Yet this is the common mental image we have of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, alternately referred to as the Ninth Circus or the Numb Circuit due to the paired inanity of it’s decrees and a rate of overturned decisions bested only by mothers arguing with their kids over cotton candy being a dinner entrée.  With consistency bordering on either persistence or lunacy, the Ninth Chronic announces one or another decision which the Supreme Court eventually tosses out due to the self-evident self-medication of the lower bench.

Such is the case with a recent ruling in which Nonsensical Ninth declared that your driveway was not private property.  Allow me to repeat this, because you may have had a different notion when you paid money for and received a deed to your land, which included a driveway.  The Nutty Ninth has decided – at least for acts of espionage on citizens – your driveway is not private nor property.

The case revolves around a Federal government agency that wanted to track a suspected marijuana grower.  Without the benefit of a warrant or other authorization, one or more DEA agents crept onto the suspect’s formerly private property and attached a tracking device to his vehicle.  In every other circumstance of past jurisprudence, a warrant was required to violate property boundaries in order to electronically monitor a suspect.  Not having such authorization – a requisite check-and-balance to preserve liberty – has caused numerous cases to be tossed out of courts from leftist to right-wing coasts.

The Cuckoo Court has now sanctified government trespassing for surveillance.

Skipping past legal incantations and misdirection’s that would impress Penn and Teller, the Ninth Numbnuts insisted that ungated driveways are openly accessed by members of the public including folks like your milkman, UPS driver and neighborhood kids.  The point that our Ninth Circuit Nimrods nimbly pranced past is that citizens give express or implied permission to certain people to come onto a driveway.  You do not expect the FedEx delivery man to leave your overnight envelope on the sidewalk.  Your milk would rot before you discovered it on the curb.  And even though you might not like kids in your yard, you expect and accept that as part of living in the suburbs.

You do not expect or accept the Feds crawling onto your turf on a moonless night to plant bugs on your buggy.

Assume that the Schizophrenic Supremes will overrule the Cloud Nine Ninth – ­ they have made a habit of it.  But the case stands as an example of incrementalism via judicial eradication of rights.  Before FDR was laying under mistresses, federal courts held that the Constitution’s commerce clause only allowed congress to make equal the buying and selling of goods between states.  Some sloppy Raw Deal era linguistic nonsense caused this otherwise limited authority to become the ‘anything goes clause’ and created the federal leviathan we battle today.  It was not a moment of legal revolution, but the beginning of an incremental evolution and decent of the American constitutional species.

Left unchecked, an equally hideous erosion of the definition of ‘private’ and ‘property’ would prevail.  Under the same theory of public access, a future court could assume any place where you allow strangers to enter would no longer be private.  Make the mistake of inviting a Jehovah Witless into your living room and your family space would then no longer be a private place – installing surveillance cameras inside and without a warrant would be permitted.  Same might apply if you are prone to leaving your curtains open, as that would be an indication that you do not consider what occurs in your living room to be private activity.

Next stop, concealing a homing device in your wife’s cooter.

All this brings us to why this won’t bother  Democrat Senators.  If availability of access is the criteria for privacy, then people with tall fences and iron gates achieve automatic immunity from government surveillance (and if the Supreme’s do not overrule the Ninth Nuthouse, then I’m buying stock in fence companies).  Thus rich people are granted protections not afforded to the average Joe or Jane.  The richer the person, the less worry they’ll endure about federal law enforcement improperly entering their property because of visibly advertised privacy preferences.

This would be 7/10ths of congress … the Democrats.

Of the top ten wealthiest members of the most exclusive club in America, 70% are of the party of the little guy.  Senator and failed presidential candidate John Kerry tops the list, though in all fairness to him he married his money (and given how sobering scary looking his wife is, he is better off being married to her mulla).  Kerry carries company with filthy rich folk like Senator Rockefeller, Senator Lautenberg and a woman who steers government projects to her contractor hubby, Senator Feinstein.

I wager all these folks have very high fences and gates with enough iron to build a battle ship.

UPDATE: Sanity prevails elsewhere in the court system.  A different count has ruled that data from cell phone towers is detailed enough that government acquisition of said data requires a warrant.

