Politicization

This is not going to be terribly elegant, because I am more furious than I can handle gracefully.  But here goes.

In the "wake" (well named) of the Sandy Hook Elementary slaughter, discussion has arisen (not too surprisingly) regarding the evident proliferation of powerful and extremely dangerous firearms in this country.  I should start, as a matter of truth in advertising, with the disclaimer that I know virtually nothing about guns, except that they are devices designed for the sole purpose of blowing holes in living flesh, a fact which makes me extremely uneasy.  That the people of this nation have seen fit  to acquire something over 300,000,000 of these devices entirely for their own personal gratification seems to me indicative of some serious craziness.  And I'm a clinical psychologist with over thirty years experience, and I understand a bit about mental illness.  Anyhow, I do not pretend to be able to speak knowledgeably regarding the relative merits of Glocks versus Smiths and Wessons, or the distinction between high-powered automatic assault rifle A versus high-powered automatic assault rifle B, or any of the other technical crap with which public commentary on this matter seems to be laden.  To me, they're all dangerous.  They're supposed to be dangerous.  It is their raison d'etre, if an inanimate object can be said to possess a raison d'etre.

I am an intelligent, peace-loving middle-aged white adult family man, and I can assert candidly that  in a life spent substantially in Houston, Albuquerque, and Detroit,  I have never found myself in a situation in which I would have been better off possessing a gun.  Except once in graduate school when I was really strapped for cash and would have liked to have something I could pawn for a couple of hundred bucks.  Of course, I may be mugged tomorrow and wish that, instead of having devoted my life to the treatment of the mentally ill, I had spent more time honing my quick-draw skills so I could gun down my assailant a la Matt Dillon (the marshal, idiot, not the actor!).  But one cannot be all things to all people.  So I shall attempt to steer clear of high-crime neighborhoods and avoid wearing expensive stuff (I don't have much, so this should be a piece of cake) that would tend to attract predators.

My issue concerning the present gun debate (why there should even be a debate eludes me) is the recrudescence of the term "politicization" (a made up word if ever I saw one).  As in "I don't think it's right for Obama to 'politicize' the Newtown tragedy for the purpose of pushing his socialist, Kenyan, Muslim, antichrist, Nazi, what have you, agenda."

So, what is meant by "politicizing"?  It seems to mean that Mr. Obama is cynically exploiting a sensational catastrophe to achieve some devious political objective.

But is that not precisely what we elect public officials to do?  To identify significant problems in our nation and devise ways of resolving those problems.  And sometimes, as in the matter of the slaughter of little children in Connecticut, to draw public attention to the nature and severity of the problem in order to marshal public support for solving it?  Isn't this why we have a Congress in the first place?  To identify problems and propose legislative solutions to them?  Or are they just there to pass resolutions declaring November 23 to be officially recognized as Franklin Pierce's birthday, or National Pork Belly Day, or National Kiss Your Mother Day, or National Think Nice Thoughts about Jesus Day?  If so - if we really have all the laws we need and Congress is only there to conduct such foolishness as the aforementioned - then why don't we shut it down altogether (it wouldn't seem that different from the present state of things) and just leave it to the Executive Branch to administer the presumably all-sufficient set of laws we already have.  We could divide the Capitol into condos and sell them to wealthy lobbyists (who, admittedly, would now have a lot of time on their hands, since there would no longer be influential congresspersons to bribe).

If by "politicize" we mean make use of a vivid example of an existing problem to bring public attention to bear on the existence and significance of that problem, then it would be a pretty lame public servant who did not thus "politicize" the Newtown massacre for the sake of enabling government to act to make it much less likely for things like this to happen again.

Unless, of course, you don't think it's a problem.

Conservative gun addicts have lately asserted that there is not a gun problem.  What we have instead is a "people problem", and that guns are protected under the Constitution.

I, for one, was under the impression that people, too, are protected under the constitution.

I read the view that the problem is a mental health problem, and so, to a considerable extent, it is.  And because we completely dismantled the greater part of public mental health resources back in the Sixties and Seventies, it may take a while to re-establish any serious attempt to address the problem of mental illness in this country.  Moreover, most mentally ill persons are not dangerous, even as most members of the Tea Party are not actually dangerous.  So, is everyone who qualifies for a psychiatric diagnosis to be deprived of his/her constitutional rights?  And is that not diving headfirst into Socialized Medicine?  The dreaded "nanny state"?

