Monthly Archives: March 2004

Bush’s support of Federal Marriage Amendment

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Bush’s endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment earns him points with his hard line right wing supporters, and costs him nothing.  Staunch Republicans, even if they tacitly support gay marriage, won’t let Bush’s stand on this issue push them to vote for John Kerry or any of the other recent Democratic hopefuls.  Similarly, it’s highly unlikely that any loyal Democrat would vote for Bush even if he came out in favor of gay marriage.  Even Democrats who oppose gay marriage aren’t going to let Bush’s endorsement of an amendment that has zero chance of passing sway them.

The coming election won’t be won by staunch Republicans or loyal Democrats.  This election, like the one before, will be decided by that small percentage (perhaps smaller than ten percent) of voters who currently are “undecided,” and it’s unlikely that this issue would be a deciding factor for many of them.  It’s a can’t-lose endorsement for Bush.  It costs him nothing and keeps the campaign contributions coming in.

But it’s still a stupid proposal.

Federal Marriage Amendment is a bad idea

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So why do I think the Federal Marriage Amendment is a bad idea?  First, take a look at the proposed text:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.

Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

There is only one other amendment to the Constitution that attempted to restrict the rights of The People:  the 18th amendment, which prohibited alcoholic beverages.  All other amendments to the Constitution have been made to guarantee the rights of The People or to smooth the running of government.  The Constitution is written by The People.  It establishes the government and grants rights to that government.  The amendments are intended to limit government’s power, not to limit freedoms of The People.  We grant to  Congress and to the States the right to enact laws that are “necessary and proper,” for carrying out the Powers that have been granted to the government.

There is no mention of marriage in the Constitution or in any of the amendments.  Marriage is a legislative construct, created by law and subject to change by law.  If you take a look at the Constitution, you’ll realize that other much more important things than marriage also aren’t mentioned:  things like assault and murder are not prohibited by the Constitution, except to the extent that government is prohibited from doing them.  When the Constitution includes a clause prohibiting murder, assault, and other such crimes, then I might give some thought to the inclusion of an amendment defining marriage.

I would use this same argument to oppose the old flag protection amendment that Bush, Sr. tried to get passed.  A Constitutional amendment to protect the flag?  Ridiculous!

Those of you who know me or have read this journal for any length of time know that I don’t like homosexuality, nor would I consider burning the flag in protest.  However, our Constitution guarantees our right peaceably to act in ways that might be upsetting to others.  These issues are matters for Congress.  Trying to modify the Constitution so that it becomes a list of prohibitions turns it into a much different document and a potential tool of oppression.  The Framers knew that, and purposely made it difficult to amend the Constitution so that this kind of knee-jerk reaction wouldn’t become permanently codified.

Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act

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I made the mistake today of posting to the Plastic thread discussing the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act that is making its way through Congress.  One of my posts was marked “irrelevant,” which I find somewhat amusing considering the contents of other posts, and the other has not (yet?) been moderated.  Both were throwaway comments, but I should know better than to post to a place like Plastic.  Especially in an offhand manner.  The worst thing about it is that once I invest enough mental and emotional energy to read and post on a thread, I find it difficult to let the conversation go without trying to have the last word.  That poor decision aside…

The PRFCA is one of the silliest pieces of proposed legislation I’ve seen in a while.  Well, okay, perhaps the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is sillier, but we’ll leave that for another day.  The PRFCA, in its present form, proposes to prevent food and non-alcoholic beverage companies from being subject to civil liabilities unless it can be shown that the product in question was not in compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements at the time of the sale.   That somebody (several somebodies, from the looks of it) thought this needed to be specifically stated in a law says volumes about the state of our courts and our legislators’ priorities.  If courts are screwed up enough to allow the kinds of lawsuits this bill is intended to prevent (i.e. “McDonald’s made me fat”), what makes the authors think that the courts won’t just overturn their piddling little law?  If enacted, this law would be just an insignificant speed bump in a road that should never have been paved.  Heck, it shouldn’t even be a footpath.