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On either end of an Ohio cornfield there is an evangelical church and a strip club, separated by some very nervous Amish folk.  The strip club is nothing to write home to mama about.  It is a shabby building that oddly resembles a resurrected church, though as a strip joint perhaps Beelzebub performed the resurrection rites.  The dancers have requisite Midwest belly pouch, some are decorated with tattoos, and let’s not tally the c-section scars.  The Foxhole is a place one web critic called “the shadiest, dirty skank a** hole in the wall I’ve ever been.”

But why trust the word of a Senator.

Left to their own undulations, the Foxhole might never have achieved notoriety beyond being the bottom rung in the “gentleman’s” club ladder.  Indeed, such a putrid pole parlor would never have received press unless religious zealots had not made it an issue.

Oddly, Muslims have nothing to do with this story.

Nine miles down the road from the Foxhole sits New Beginnings Ministries, which on the surface sounds like an oxymoron given how long ministries have been a business classification (just ask Saint Peter who started the industry before Christ’s corpse got cold).  New Beginnings’ pastor was unhappy about competing for spiritual real estate with an accumulation of discount and not very exotic dancers.  As the pulsating pastor pontificated “We cannot share territory with the devil.”

He hasn’t seen the falling real estate prices in Ohio.  There is plenty of cheap land for everybody.

The flock at New Beginnings began to badger the “babes” at the Foxhole.  For months the congregation has photographed the license plate numbers of Foxhole patrons and generally annoyed the workers with scripture.  They stood outside of the club, making a highly visible and entirely contrary environment to the one inside.  They shouted at the burlesque princesses, using their stage names and applying a carrot-and-stick trick, offering to pay their living expenses while reciting bible verse.  In other words, they have taken all the fun out of either being nearly naked on stage or providing one dollar incentives (there is no fun to be found in buying five dollar Budweisers).

So the bump-and-grinders counter protested at the church.

Come Sunday morning, some Foxhole peelers pop-out of their clothing and into bikinis or less, and stand outside of New Beginnings, no doubt proving a new beginning to teenage boys attending adoration services (and perhaps to some of the teenage girls).  They hold signs quoting scripture to give the pastor and parishioners some Christian enlightenment.  “Light and darkness cannot exist together, so The Fox Hole has got to go,” is the pastor’s retort.

Light and dark coexist – they just have to time share.  Like the master Ray Hubbard says, there are two kind of people – the day people and the night people, and it is the night people’s job to take the day people’s money.

The fact is that extremes have always co-existed as long as nobody thought they were perpetually right and used force to enforce their perceptions (i.e. Osama bin Laden and other porcine syphilitics).  Yin and his ugly brother yang.  For example, there is currently a strip club in Jerusalem, though historical records do not tell if there were table dancers at the Last Supper.  Extremes even blend.  I have few doubts that more than one member of New Beginnings has ventured into a bimbo bar before.  The dancers are the night people, and it is their job to take the congregation’s money.

If nothing else, this bilateral cluster clucking is an example of American freedom in action.  Woman have a right to make money given whatever ‘talent’ or assets they have.  People have the right to either peruse the performers or be dedicated to their dogma.  Everybody has the right to speak their minds regardless of how empty they may be.  Yes, everybody has the right to free commerce, free communion and free speech.

But not in the VIP room.  That always costs extra.

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Thankfully, this ailment is largely restricted to politicians and other zealots.

News recently broke about the building of a community center near Ground Zero, the central target of the 9/11 massacre. That bloodshed was executed by zealots of the muslim variety (not to be confused with Christian brand zealots, like the Florida preacher promoting ‘International Burn a Koran Day’).  The community center will have a number of amenities, including a large auditorium, fitness center and a mosque.  In simpler language, some New York locals of the Muslim faith decided to build a center of Muslim worship within eyesight of the place where Muslim zealots killed a few thousand people guilty of nothing more than showing up to work on time.

So much for cultural sensitivity.

