would be like using car insurance to pay for tune-ups and oil changes, and history has shown that this model increases (marginal) demand for medical services. But government interventions have favored the comprehensive model for decades, beginning in the 1930s with the granting of nonprofit status to Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which pioneered the model. Comprehensive coverage was further entrenched by Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, as well as by the imposition of more than 2,100 federal and state mandates dictating who insurers must cover and what services they must pay for. 

As a result of these distortions, 95 percent of insured Americans--some 240 million of us--have comprehensive insurance paid for by a third party, either our employer or the government. As consumers of medical services we are cut off from their costs. When we go to the doctor, we don’t even see the price until it shows up on the invoice--with all but a small co-pay or deductible (relative to the total bill) paid by our insurance. When the cost to patients is low, we view any test or treatment as “necessary” no matter how minor the benefits. This apparent free lunch has led to the exploding spending we see today.

Because Obama fails to grasp the cause of our problems, his proposed solutions will fare as badly as every previous “reform.”

Past attempts to limit the expenditures of Medicare and Medicaid by lowering reimbursements to physicians and hospitals, for instance, have left medical providers loath to take on new Medicare and Medicaid patients and forced them to make up the losses by raising prices on private consumers. These “cost-cutting” measures have also done little to stop the hemorrhagic spending--Medicare alone is expected to consume nearly 50 percent of all federal income tax revenue by 2040.

Similarly, the use of mandates to increase coverage has had disastrous results. While state mandates have benefited special interest groups, they’ve raised the cost of basic coverage an estimated 20 to 50 percent. Moreover, in order to prevent the skirting of state mandates, federal law prohibits insurance companies from offering plans across state lines--effectively banning competition and prohibiting market forces from driving prices downward. 

No honest observer of our health-care system could deny it is in need of reform. But the basic question is: Have existing government interventions proved positive? Obama and his supporters on both the left and the right answer “yes”--but the facts say otherwise. Rather than trying to expand government control over health care--as Obama would do--we should be working to eliminate it.

When perusing the pages of websites such as Stand For Marriage Maine, we may encounter the following lines:

“If Question 1 fails and LD 1020 is allowed to take effect, marriage will be redefined to be about any two consenting adults without regard to gender, the focus being only about what the adults want for themselves, and not what is best for society as a whole. If allowed to take effect, LD 1020 would throw to the trash heap Maine’s decades-old interest in traditional marriage and legalize homosexual, genderless marriage.” 1

There is a lot of subtext floating around in this statement, and I think we should cleave this political and ambiguous language in order to extract the actual principles that are peering at us from behind the language of propaganda.  I’ll divide this into four violations:

1. Appeal to Government Intervention.
2. Appeal to the mob.
3. Violation through deceit.
4. Appeal to the cherished  zombie.

1. Appeal to Government intervention:

The stance as a whole assumes that it is proper for government to restrict the right of an individual to enter into a contract of his own choosing with another individual. Furthermore, the sentence insinuates that it is perfectly within the rights of a sufficiently agitated majority to restrict other individuals from entering into a specific kind of contract (in this case, a civil marriage contract) simply because they are in disagreement with it. This, in fact, is not true at all: as long as the terms of the contract and its actions do not violate the individual rights of others, individuals are protected by the principles individual rights– they are free to enter into a marriage contract or other kind of contract if they so desire.

For the citizenship to prohibit a couple of the same sex from entering into said contract, there would have to be an explicit right to specifically delimit relationships of third parties.  No such right exists and no such right could exist because its philosophical and legal repercussions would be devastating upon individual liberties:  with these principles put into practice, one group may prohibit a set of individuals from entering into a contract of marriage because of religious grounds, racial grounds, public opinion, et cetera.

The principle of interference in the affairs of others has already run its course in North America and South Africa, the only difference being that the bone of contention upon which opponents leaned was the issue of race – this stance (on both its general principle and its specific applications)  has been proven to be wrong in the past, now it returns to us in a different guise but with the same trite old chestnuts for arguments.

The argument for government intervention must be immediately discarded because it is improper for government to interfere in the private lives of its constituents when no rights are being violated and no crimes are being committed.

These groups attempt to strong-arm the government into bowing down to their particular agendas by using the mob as their bludgeoning weapon.

2. Appeal to The Mob:

Stand For Marriage Maine, by citing ‘what is best for society as a whole’ has invoked the principle of  ‘social theory’  which holds the highest good, and the highest good is whatever ‘society’ deems it to be. Rand identified the problem behind this collective surrender in “The Objectivist Ethics” by indicating that

Although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. 2

This egregious philosophy is naked for all to see in the fourth line of the website’s excerpt: ‘The focus being only about what the adults want for themselves, and not what is best for society as a whole.’ Well, then, who is ‘society’?  What rights does ‘society’ have that it supersedes the rights of the individual?  In this example, just as in all other examples of ‘social theory’ throughout the ages, same sex couples are not part of ‘society’ and their benefit is not part of ‘what is best for society.’