I also read that the problem is our "culture of violence", the ubiquity of violent movies, TV shows, and video games to which the USA seems to be addicted.  Now, I'm not a constitutional lawyer (like I said, I'm a clinical psychologist), but even I can recognize a First Amendment issue when it's this obvious.

So, what'll it be, folks?  Do we violate the Second Amendment (or, preferably, repeal it) so the government can pass reasonable laws concerning the possession of dangerous weapons?

Do we deprive all persons "convicted" of mental health problems of their civil rights, as though there were not degrees and varieties of mental illness, most of which are not at all dangerous?  That seems like a constitutional issue in itself and certainly at variance with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).

Or do we conclude that, in the absence of violent TV, video games, and movies it would never occur to anyone possessed of a gun to actually shoot someone with it?  That this is absurd beyond all previous Tea Party absurdities, and clearly involves inroads into the First Amendment that no one would consider acceptable can hardly be doubted.

Which leaves prayer.  I kid you not, I have actually encountered numerous expressions of the idea that the reason the Newtown slaughter occurred was because we have taken prayer out of our schools.  Any intelligent, mature, humane adult who gives voice to such pernicious nonsense should probably recognize that they have become a monster and lock themselves away from the rest of the world.

The point about prayer is that it is essentially trusting to luck.  Landing a plane "on a wing and a prayer" means hoping to hell you manage to bring the plane in successfully in spite of damage to essential systems.  A "hail Mary" in football means throwing the ball as far as you can and hoping that your guy catches it.

I wasn't there, but I'd be willing to bet that there was more praying going on at Sandy Hook School last Friday than at any other school in the world, and it didn't accomplish a thing.

In sum, then, if Obama is "politicizing" Newtown for the sake of trying to see that homicidal maniacs are not equipped with sophisticated weapons with which to conduct their horrors, then I say "politicize away".  And any public servant who doesn't is being grossly, immorally, criminally irresponsible.

Political Rant - 2011

Ultimately, of course, we all pay, and it is legitimate that what we pay for should reflect the values of our society as well as the realities of the economic environment.  Americans are essentially humane (Christian, if you will) people who believe in making some sacrifices in order to help out those in need.  Unfortunately, if this is institutionalized, someone will take advantage and abuse it.  On the other hand, if it is not institutionalized, thereby taking advantage of what I believe is called "economy of scale" (marshaling large resources to accomplish large projects) which only government can actually do, and that by taxation (which no one likes), some important things simply cannot be done - building the interstate highway system, for example. 

Of course, there are other, more controversial aspects of government assistance (welfare, for example) which may lend themselves to greater abuse and may tend to the development of a culture of dependency which is not really healthy in the long run or financially tenable even in the short run.  And yet there are many families in this country who, through no fault of their own, are unable to make ends meet on even a modest basis.  I don't believe that Americans want to cut such families adrift on the principle that "anyone who is willing to work hard can make it big in America".  There are far too many unemployed automotive engineers and nurses in this country for that to be credible.

In sum, for us to be who we want to be, both strong and good, disciplined and humane, we will need to make some tough choices.  The first of these is to treat humanitarian programs seriously and pay a lot more attention to making sure that what they do is what they're intended to do, not be simply an all-you-can-eat buffet for anyone who wants a snack, but a decent source of basic nourishment for those who can't realistically get it any other way.  Same principle should apply to all other government programs.  Do what we need done, but be VERY careful and responsible about how the money gets spent.  Instances of criminal malfeasance in the use of government contracting, etc. might reasonably be regarded as treasonable and treated accordingly.  This would take a bit of lawmaking, but seems necessary.  There have been far too many pigs (both individual and corporate) in the governmental trough for far too long.  THIS MUST STOP!

The other aspect of this which must change is, alas, taxation.  We must have more revenue in order to both pay our bills and continue to function as a humane, modern society.  Relative to other first world countries, our taxes are grotesquely low, our corporations are making enormous amounts of money, and yet the whole "supply-side economics" concept which enjoyed such a vogue in the 80's does not seem to be getting the job done.  There are certainly tax loopholes for the wealthy which should be closed, but the biggest loophole is the absurdly low marginal tax rates paid by those who get the most out of living in this country. 

