“There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’

In a Jan. 8 letter to the Daily News Niceville’s Chip Dearing rants that allowing gays to marry is “pushing for more government intervention in the bedroom” because someone will have to decide whether “those two women or men are married for love or for the benefits … How are you going to prove it one way or another?” He concludes that gays can already marry in Florida “but they want the benefits, they want the money” and will leech off taxpayers to get them.

It’s true, one of the issues in gay marriage is about benefits: The right to be with your partner and get information about him/her when they’re in the hospital, the right of inheritance, adoption and so on and so forth. But how exactly do these generate the huge pile of government welfare that Dearing seems to think is out there? I know a lot of married couples, and I don’t recall them getting huge pots of money from the state just for tying the knot.

In the second place, it’s true that gay couples could be married in a church or religious ceremony in this state. But I would bet money that any straight couple (including Mr. Dearing, should he be married) that made a church wedding and was told “I’m sorry, as far as the law is concerned, you’re just two single people living together.” would think this a significant infringement on their rights.

In the third place, if gay couples were together for benefits, how would this be different from countless straight couples? I had a friend who was married in name only to an Air Force officer because it gave her a financial benefit (I think it was housing allowance, but it’s been too many years to be sure) and he received a kickback. And we all know that some marriages happen purely because one partner has a big bank balance, which is another form of marriage-for-benefits. Cases like these haven’t led to “government intervention int he bedroom,” so why should gay marriage be any different?

An earlier post referring to Pointe One Marina has been deleted. When the council started discussing a controversial marina last night, I made an assumption that was what they were talking about. I was wrong (it was actually HarborWalk’s proposed marina).

A useful lesson in the drawbacks of liveblogging, I guess.

From Spout Off in the Daily News: “I am sure I am just an idiot who doesn’t understand evolution, but if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?”
Setting aside the writer’s self-assessment of his intelligence, there are two reasons:
A)We didn’t evolve from any of the apes now existing, but from some common ancestor.
B)Because evolution isn’t a magic wand that transformed apes into people. Evolution by natural selection means that in any generation there will be a certain variation between offspring—some are taller, some are heavier, some run faster, etc.
In the case of our ancestors, that variation meant some offspring were very good at living the way their parents did (foraging in forests, hanging from trees, whatever). Others found it easier to find food by doing things a little differently. Their offspring were more different still. And so over time, they diverged completely from the ancestral stock. But that doesn’t mean the ancestral stock goes away.
And that’s why there are still apes.

An article this week in Southwest Florida’s News Press reveals that the money gathered from the state selling Choose Life specialty license plates is piling up in several counties because while they can use it to help out single mothers, they can only do it if the mothers plan to give up their babies for adoption, not if they choose to keep and raise them.

The logic of this completely eludes me.

Emily Yoffe, a writer on the Slate Web site, discussed Islamic honor killings in a recent post–including a case that happened in Canada–and grumbled that feminists don’t seem to care: She’s been to the Web site for the National Organization of Women and can’t find any opposition to such murders.

Amazingly, I found a page condemning honor killing after oh, 15 seconds searching.

A letter from the American Christian Heritage Center in Sunday’s Daily News argues, as conservative Christians are prone to do, that the purpose of the First Amendment is to ensure “no denomination would be established as a national church,” not to separate the church from the state. On the Center’s Web site, the author of the letter, one Calvin Longton, points out that “separation of church and state” isn’t actually in the Constitution.

Perfectly true. But neither is one single word about Christianity or God, other than the fact there shall be no religious tests required for federal office. So if Jefferson’s reference to the “separation of church and state” is irrelevant to understanding the First Amendment—since it isn’t in the Constitution—presumably the Founders’ Christian beliefs aren’t relevant either, since they aren’t included.

After all, it’s not as if they couldn’t have said “Congress shall make no law representing the establishment of a federal church” if they’d wanted to. Or “prohibiting the free exercise of any Christian sect.” Or said their shall be no religious test applied to any professing Christian.