This is an argument best called Argument From The Herd. It consists solely on denying or imposing a course of action to someone simply because the great majority has decided  it be so, without any necessary proof other than testifying that they ‘speak for society,’ and society always happens to be everybody but the parties being coerced.

There are no magical rights that suddenly appear when two or more people are gathered together- each individual has his own rights, which are no different from any of the rights those around him hold. The Argument From The Herd would have you believe that consensus equals truth, but that is not the case: You can convince the entire population of the United States to vote that gravity is caused by little green fairies who live under trees, it won’t matter because reality will not suddenly change its configuration to accommodate the new ultimatum from the Gravity Definition Committee.

Society is not a beast apart from the individual unit (it is, in fact, nothing more than an abstract concept that means ‘the total sum of individuals living within a specific social framework’)—what is good for the individual is what is ‘good for society’, and what is good for the individual is to have his individual rights respected and enforced: to impede two individuals from defining their relationship in legal terms is infringing those rights.

The  argument for ‘society’ must be immediately discarded without a second thought:  there is no such thing as a collective hive mind and sheer numbers cannot substitute good judgment,  logic and reason.

How do these groups manage to get the sparks of a mob fired up enough to command its mobility? The answer is simple: Deceit.

3. Violation through Deceit (inciting fear):

There is an enormous confusion when it comes to the term ‘marriage’ as it is applied to the non-ecclesiastic function of two individuals signing a legal contract with the intent to share their assets and their lives.  Opponents of same-sex marriage have used this tactic over and over again: deliberately misinforming the public as to what exactly is being discussed.

Preachers and other religious leaders would have you believe that what is at stake is ecclesiastic marriage, the ceremony by which the priest, cleric, pastor, witch-doctor or other religious officiator unites the couple in question before their shared deity.  This is wrong- the entities of civil marriage and religious marriage are separate and it is impossible to treat them as a single entity: one is a legal contract, the other one a religious ritual, and neither has any effect on the other (if it were otherwise, then all it would take would be one ceremony and both bases would be covered- and we know that is not the case).  The contract that a couple signs when marrying through City Hall is, in fact, a civil union.

Groups like these are often contentious of the concept of separation between church and state – but only when it goes against what they desire. Whenever something transgresses upon their agenda, they are more than willing to erect a wall. Thus, it is perfectly alright for them to impose their religious values upon local government (by banning same-sex marriage), but they are quick to repudiate this church-state love affair should someone attempt to impose legislation on them (after all, if there is no separation as they claim, then it should be impossible for them to stop government or legislation).  This ideological inconsistency is a trademark of all religious movements because religious thought does not work on principle, but works from the angle of commandment and imposition, a position that makes it impossible to integrate philosophical principles.

If these religious groups understood principle they would realize that the concept of separation of church and state is nothing more than a concrete example of the principle that government may not interfere upon the private lives of its citizenship- romantic love and religion being two elements of this, and government being part of the public life of the country. These two elements are like acids and alkalines- best kept apart, and disastrous when combined.

Furthermore –and here I am moving outside of the context of Objectivist Philosophy to address a point in theology- it is an act of extreme inconsistency to make religious belief a public issue. By interfering through government in other people’s lives based on religious belief, these groups take their faith – a private matter- and turn it into a public affair, a part of the government, as one would think of the State of the Union address or tax payments. The religion in question (Christianity) has something very definitive to say concerning making one’s faith a public affair:

“”And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.  – Matthew 6.5-7”

I bring this up as a serious point, since it is clear to my readers that I am neither a Christian nor religious (though having undergone a very extensive study of theology during my teenage years), but I do believe in holding people to be consistent with what their alleged philosophical platforms are.

The violation from deceit continues:

“A wealth of examples have been identified by legal scholars who have pointed out the conflicts that will arise between the rights of people who sincerely disagree with homosexual marriage, and the rights of homosexual couples to demand that the state enforce gay marriage whether people support it or not.” 1

We have a dash of Argumentum Ad Verencundiam mixed in here for added flavor, basically “Great experts have said this is so, and you should believe it”- these are anonymous Great Experts, as the website fails to link to any study or provide any names whatsoever (most likely because they are sources that are well-known to be absent of objectivity.)