I hear well-meaning people complain that to tax the "producers" (not Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) is to hamstring economic growth, and I agree.  However, the claim that everyone who is rich is a "producer" is untrue.  Stockbrokers and investment bankers are professional gamblers who produce nothing for anyone and who get rich retrading stocks which long ago ceased capitalizing business growth.  I strongly urge that LTCG's from stock trading be taxed as ordinary income.  Ditto, dividends.  Those forms of earning represent nothing which provides jobs or adds materially to the real wealth and value of the economy.  It is a purely individual benefit, and though there's nothing wrong with that, there is also no reason not to treat it as ordinary income.  The sole exception to this is profits resulting from investments in IPO stock, stocks sold by a corporation to capitalize growth.  THAT creates jobs and economic growth and should be taxed at lower rate than ordinary income, lower even than that accorded other long term capital gains, say, 5%.  This will encourage economic growth and individual investment in that growth.

IRAQ - Written 2003

I am deeply concerned that the United States, under the apparently tunnel-visioned direction of President Bush, is about to take the unprecedented step of launching an all-out war on a sovereign nation which has not attacked us or our allies-by-treaty.  Historically, we have held the moral high ground precisely because we have never done such a thing, and I am troubled that we now risk sacrificing this enviable and unique standing in the world community for no very clear purpose.

I am firmly convinced that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a bully of the first order, but I am equally convinced that this is precisely why we do not need to worry about his attacking us.  He went adventuring in the Middle East several years ago and was all but annihilated by us.  He has remained very quiet ever since.  Like most bullies, he only seeks fights he can win.  He is not a religious fanatic like Osama bin Laden.  Indeed, there is little to suggest that he has any religious beliefs whatever.  He is a tyrant who oppresses his own people and sells oil to us and our allies to support his regime.  He does not want to harm his best customers, especially knowing we can turn his capitol into a sheet of trinitite any time we feel the need.

I am all for enforcing the UN’s weapons inspections with all the force required.  I am all for destroying anything we can reasonably identify as an arms manufactory.  And if our intelligence resources are all President Bush would have us believe, we shouldn’t have much trouble doing exactly that.

But we are not going to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy by killing Saddam Hussein, and if we did it would only create another sphere of active conflict which, like Israel, we would feel honor-bound to defend while it progressively antagonized its more “traditional” neighbors.

To date, our standing in the Middle East has been founded on our role as peacemakers and our historic tendency to bring a voice of reason to situations of international chaos.  Now we are proclaiming our intention to invade Iraq, not because they are producing “weapons of mass destruction” (North Korea, Pakistan, China, India, France, Israel and ourselves are also doing so), but because President Bush has a private feud with Saddam Hussein.  We claim we are doing this to bring peace to the region, but the only party threatening to start a war in the Middle East is George Bush.

There are doubtless good reasons for depriving Iraq of their weapons of mass destruction, but the United Nations and a worldwide cooperative process of methodical identification and surgical removal is the way to go if it can be done.  Otherwise, we convince even moderate middle-easterners that we are exactly as Osama bin Laden has painted us, we will have alienated our traditional allies, we will have killed and lost thousands of human beings, burdened our struggling economy with enormous costs, and we will not have achieved a thing that cannot be undone in another ten years.  Even if we manage to kill Saddam Hussein, which we have no right to do either under international law or our own traditional policies, this will merely create a lot of antagonism and a power vacuum in Iraq which, by a natural process we have seen in action a hundred times, will ultimately be filled by whoever is brutal and unscrupulous enough to take over.

War against Iraq, as President Bush would have it, is stupidity of the worst sort and is exactly why a majority of American voters did not want Bush to be president.  He is immature, ego-challenged, impulsive, historically naïve, and not very bright.  No doubt he means well after his fashion, but he is sending our country into a violent morass of unimaginable complexity and ramification, and he seems to be doing it because he feels humiliated over the events of 9/11/01 and not because it is the right thing to do.

The Phantom of Conservatism

                In the 1925 film of “The Phantom of the Opera”, there is an iconic scene in which Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) strips the mask from Erik the Phantom (Lon Chaney, Sr.), thereby revealing that the doting mentor in whom she had invested implicit trust is, in reality, a hideous monster.  Something of the sort has happened lately in American politics, and it is turning society on its head and disorienting and confusing the populace as a whole.