Wikipedia claims that “cultural sensitivity” means “the quality of being aware and accepting of other cultures.”  Culture is defined as “the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular … group”, in this instance, Homo Americanus.  While Americans in general, and people of tie-dye set in particular, strive to be aware and (when appropriate) respectful of other cultures, the klan behind this new mosque isn’t.  They are either such insensitive louts that their presence in polite society should evaporate faster than flesh in an inferno (you know, like a burning sky scraper), or they purposefully push envelopes to test the patience of the American public and make a statement concerning a successful assault.

It appears to be the latter.

Figure-heading the project is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who believes what many potentates and terrorists do – that Islamic law (Sharia in particular) is paramount.  Mere months before this ruckus over erecting a mosque near the Twin Tower ruins, Imam Rauf said:

“Throughout my discussions with contemporary Muslim theologians, it is clear an Islamic state can be established in more than just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Sharia that are required to govern. It is known that there are sets of standards that are accepted by [Muslim] scholars to organize the relationships between government and the governed.”

The American theory of government works in reverse.  Government is what is governed by the people – government obeys or government gets replaced.  In order to insure this remains the case, almost every aspect of personal privilege was left to The People, including the right to shout Amen in a revival tent, utter Hebrew from under a yarmulke, or kiss a rug a five times a day (and if you want a religion incompatible with America’s traditions, then Islam is very far afield – you can’t get the average American protestant to church except on Easter and Christmas, so praying five times each day constitutes having a second job, and an unpaid one at that).    Thus the Imam’s idiocy is not only in believing any religion reflects Gawd’s thinking, but in believing that inserting one or another prophet’s poetry over American law will produce results aside from snickers and redneck retaliations.

Don’t be surprised if a contingent of pissed off Bubbas show-up for the first prayer recital at the new mosque.

Here we see at play so many oddities about American culture that even people outside of the media couldn’t count them all.  First, there is no legal way the mosque can be prevented.  The same First Amendment that guarantees your church a building permit – even if your preacher is Baptist and the church site is outside of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral – also guarantees the Idiot Imam’s horde can build a mosque despite their utter lack of cultural sensitivity over location and the obvious arson risk therein (any insurance company that covers the mosque construction project is staffed by people unfamiliar with risk assessment).  Conservatives basted Obama – what a beautiful vision that is – when he said in part that Muslims “… have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.  That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

In this case Obama got something right, but even a blind elephant finds his nuts once in a while.

Another aspect of the First Amendment – wherein government is prevented from preventing exercise of any religion – is the prohibition against restraining speech, a freedom people loudly exercised after the blatant display of cultural insensitivity by your imama.  Even supporters of the mosque showed up to speak, uttering inanities like “We don’t care what bigots say …” and thus demonstrating a cultural insensitivity unheard of since the irritating imam last orated.  The First Amendment also means the government can’t mess with the press, who are covering the story for all the wrong reasons, proving that there is at least one constant in the universe.

In countries with no freedom of the press, speech or religion – which oddly are primarily muslim – the debate of where the mosque should not be built is causing a few hot heads to heat up, nearly setting their collective turbans on fire.  Unable to get the average muslim to think America is any real threat to their faith (thanks to professionalism of Americans in two recent wars), Mohammad’s maniacs are using the squabble to miff other mulims.

Let’s check the fanatic scoreboard thus far:  A muslim imam instigates a ruckus through cultural insensitivity if not outright arrogance (muslims 1).  Some Americans, after spewing coffee over their morning newspapers, object to the mosque’s location (have to score that one a null).  Some allegedly sensitive Americans of the touch-feely sect call the former group ‘bigots’ (stupid people 1).  Members of the Friends of Osama use America’s public dissention to recruit their next flock of airline pilots and smoldering underpants experts (muslims 2).  Various politicians make the matter worse (stupid people 365,217) and the media eggs everybody on (stupid people … see googol).

Meanwhile Iran, the first modern Islamic theocracy, is one step closer to building nuclear weapons while Barack Obama does zilch (stupid people +1).  Guess over what issue World War III will erupt?

I don’t know where Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is today, though ‘in hiding’ might be a good guess.  Not hiding out of shame mind you, for anyone who would even consider erecting a mosque near ground zero has none.  Yet after the uproar he has yet to admit his mistake, which means he doesn’t believe it to be one.  If after reflecting on the objections of Americans over this affront, the imam persists in the project as planned, I wouldn’t pay a nickel for the land at Park Place and Broadway.  Piles of cinders are rarely worth anything.