Fixing broken links

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If you’ve explored these pages at all in the last few days, you’ve probably noticed a few broken links and missing pictures.  The transfer of my site to the new hosting provider didn’t go 100 percent smoothly.  You see, the old server was running Windows 2000, and this new server is running Linux.  Under Linux, URLs are case sensitive.  They’re not under Windows.  When I created the Windows site, for some reason I used mixed case on some of the directory names.  This diary page, for example, was http://www.mischel.com/Diary/.  All well and good, except that in some places I used “diary” instead of “Diary” for links, and people typing the thing into their browser’s address line usually don’t worry about case.

In order to reduce confusion, I wrote a program to make all the file and directory names lower case, and another to go through and make all of the internal hyperlinks lower case as well.  That all works, but after I’d uploaded the files I realized that I’d forgotten to change the image tags in the HTML files.  So many of the embedded images still aren’t showing.  I’ll fix that in the next couple of days and re-upload the entire site again.

I knew, of course, about the case sensitivity of Apache on Linux.  But in my rush to upload stuff to my new site, I didn’t even think about it.  Poor planning.  It’s a good thing I didn’t have a client paying me for this, huh?

Unhelpful answering machine

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Unhelpful help isn’t limited to computer systems.  This afternoon a coworker and I had  to call a client regarding a project.  She gave us the wrong phone number and we ended up with a particularly unhelpful answering machine.  It answered and said:

The person you called is not available.  To leave a message, please enter the number you were trying to call, followed by the pound sign.

We were somewhat surprised by that.  Anti-spam phone messaging, I guess.  Dan entered the phone number, area code and all, followed by the obligatory pound sign.  The answering system replied with:

The number you entered is not valid.  Please enter the number you called, followed by the pound sign.

Hmmm.  Maybe without the area code?  Nope.  How about the last four digits?  No dice.  We gave it a half-dozen different tries with the same result.  Finally, the phone system replied with:

I’m sorry you are having trouble.  Please get some help and try again later.

We just looked at each other and laughed.  Hard.  We even went through the whole exercise again to make sure we weren’t hallucinating.  I don’t have to make up funny stuff.  Life is endlessly amusing.

New hosting provider

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I finally took the plunge and started paying for domain hosting.  This site is now hosted by SectorLink.  I now have better control of my email instead of relying on the forwarding arrangement that I had with my employer.  I’m also on a production server here rather than the test server that I was using previously.  I don’t expect to make any major changes to the site immediately, but I do have some things in the works.  Those will have to take a back seat to a few other projects.

Spring!

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It looks like the cold weather is over for another year.  Central Texas is moving right into early Spring, with warm and rainy days.  The temperature was 64 degrees when I got up this morning, so I took the bike off the mag trainer and went for a ride.  I half expected to be slow today and easily tired because I haven’t been out on the road for almost four weeks.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was strong throughout the ride and able to keep a decent pace up the moderate hills that were on my route.  The hours and intervals I put in on that mag trainer really were helpful.  I finished 21 miles at a pace that’s much faster than what I had expected, and I wasn’t exhausted afterwards.  The big ride starts in exactly 4 weeks.

Bookcases!

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The Bookcase Store delivered our new book cases two weeks ago.  Since Debra and I were very busy and out of town for much of the week following, they just sat in the office against the wall for a week.  I screwed the book cases together on Wednesday, and moved books for the next few days.  We now have all of the non-fiction books and paperbacks in the office with us.  That gives us enough space in the master bedroom to put all of the novels and “other stuff.”  The whole point of this exercise is to clear books from the spare bedrooms so that I can start remodeling in there.  I’m still not sure where we’re going to put all of the knick knacks and geological samples (rocks), but we’ll figure something out.  Now all we have to do is find a place to put all the stuff that’s in the closets.  Remodeling in-place is turning out to be a very difficult problem.