                I have a thesis, to explicate which will tempt me to make use of some metaphors that seem good now and which may or may not disprove their own merit and utility as I develop them.  We shall see.

                Modern man, we are taught, started out as a species of “hunter-gatherer”, with an apparently well-delineated social structure whose roles split cleanly along gender lines.  While there may be no hard evidence for this, there seems to be a commonly held assumption that men, bigger, stronger, and more aggressive, went out to kill animals for the group to eat, thereby extending the limits of their habitable world, while women, not so strong, but infinitely more capable of bearing and nursing children, stayed home and took care of the cave and the kids.  Well, we have survived, so one assumes that this system worked reasonably well.

                An (arguably) analogous arrangement has prevailed substantially in the American political sphere for, to the best of my knowledge, the entire history of our nation.  Two groups, for simplicity’s sake, Liberals and Conservatives, have more or less divided up the political landscape between them, and most of the dynamic activity in the evolution of our governed society can be characterized in terms of the relative influence of those groups.

                Historically, it has been the role of the Liberals to “push the envelope”, to experiment with change, to, in the words of Bobby Kennedy (as borrowed from Bernard Shaw), to “dream of things that never were, and ask ‘why not?’”  In paleontological terms, this would seem to correspond roughly to the male role in hunter-gatherer society, that of pressing beyond previously fixed limits in the pursuit of solutions to problems not previously recognized as capable of challenge or, as frequently, not previously recognized as problems.

                If Liberals have been the “men” in this scenario, that leaves it to the Conservatives to be in the role of “women”, a designation many contemporary conservatives might dispute, but I assert it on the following grounds:  it is the role of the conservative to act as steward and conservator of that which we already possess.  Thus when Ugug the male goes out to see what might be beyond the mountain, it is Ooka the female who reminds him that the prime directive is still to make sure he brings something back for dinner.  Similarly, when liberals have proposed changes in the socio-governmental doings of the nation, it has been the role of conservatives to act as a reality check, a sort of drag chute whose function is to keep our imagination from running away with us, to ask of the proposed change, is it desirable?  Is it safe? What will be its long term consequences?  Is it consistent with the sort of nation that we are? And, always, what’s it going to cost?

                This has constructed a fluid dynamic tension between the impulse to flex our muscles and dash at the solution of new problems, tilting at windmills perhaps, at times, but always looking for something to challenge (liberal) and the instinct to preserve and consolidate what we have, balancing a keen eye for opportunity against a thoughtful regard for risk (conservative).  Over time, the trend of this American (sorry) Evolution can be plotted similarly to the classic chart of the stock market, that of a ball bouncing upstairs: up and down, up and down, but more or less always trending more or less upward. 

                At this point it becomes necessary to define what, in these terms, constitutes “up”.

                In other writing, I have defined civilization as that process by which planet Earth (and the universe in general) is made to be, increasingly, a good place in which to be a human being.  And being a psychologist, I tend to think of the criteria by which this goodness is measured in terms of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which places physiological needs at the base of a pyramid, tapering upward through safety and belonging to, ultimately, self-actualization – becoming, in effect, the best we can be.  When I say that the trend over the course of our history has been generally “up”, I mean the extent to which government is active in the process of civilization as defined above.  Naturally, there is a lack of unanimity as to what is good for people, especially the question of whether it is good for people to have government actively engaged in taking the initiative in deciding what is good for people.

                The upshot of all this has been a nation whose historical tendency has been in the direction of increasing governmental assumption of responsibility for seeing to it that the citizens are as okay as they can reasonably be, consistent with freedom, self-determination and a realistic assumption of self-reliance.  It has been the liberal role to identify and propose ways of tackling anything that might threaten the basic wellness of the citizenry, and it has been the conservative role to see to it this proceeds deliberately, gradually, cautiously, responsibly.  That such a progression is meet and desirable in a serious, mature nation has never really been challenged.

                Until now.  In recent years, possibly in an hysterical reaction to a pair of historical firsts (an enemy attack on the sovereign soil of the country by foreign functionaries (Pearl Harbor doesn’t count because, although a territory, most people at the time would not have regarded Hawaii as a real part of the United States), and the election of a non-Caucasian to the presidency), conservatism has begun to redefine itself no longer as stewardship of what we have constructed but as an impulse to rewind to sometime in, one imagines, the late Nineteenth Century, tearing down as we go much of what the intervening portion of our history has wrought.  So far from being a conservator of what our energies have created for ourselves, a sort of violent panic has set in among those styling themselves as conservatives, causing them to slash and burn, apparently indiscriminately, striving to destroy such formerly well-established and well-functioning and characteristically American institutions as racial equality, disseveration of church and state, women’s rights, sexual freedom,  public education, and a system of taxation which aims at something approximating economic equity.