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(yes, I know, the differences are vague on the surface, but as always I’ll go deeper into a philosophical subject than you are otherwise prepared)

Of the three Satan is most trust worthy.  Aside from a brief cameo in Eden, Satan is what he is.  Like any garden variety redneck, you pretty much know what you are getting with Scratch.  Used car scammers are trustworthy in as much as you know where they work, and fear of baseball bat retribution keeps them more-or-less honest.

Politicians?  You can trust them as far a you can throw a used Buick.

Trust is tricky.  The odds of anyone being both honest and reliable can buckle under the superior force of human frailty.  Selfish interests get the better of everyone eventually, though most folks outgrow it.  Perpetual children (a.k.a. politicians) practice deceit to get what they cannot get honestly, and thus no trust of politicos can exist.  One or another statesman might well be honest, but why risk reliance when badgering, belittling and abuse are better tools for keeping them as close to conscientious as can be managed.

Of course, we can trust them not to be trustworthy.

The essence of trust revolves around the paired concepts of reliability and integrity, the latter word encompassing our mutual visions of virtue.  Not only must the object of trust be relied upon to do something, his/her/its actions must be within the scope of what we consider to be honorable, just and decent.  You can rely on Satan’s actions to be consistent, but his chewing on your bones while butt-bumping your mama likely is not within your definition of ethical behavior.

A politician would commit the same heinous acts, but would first promise not to.

Over the last four and a half million years of human evolution, people have devised various ways of enforcing trust.  In civilized societies and San Francisco, the process is normally left to the tort courts, where people debate which person lacked either integrity or reliability in modes of contract.  This occurs between former business partners and former spouses, though the latter source provides more scandalous amusement (“Your honor, she asked me to do her sister.  Honestly!”)  It occasionally occurs between citizens and their government though appealing to the government (i.e., the courts) with claims of violation of trust by the government (i.e., legislative or executive branches) is a stacked deck.

Bazookas work better, though tar and feather are not completely out of vogue.

People also enforce trust without the benefit of intermediaries like courts.  Despite being illegal, dueling is not unheard of in the modern South, though gentlemanly demands for satisfaction have largely fallen to more common protocols.  Nationally, wives have been known to bobbit unfaithful husbands, lawyers are occasionally used for target practice, and discourtesies often enough encourage corrective reaction from flying fists.  For most people civil discourse or social outcasting is sufficient.  Every breech of trust can be corrected in small and large ways (such as changing a former boyfriend’s online dating profile password to ‘dumbass’).

Politicians and judges are another matter.  Having been granted temporary power, they have means for justifying their deceptions.  Combined they can eradicate the most fundamental form of trust between the people and their government: The Constitution.  Such great power requires those elected and appointed to be trustworthy, to have and maintain reliability and integrity.  This is reflected through adherence to the express written will of the people in their constitution.  Yet over the decades of American existence, judges redefined The People’s will and politicians found ways of further violating public trust.

Hell, we’d be better off with Satan sitting on the Supreme Court than Sotomayor.

This brings us to the disquieting direction in which America is heading.  When people can compromise, or at worst have an allegedly disinterested third party mediate, then trust can be enforced without assault or onslaught.  If you can talk-down a drunken bully, the two of you might well knock back a beer once mutual tension subsides.  Trying to settle with Satan just means you are his next penile piñata.  Such is the nature of man and government.  When government behaves with integrity – when it obeys – then trust reigns, or at least the judicial branch will enforce the trust.  When Uncle Sam becomes Uncle Satan and abandons integrity and reliability, then few other corrective actions are open aside from blunt trauma.

A scorned wife will never again trust a philandering husband, but frying pan therapy might keep him from doing it again.  The People are one government indiscretion away from pummeling politicians and jack-hammering judges.  I don’t advocate savagery to extract satisfaction, but I can’t say I wouldn’t crack a smile if it occurred to my congressman.  People maintain the ultimate power and direct correction would be an obvious outcome for the current state of the untrustworthy state.