Furthermore, what conflicts of rights are these to which these Great Experts refer? To insinuate (as they do) that a gay marriage infringes the rights of a heterosexual marriage who disagrees with it is as ridiculous as stating that an interracial marriage infringes the rights of a white supremacist marriage. Contracts are not signed on a ‘societal’ basis, they are signed only between individuals, and the contracts that two individuals undertake have no obligation nor repercussion on other individuals, thus two men or women marrying has no immediate metaphysical impact upon others, and whatever others’ religious dogmas require on the side of a reply is not a public matter but a private one.  The only way in which rights would be infringed here would be if the new marriage clause would force individuals to marry only certain individuals based on an arbitrary criterion.

For this to be even remotely true it would require the government to impose that you could only marry people of your same sex, regardless of your sexual orientation.This is exactly the same kind of imposition that these groups seek to bring about by banning gay marriage. Same-sex couples are only asking that their right to enter into a contract with each other be respected- they are not prohibiting al heterosexual marriages or requiring that everybody else marry their own gender.

Immoral groups such as Stand For Marriage Maine (in Maine) and The Church Of Latter Day Saints (during the California Proposition 8 Referendum) demand that the state enforce the prohibition of this contract to whatever group they deem is not within their definition of ‘society’. It is irrelevant ‘whether people support it or not’ if it is a constitutional and philosophical issue- the annals of this country are full of many majorities supporting unjust and immoral laws that had to be defeated through the efforts of relentless individuals fighting against the throng- the appeal of sheer numbers is the equivalent of a brutish thug breaking the arm of a weaker person in order to coerce the person to act for his benefit: Might makes right.

This is why such groups must resort to the Violation From Deceit- in order to get the anger of the mob behind them (and thus have the Appeal To The Mob as one of their weapons) they must first instill fear in people for whom thinking on principle is not a habitual engagement. If these unthinking people fear that their cherished society is about to collapse and give into paranoia, they will follow whatever their leaders command in order to ‘kill the monster’, so to speak.

But what do these groups point towards, as their imagery of a frail and collapsing society in need of their crusade of salvation? Why, the Cherished Zombie, of course.

appeal to the cherished zombie:

The Cherished Zombie is a relic. It has been around for ages and its origins stretch back as far as anyone can remember. People might or might not know how it came to be there, but one thing everybody is certain is that it has always been there. And anyone who tries to move it will pay dearly.

The Cherished Zombie in this particular fight is the “Traditional definition of marriage,” an admittedly ugly and threadbare zombie in its own right. When they speak of ‘traditional definition of marriage’, these groups continue practicing the Violation From Deceit, because they do not explicitly say that the only ‘traditionally defined’ definition of marriage they accept is that of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conveniently forgetting the arranged political marriages and child brides that were the staple of marriage for a much, much wider expanse of time than those two centuries. We will look at this definition, however, a little bit later, for now we shall focus on that one interesting word (which earned itself a whole musical number in “Fiddler On The Roof”): Tradition!

What is tradition? What makes it so important? To put it bluntly, a tradition is a social ritual (though it can be religious as well) that dictates the certain manner in which things ought to be done. The reason? Because it has always been done that way. The entire weight of the argument is supported not by how right it is or proof, but merely by how long it has been done.  That’s pretty much it: anyone arguing from a traditionalist perspective has to be informed that attempting to establish a moral stance through the perspective of tradition does not have a foothold- morality must be constructed from logic and reason, structured through the incorporation of principles- Traditional imposition is no different than Moral Commandment as far unsuitability to formulate an actual moral code.

An appropriate fable that shows an application of the shortcomings of traditional imposition (though its origins are forgotten, unfortunately, by me) is that of a school teacher in antiquity and his pupils.  The teacher had several gifted pupils whom he instructed at an amphitheater, and it happened that a certain local cat came to the assembly every day out of curiosity. This cat eventually became a distraction to the students and so the teacher finally tied the cat to a nearby tree and continued with the lesson. This continued for many years every day, and eventually the students grew and new students came in and eventually a new teacher replaced the elderly one when he died— but what started happening was that, when the cat finally died, a student started bringing a cat for the teacher to tie up! Neither the new teacher nor the newer students knew precisely why a cat was tied at the beginning of class, but all they knew that that was the way things had been done from the beginning, and no-one dared to question this, it became a commandment.

The reason many anti-gay marriage opponents make reference to ‘the institution of marriage’ is precisely because their approach to principle is like the students at the amphitheater. They have grown up with ‘the way things are done’ for many years, and they look back towards this traditional image of a 1950s family as the model of all familiar relationships because they seek to reinforce a standard not through rational processes, but through imitation of antiquity. They do not ask “what is the proper criteria by which man/woman must choose a lifetime companion?” but rather they state “Man must marry a woman, because it has always been.”