                It is unnecessary at this time to attempt to enumerate the specific forms in which this suicidal hysteria has recently manifested itself.  An illustrative example, however, is a recent bill which would have been passed by the Virginia state legislature but for the outpouring of incredulous outrage from women and other thinking persons both in Virginia and across the nation.  This bill, had it become law, would have required that a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy (a legal act in the United States of America for at least the past forty years) be subjected to a “transvaginal ultrasound”, an imaging procedure which, through the insertion of a sort of wand into the woman’s vagina, produces an image of the fetus for the patient’s viewing pleasure, ostensibly for the purpose of giving the patient the opportunity to be well-informed concerning the medical procedure she is about to undergo, but in bald fact, intended to horrify her with a vision of causing the death of her unborn child.  The idea is obviously to inspire such guilt in the patient that she is persuaded to forego the termination or, at the very least, to make her feel really terrible about it postoperatively.  There are so many things wrong with this concept that it is difficult to know where to start.

                Let us begin with the Virginia Criminal Code which, like most other states’ criminal codes, considers inserting any object into a woman’s vagina against her will and without an established medical purpose to constitute rape.  And the threat of withholding a procedure to which the woman has an established constitutional right clearly constitutes coercion, also under Virginia statute.  Thus, should this be done, a lot of doctors would be prosecuted and, I should imagine, a lot of legislators as co-conspirators in what must certainly be seen as a civil rights violation as well as a class-action gang rape.

                 Now let us consider the notion of informed consent.  Informed consent is for the purpose of making sure the patient has a reasonable grasp of what is about to be done to them and how it is apt to affect them.  Informed consent never takes the form of another medical procedure, for which, presumably, informed consent would also be necessary.   

                Moreover, since the very clear intent behind the inclusion of this unnecessary procedure in the process by which a woman terminates her pregnancy is to punish her and, ideally, make her emotionally worse following the procedure than she would otherwise be, this requirement clearly violates the Hippocratic injunction to “do no harm”.  But that’s okay, because this isn’t done for medical reasons in the first place.  Which is one of many reasons why it shouldn’t be done at all.

Finally, the fact that the woman is required to give informed consent to this procedure as the patient and not in her capacity as the mother of the child implies clearly that the fetus is NOT regarded as a person under Virginia law, and therefore the requirement is simply gratuitously and unjustifiably vicious, and is, in effect, a way of making it more difficult for women to exercise their established constitutional rights.  Virginians like Washington and Jefferson would have known what to think about such attacks upon civil rights under the constitution for which they risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.  Unfortunately, they don’t make Virginians like that any longer.

                This is but one of numerous efforts on the part of the radical right wing to impose their retrogressive version of morality on a people generally committed with moving gradually forward to better quality of life, a stronger, more humane social contract, and the hysterical character this has assumed has become increasingly marked and increasingly extreme.  It is as though “conservatism” had abandoned the maternal role to the liberals, who also shoulder the paternal duties, which leaves “conservatism” in the role of “rebellious adolescent”, prepared to reject in principle anything the parental element espouses in a childlike flexing of newly-discovered muscles without regard to the damage they do in the process.  Like so many adolescents, the nascent extreme right wing of conservatism are vandalizing decades of social progress purely as an act of indiscriminate rebellion – as though the institutions they seek to tear down were not the product of good-faith efforts by intelligent leaders.  This is analogous to teenagers who wreck themselves on ecstasy and other drugs, confident in the essentially immature assumption that theirs is a higher and more legitimate vision of “how things are” than their elders’.

Contraceive This!!

     In recent days, the Republican world has overflowed with outrage over the requirement under existing healthcare laws that all employers (excepting actual churches whose dogma specifically regards contraception as a “sin”) provide health care coverage for their employees, including copay-free contraceptives.  That this requirement has existed for some time in the majority of states has not heretofore triggered the sort of self-righteous frothing that it does, now that it can be labeled (at the risk of coining a term the right will find irresistible) an Obamanation – (something defined as immoral primarily because it is connected with President Obama and must therefore be, by conservative logic, of necessity bad) is neither here nor there, except that it indicates the majority of the country is okay with it. 