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Television.

Until today I assumed that there were none superior to the All American Couch Potato.  Having invented and for decades perfected to art of after work loafing, augmented with over eating and excessive drinking, it was a given that no nation could rival the Red, White and BoobTube.  Our leadership in idiot box inertia was perfected, from mind numbing Friday night sitcoms to powerful sedatives provided by Budweiser and Frito Lay.  Who on earth could possibly consume more electron “entertainment” the America Lard Butt?

Hong Kong, Brazil, China, India, Philippines, Italy, UAE, Columbia, Mexico, Venezuela, Vietnam, Russia, Thailand, Egypt, Lithuania, Pakistan, Romania and Singapore, that’s who.

Nielsen, the company that has recorded your TV watching habits since prenatal days, is now monitoring the rest of the inhabitable world and Svalbard (look it up).  Their data now indicates that the devil’s own television has corrupted every corner of the world with electricity, and even a few places with only hand cranked generators.  So thorough has Philo Farnsworth’s folly been – spreading like cathode ray virus – that entire swaths of Asia and Latin America are rapidly seeding their own sofas.  As your read this, roots are thrusting out of Brazilian buttocks and Hong Kong hinnies, crawling into the fabric of their recliners and cushions.  In short order these formerly fat-free regions will be lumbering into competitive positioning against Americans for personal curb weights rivaling small pickup trucks.

It is Europe we must nuke.

At the bottom of the television addiction list is a cluster of cultures that must be held suspect and in contempt, as they have not fallen for our devious device.  In close proximity are Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Norway and Belgium, who separately consume a third less televised radiation than people in The States.  They are suspiciously active, which can only mean one thing:  they are getting outdoors, staying in better shape, and thus preparing to attack.

However, until those lanky Europeans make an overt move, we will have to content ourselves with progress made in the UAE, Egypt, Pakistan and other counties that occasionally breed islamofacists.  It is a long range plan, but we can subdue them through lethargy, saturated fats and inactive life styles to induce coronary heart disease.  Take that Osama, as you sit in your Lazy Boy, chomping on your pork rinds and sucking down a cold Miller.  Die!

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Now I’m not accusing women in Democrat party leadership of being free range bovine, though Hillary is looking more the part as her rump roast ripens.  Nor am I saying men in the party leadership are a bunch mindless heifer humping bulls, despite that description fitting Bill rather well.  Nor do I imply that Democrat voters share a herd mentality, though my Republican friends constantly argue that the proposition is validated by evidence.

Once the Republicans have stable political philosophy, I’ll take their opinions seriously.

What I am saying is that in matters of economics, Democrat party chieftains have the cranial density of your average angus and the stubbornness of a Texas longhorn.  With either species (bovine or Democrat politician), whacking them in the forehead with a two by four produces no meaningful response (however, the good people of Nevada seem ready to apply that process to Harry Reid).  Preaching blindly simple matters of macroeconomics to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama would be like orating to oxen:  neither audience is bright enough to grasp the concepts.

Outside of conscripted societies, economics is based on people creating things of value.  Exxon puts gas in your car, allowing you to get to your job where you create things of value for other people who buy them from your company, generating your paycheck so you can rent an internet connection to read this blog, click on the advertising and put money in my pocket, which I’ll use to buy some gasoline as well.

Government produces nothing.  The only product of value it can create is keeping one person from harming another, and even that government tends to do poorly.  Only a Keynesian or otherwise enfeebled person perceives that government spending increases economic prosperity, for they fail to see the direct and highly individualized essence of value (I value a good steak while my vegetarian pal values tofu – guess which of us voted for Obama).

Democrats utter lack of insight into the basics of economics has caused the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to warn about next year’s double dip into recession.  Abbreviating their economic discourse, the San Francisco Fed basically said the odds are good and getting better that we will slide into phase two of the Great Recession (“the macroeconomic outlook is likely to deteriorate progressively starting sometime next summer.”)  This has instigated Fed infighting concerning deficit spending stimulus and other unicorn concepts.  Despite spending at a rate that has launched America toward an inescapable economic collapse, some bovine roaming the White House war room insist that more spending will generate economic growth in the same way that their first round didn’t (can you hear Rahm Emanuel mooing?)  Politicos in the Fed – and, yes, Fed officials have personal and political motives for their decisions – are debating if rampant spending, and artificially keeping interest rates at zero percent, is wise. It ain’t.