There truly is no ‘institution of marriage,’ marriage –the contract two people choose to enter out of their own free will-  is not the prerogative of the government to command, nor is it the property of interest groups to deny. From a moral and philosophical level,  there cannot be any government-enforced model of romantic relationships, for once that threshold is crossed statist groups are free to dictate whatever impositions upon anyone, without any other authority than the force of the violations enumerated above.

The track record of tradition

The issue of tradition versus principle is a serious one. To examine one concrete example, If it were not for the intellectual integrity of some individuals to not only defy but destroy ‘tradition’ for tradition’s sake, we would still see a world in which this ‘hallowed institution’ of marriage served no other purpose than to establish political or mercantile ties between powerful clans, with the unfortunate bride serving as nothing more than chattel, a bargaining chip made from flesh and blood. It was neither religion nor tradition that gave us the notion of Romantic Love – rather it came from the circles of intellectual individuals  such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, who sponsored and protected the troubadours that predicated the notion of courtly love (once called Amour Honestus, or “Honest Love”)- a way for people to express the love not found in their marriages, which were in most cases unhappy- being almost exclusively made out of political necessity. In the Middle Ages you married a fief and got a wife thrown in with the bargain.

It was this notion of courtly love that would eventually give birth to romantic love, which was then adopted in the movement of the Enlightenment and carried into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to give us a world in which a young man and woman can arrange their own marriage for their own reasons – and upon whom the outcome is solely dependant.  This is not to say that romantic marriages never existed prior to these movements, but they were the exceptions, not the norm. The lower classes married as they would, of course, but the leading trend of any family above serf status sought arranged marriages to improve their financial lot in the absence of a capitalist system.

The focus is evident here: Tradition demands the lives of individuals to be bound and dictated by nothing more than “How Things Have Always Been” in favor of a community or collective, while the individualistic notion of Romantic Love calls for no other dictum than the judgment and free will of the parties involved.

An effective and rather poignant dramatization of the principles at play here can be seen in the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ In this musical the milkman Tevye, who reveres Tradition greatly, has to bend twice to two of his daughters, Tzeitel and Hodel, when they choose grooms out of love (Motel and Perchik respectively)- although it is tradition that the weddings be arranged by the Matchmaker (Yentl, a role created by the late great Beatrice Arthur) in an arrangement that is usually primarily done for economic reasons, Tevye realizes that the happiness of his two daughters as individuals is much more important than whatever demands tradition may make and gives his blessing. However, when the third daughter, Chava, chooses a man outside of the Jewish faith (Fyedka), Tevye refuses to cross that line and in a rage forbids Chava from ever seeing Fyedka again.

Chava elopes and marries Fyedka, and returns in an attempt to approach her father once more- he rejects her and declares her dead to the rest of the family.  The man who out of love bent the rules (and backed out of a arranged marriage for his first daughter- a major social rupture) could not overcome the final barrier that holds any traditionalist bound fast: Tribalism. Considering the floating abstraction of ‘the tribe’ more important than his own daughter’s pursuit of happiness drove Tevye to even impose his will upon Chava. Too much of a free spirit, and being a creature who was too in love with life, Chava abandoned ‘The Tribe’ for the pursuit of her own happiness – because what was demanded of her was that she should sacrifice her chance at happiness that others might not have to question the possibility that their Tradition was wrong.  Anyone that values joy is incapable of choosing a different path than Chava’s.

This is the world that organizations such as Stand For Marriage Maine really mean when they speak of ‘the institution of marriage’ and of the ‘traditional definition of marriage.’  It is not the world of Romantic Love where you and I are free to choose whom we court and pursue, and with whom to spend our lives. The world based on a principle of “Tradition” is the very world from which the Enlightenment delivered us – a world in which we must court and marry in accordance with the wishes of others, for their benefit (not ours), and with our happiness, our joys, our aspirations and our longings within a romantic context are completely  and permanently ignored.  The restriction of marriage for ‘the good of society'.’

History and philosophy show us that the choice of romantic partnership is a choice that is only morally right when the individuals in question are the ones making it—to seek to impose a decision by law or by force is the peak of immorality, and these groups who speak of marriage as the unit of society for centuries (and by this referring solely to heterosexual marriage) would do very well to remember that their kind of marriage is an aberration from a historical perspective (being a relatively new invention when compared to the older approach), and that the true historical ‘institution’ of marriage (if one goes by what has been the longest-running historical trend in ‘tradition') can be encapsulated in this phrase:

“How much for your daughter?”

These groups  should spend less time protecting the fictitious institution of Marriage and instead should spend its funds into  discovering principle behind the freedom of each individual to determine his or her romantic unions by his own judgment, instead of engaging in behavior that is ultimately destructive towards the individual and his rights.