     The argument seems to be that, if hospitals and universities affiliated with the Catholic church [which holds any form of contraception except “rhythm” (having sex only when the woman is not ovulating) is sinful] are required to provide the same sort of full-spectrum health coverage required of any other employer, this somehow violates the right to freedom of expression protected under the First Amendment.  That provision of healthcare coverage should be regarded as a meaningful form of self-expression seems to me odd to begin with.  It conjures up visions of a future in which black box theaters off-Broadway will present radical forms of health insurance plans for the titillation of scandalized audiences and ecstatic reviewers.

    The concept also suggests that institutions, such as churches, hospitals and universities, as distinct from the individuals who work, study, or worship in them, have rights that are protected under the constitution.  Certainly, institutions have the right to own property, but to extend to them (“corporations are people”) the status accorded American citizens seems to open a can of legal worms that, if this is its beginning, has at least no readily discernable end.   For example, it would be absurd, but under this logic unavoidable, that if churches have constitutionally protected rights, they should be able to vote, to marry (presumably other churches, though same-sect marriages would doubtless encounter resistance) and, if found in violation of a law (maybe building codes?), be tried by a jury of their peers, again, presumably, other churches.  If a church wishes to close down its operations, is this suicide?  Can churches be drafted in time of war?  Can they run for public office?  And (switching from the silly to the serious) if churches are people whose rights are protected under the constitution, why shouldn’t they pay taxes like the rest of us?  Surely, if institutions are accorded the protections that go with citizenship, does that not also imply the duties and obligations inherent in citizenship?  And if, as seems obvious from the above discussion, churches (and their affiliate organizations)  are NOT people, is it necessarily the case that their rights of self-expression, etc. , are protected under the Constitution? 

     Further, the Catholic Church is not the same as the Little Brown Church in the Vale.  It is an independent, sovereign nation that exists within the geographical bounds of Rome, Italy, and has representatives all over the world.  The Pope is its king.  It makes its own laws, has its own security and police forces, and, through the agency of the Holy See, conducts diplomatic relations with other sovereign states.  Therefore, laws promulgated by the Vatican should have precisely the same standing as regards American institutions as do Swiss laws, Japanese laws, or Nigerian laws, that is to say, none.  To assert otherwise is inevitably to open the door to Sharia law which, at any rate, is only a cultural tradition and not something foisted upon the United States by a foreign country.  To assert that the present issue has anything whatever to do with conscience is absurd.  One’s conscience is the province of one’s own reason, which has nothing to do with the blind obedience to the dictates of a foreign potentate; this is about jurisdiction, about who will make the laws by which the United States of America is to be governed.

     BUT, if it be insisted nonetheless that laws promulgated by the Vatican supersede the force of American law, the Church cannot in principle then invoke the Constitution (the basis of all American law which the primacy of Catholic law presumably sets aside) as the principle under which they claim protection.

     Therefore, because insurance coverage is not reasonably construed to be a form of self-expression, because institutions are not human beings whose right to life and liberty are reasonably protected by Constitutional guarantees, and because the laws promulgated by the Catholic Church are those of a foreign, sovereign nation, it is not proper to accord them the same status under the Constitution as American laws which must meet the test of according with that constitution in order to be valid.

     Therefore, while individuals may, of course, do what they wish regarding contraception, including use or not use their health insurance to provide themselves with contraceptives, employers (however sincerely devoted to the Catholic Church) may not deny their employees the right to equal protection under the law (in this case, in the form of adequate healthcare coverage).  If this were allowed, the door would be open for employers to deny their employees safe, sanitary working conditions, or impose any other form of mistreatment on the plea of personal reservation.  Laws exist so that people are required to do what is presumed to be right irrespective of their personal reservations.  We don’t need laws to make people do what they would do anyway voluntarily in accordance with their own preferences.  The laws of the United States of America exist so that the citizens of the United States of America may live under a system of rules which they, themselves, the citizens of the United States of America, deem to be right and proper for them as a nation and in their best interest.  This has traditionally been construed as being without reference to the laws of Switzerland, Indonesia, Lithuania, Uzbeckibeckistanstan, or the Vatican.  And long may it remain so.