Instead the First Amendment speaks about the free exercise of “religion”, as if they (unlike so many people) conceived of a nation where nonChristian believers might be free to worship as they chose.

Go figure.

In response to my recent column on the death penalty—and columnist Ron Hart’s view that executing innocent people is just “the price of doing business”—Destin resident Chris Young wrote to the paper (published yesterday) to say I was “unfair” and “hysterical” about Hart’s “satire”; that I’m unreasonable to require 100 percent infallibility in death-penalty cases; and that I ignore Hart’s point that recent studies show “as many as 40 people are saved from murder by one execution.”
My response? Taking it from the top:
•Hart made jokes in that column, certainly, but he’s quite obviously serious that the death penalty is a good thing, and that we shouldn’t be so careful and prissy in applying it. The satire is entirely directed at the “liberal knee jerk reaction” that thinks there might be drawbacks to shoving every accused person into an electric chair and pulling the switch (that comment, by the way, IS satire—Hart didn’t say that. Just in case anyone else can’t tell the difference).
So where’s the unfairness? Hart claims, and apparently believes, that the death penalty is such a good thing, executing innocent people is acceptable (and Young says he agrees); I disagree with his view and said why. That’s how debate works.
•Young argues that if I want 100 percent infallibility in the death penalty, we should give up on having any laws at all, since there’s always going to be errors.
First off, an error that leads to death is, obviously, worse than an error that doesn’t, so I think it’s reasonable to require a higher standard when the government kills people than when it, say, hands out speeding tickets.
In the second place, I didn’t say there had to be 100 percent infallibility in death penalty cases—I agree that’s not possible—but we should be trying our best to approach that level of surety.
Hart, on the other hand, wrote that the system works so well we needn’t worry about any of that; like so many death-penalty supporters, he doesn’t see any need (as far as I could tell from the column) to push for greater accuracy in the system. As I pointed out, that attitude blows off the lives of every innocent person who wound up on death row.
As for the studies, the New York Times reports the range of deterrent effect runs from 3-18 people saved per execution, not 40—and the logic and facts of the studies have been criticized and dismissed by others. I will freely admit I don’t know the merits of any of the studies and counterstudies (this is the kind of field where statistics can be juggled like colored balls), but I doubt Young does either since his only response to one study on the number of innocents who’ve gone to death row is that it’s “a liberal statistic.”
Even if the deterrent studies turn out to be accurate, that wouldn’t change my view: Executing innocent people is a bad, bad thing, and we should bend over backwards to prevent it.
I would think that was something everyone, pro- or anti-death penalty, could agree on. But Death Penalty PC would, it seems, much sooner duck the question.

A letter to the Daily News Tuesday says that “our children are taught that it’s not right or ‘legal’ to pray in school. We’ve removed prayer.”
No matter how many times conservative Christians make this claim, it’s not true. Children have the right to pray, to hold prayer groups (assuming equivalent secular groups are allowed to use the campus), to say grace, to read their Bible in breaks. When administrators have objected to a legimate expression of faith, the courts have ruled against them—and the ACLU, contrary to the conservative delusion that it’s trying to wipe out all religion, has often fought for the Christian students caught up in these cases.
Drive a stake through it’s heart and let this nonsense stay in its grave.

Does everyone know snopes, the urban legend Web site ? It’s indispensable if you want to fact-check the latest e-mail someone sent you about some deadly new disease, health hazard, crime wave, etc.
Twice in the past month a couple of my friends have sent me an email about a new trend in crime (e.g., fruit-flavored crystal meth to get schoolchildren hooked!) including an assurance that snopes has already verified the facts. If they’d checked snopes before sending out the mass e-mail, both of them would have found snopes did not, in fact, confirm the e-mails.
I suspect we’ll see many more Proven By Snopes e-mails in the years ahead.