The only upside to the looming second dive into the economic sewer is that it will most likely occur as Obama faces reelection, assuring his one term status.

Sadly, Obama has assistance.  His Herford helpers in congress are doing everything possible to prevent economic growth by slowing economics.  The two glaring weaknesses in the economy today are zero job growth and banks not lending.  In such an environment only crackpots and cattle would pass legislation that slowed both even further.  Yet, congress has managed both in one bill by taxing banks an extra 6.7% (based on Wells Fargo’s estimate of the new regulatory and tax burden and their 2009 earnings).

With that heavy new yoke Wells is unlikely to hire anybody or lend businesses money with which to do so.

The essence of economics is people creating value.  The essence of government is preventing such.  The essence of America when barn yard animals (donkeys and cows) run Washington is killing the American dream.

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I have long accused Gawd of playing one specific cruel trick on every human he assembles.  In my case he made me a Southern gentleman who respects and honors the softer sex, yet also made me overtly amorous, resulting in the innate instinct to bed most of the world’s women and yet ethically restrained from doing so – a lifetime of teal tinged testes.  The Old Man Above made Bill Clinton a billy goat too, but instead of sexual ethics gave him a lust for chubby woman, which might be the worse of our fates.

It occurs to me that perhaps Yahweh might get yucks from inflicting similar ironies on urban settings.  Chicago received a huge industrial economic base and a political infestation to remove all the wealth industry created.  New York was granted a cosmopolitan vibe with a rich arts culture and a population of hard people whose main mission is to suck the art out of life.  Hollywood has gobs of image and no soul.  Washington got power san a conscious.

San Francisco was awarded a beautiful landscape and enough fog to conceal it.  Scenic San Francisco vistas are vacated by summer temperatures that make Alaskan’s shiver (yet people run around naked here is alarmingly large numbers).

While researching my next book (whose subtitle is an insider outs San Francisco) I discovered that San Francisco’s central essence is irony.  It is a town torn between anarchy and fascism, spiritualism and salacity, free love and expensive parking.  In San Francisco for every action there is an equal and opposite overreaction.  Familiarity may breed contempt (and children) but San Francisco breeds contradiction.

Contradictions are, in no small part, responsible for San Francisco being both prototypically American and not American at all.  San Francisco revels and rebels in freedom providing you don’t smoke (tobacco) in public, recycle and compost, and never vote Republican.  This pull between a yen for the freedom to be yourself and civic censure of anyone one free enough to be politically incorrect makes San Francisco America’s bastard step-sister.  As the master Mencken mentioned about San Francisco “What fetched me instantly … was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.”

In San Francisco your banker wears tie dye t-shirts and streetwalkers wear diamonds.  The best bars are dives and the best music comes from buskers.  The best scenery is on the costal cliffs, which the prevailing fog prevents you from seeing except on October 12^th.  This town is irony in action, a perpetual self contraction.  Perhaps Allah’s ambush on Frisco was to give it a split personality where each bipolar part is itself insane.  Yes, if you can deal with The City’s imbecilities it is an entertaining place.  Just keep your hands in the ride at all times.

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Take the two cases of Jennifer Keeton and Julea Ward, who independently have (il)logical or religious problems with homosexuals.  Both are or were students in public universities (Augusta State and Eastern Michigan respectively) in graduate programs for counseling.  Both women – who are attractive enough to convert Castro District regulars – had the poor judgment to publicly discuss what they thought.

Keeton believes homosexuality is a personal choice and lifestyle but not a “state of being.”  The two are not mutually exclusive.  Some homo sapiens are clearly hardwired from birth to prefer people with similar plumbing.  Others have no particular preference, and choose through trial and Eros.  Keeton sees only one of the two alternatives, which means she suffers from intellectual myopia.

Ward is worse in believing that homosexuality is morally wrong.  One dictionary defines morality as “conformity to the rules of right conduct.”  In an allegedly free society like America, “right conduct” is theoretical.  The People have clearly said that as long as one’s behavior does not purposefully or negligently harm someone else, there is no “wrong” conduct (granted our laws often violate this principle, but that is why The People prefer physically violating their elected officials).  Ward’s assessment is based on her own perception of “right conduct”, which she is free to inscribe on the inside of whatever woman’s thigh she wishes to lick.

Or not.  It is allegedly a free country.

What makes their cases problematic is that they are being tossed out of college onto their perky little heterosexual keisters.  In statements sounding Soviet, the administrators of Augusta State have asked that Keeton be indoctrinated.  A District Judge upheld Ward’s prior dismissal for declining to guide gays and deliberate with dykes.  Keeton was told she had to attend a “remediation program”, which is academic literary effluvium for “reeducation camp” and an attempt to force a fellow human to think what she doesn’t.  With Ward, she was ousted for refusing to counsel people pertaining to matters that she personally opposed based on her religious beliefs.

Who is a girl going to abide by – her God or her government.  Well, God does have seniority.

Several collisions between individual rights are at play here.  People have the right to believe what they like, and no government has the right to force them to believe otherwise.  Consumers have the right to spend their money as they see fit, including taxpayers forced to lob lucre into state colleges.  People have the right of association, which includes the right from association, and thus cannot be compelled to counsel anyone they dislike for whatever inane reasons they may have for disliking them.  Being taxpayers themselves, Keeton and Ward have equal access rights to public universities, and morality codices – be they the student’s or the public’s as reflected through government schools – cannot keep them from access.  Equal access to taxpayer funded counseling services are also extended to taxpaying lumber dykes and butt pirates.

Solomon couldn’t solve this dispute.

Unsurprisingly the correct solution is the most difficult, untenable and unpolitical of them all.  Eliminating government universities solves the whole mess rather nicely.  Keeton and Ward could wonder off to whatever educational institutes of parochial paranoia they prefer, obtain degrees with their own capital, and in their subsequent careers commit whatever malpractice they prefer.  Taxpayers would then be unburdened and could invest directly into the university, curriculum and state of (un)consciousness they conceive.  Everyone can be made happy by cutting government out of the equation.

Which is why it won’t happen in my lifetime.  Government, the original virus, tends to grow, mutate and infect until the host dies or some powerful antibody (a.k.a. revolution) occurs.  Americans have failed to contain the pathogen called government, and thus we must suffer the disease until death or a butt full of armed antiseptics is administered.

A Mexican stand-off (ooops, sorry, an undocumented stand-off) remains.  Freedom of thought must be preserved and thus all attempts by government to force conformity must be eradicated.  Keeton and Ward cannot be dismissed from their equal access/opportunity educational path because they think wrong (and there are only three crimes in the word – the crime of being stupid, the crime of thinking wrong, and the crime of driving with your head up your rump).  Government cannot keep these women from university programs on “thinking wrong” grounds, nor can Mao-like reeducation camps become a substitute for reasoned or unreasonable disagreement.  Government caused this problem by getting into the higher education business, and more government is the worst possible solution.

Ostracization however is always effective.

Nobody can be compelled to associate.  You cannot be forced to like someone else or say a civil word to them.  Shame is an underused tool in modern society, and one that would be very applicable here.  Living in San Francisco I have numerous friends and acquaintances who are members in good standing of the Church of the Carpet Chewer or the Sausage Factory Synagogue.  Can’t say I find a dimes worth of difference between a diesel dyke and a truck drivin’ man, except that the dyke might have more chin stubble.  Homos are people with preferences (and I even share some preferences with lesbians).  It is impossible for anyone who has spent significant time around the other clans to see them as immoral, living a “lifestyle” instead of possessing pre-existing preferences, or unworthy of counseling.  Doing so would be stupid.

Stupid people we mock.  Shame them for willful ignorance.  Deride their lack of insight, empathy and intelligence.  So let Keeton and Ward keep their educational opportunity while we individually marginalize their very existence.  Let’s assure that their social isolation is so profound they will need counseling themselves.

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