P.M. Carpenter

Counterrevolutionary rumblings

National Journal's Susan Davis surveys the GOP's mushrooming, revolutionary nihilism:

Philosophically, sentiment is growing among the freshman Republican class, and generally within the House Republican Conference, that the negotiations over the debt limit are what they came to Washington to do — fundamentally change the way Washington spends its money....

Under a default scenario, the Treasury Department would have to decide whether to pay interest on outstanding debt, half of which is owned by foreign governments, or keep its fiscal commitment to, for example, seniors on Medicare and Social Security. A default would also roil financial markets. Some Republicans have argued that this is exactly what Congress should do: Default, and pay the interest on outstanding debts first and use the squeeze to push through spending reforms.

"To push through spending reforms" is a euphemistic expression of a fait accompli, for the fiscal crisis would perforce detonate New Deal and Great Society programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in addition to veterans benefits, children's healthcare, federal aid to education, etc. -- virtually all social assistance undertaken by the national government over the last hundred years.

It is borderline axiomatic among political historians that Americans are a conservative, nonrevolutionary people. Even our Revolution was essentially conservative, as measured by its much bloodier counterparts elsewhere across the globe. Contemporary conservative pols revel in this comforting knowledge, always citing our center-right proclivities, and, from a statistical point of view, they are correct in doing so.

But if contemporary conservatives wish to discover the absolute limits of American conservativism and locate the breachable boundaries of Americans' nonrevolutionary temperament, then I would heartily encourage them to preemptively "push through spending reforms" such as those cited above. What they'll find -- and about this, I have no doubt whatsoever -- is that Americans will be inspired to violent, counterrevolutionary mobilization.

And it won't be the White House they'll be storming.

House Republicans confirm Mencken

Politico asks, "Congress 'worse than it's ever been'?" And in the way of an explanation, it answers:

A central theme of the dysfunction is a lack of trust: Republicans and Democrats don’t trust each other; rank-and-file freshman Republicans in the House and the Senate, many of whom won their seats thanks to tea party support, don’t always trust party leaders; there’s no love lost between Congress and the White House; and the public doesn’t trust government or other major institutions.

Yet in its article Politico had lassoed a much simpler, less imprecise, more economical explanation: Stupidity is the central theme of the dysfunction; that, plus pseudoconservative ideology, although I hesitate to suggest any distinction.

I give you, or rather Politico gives us, Rep. Mike Pompeo, "a freshman Republican from Kansas who has never before served in elective office [and who] explained that it is more a matter of 'deep division' and 'two sharp worldviews' between the parties than a lack of trust in specific party leaders":

"There’s nothing in my judgment that indicates that Aug. 2 is a magic moment," said Pompeo, who argues that a true financial meltdown will occur only if investors conclude that the government isn’t serious about repaying the debts it already has incurred.

The government has incurred debts beyond Treasury bonds. Indeed, many of them were incurred under the "judgment" of last decade's Republican majorities. The government must repay these debts. Yet if it fails to do so, Pompeo sees no reason why "investors [would] conclude that the government isn’t serious about repaying the debts."

In this publicly elected "judgment" there inheres a House-majority stupidity so profound, so unspeakably ignorant, so indescribably impenetrable as to compel the reader to seek refuge in a rereading of H.L. Mencken's writings on democracy, and thus find the reassurance that though Mencken's observations are a century old and aggressively valid, we have survived. 

The Weekly Standard, just Daily Bullshit

The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti subbed for the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin yesterday in confecting yet another "Right Turn" farce of laughable distortion and appalling anti-intellectualism. Naturally, the diabolical President Obama was Continetti's target.

Why diabolical? Well, according to the class-warfare brigade, of whom Continetti is a highly decorated officer, throughout his press conference Obama was "playing the same old game of coalition politics, desperately trying to divide the public by pitting Republicans and the rich against the rest of America."

A disagreeable business, this divisiveness; and it seems that Obama shamefully exploited it by merely noting it, whereas Republican pols, who created it, have merely tried to conceal its enormity from "the rest of America." In this context Continetti's use of "coalition politics" -- a conservative bugaboo that spells "anti-GOP electoral phalanx," to be distinguished from conservatives' honorable coalition of gun freaks, Scripture tormenters and fiscal prehistorics -- was fascinating. Which is to say, Obama's thrust was that Medicare should not suffer at the expense of a hedge-fund manager's obscenely low tax bracket, yet that hedge-fund manager will someday benefit from Medicare, just like "the rest of America." How, then, in this instance, was Obama playing "the same old game of [devisive] coalition politics"?

Even gun freaks, Scripture tormenters and fiscal prehistorics get old and sick, and they, too, will someday benefit from Obama's caress of civilized policy; indeed, huge majorities of Republicans and "Tea Party supporters" oppose cuts to Medicare (as well as Medicaid). Hence in Continetti's configuration of Obamian cynicism, Republicans and Tea Partiers are a part of the Democratic coalition.

But all that gibberish was comparatively lucid when stacked against Continetti's expedition into ignorance-pandering and rank anti-intellectualism. His opening argument is breathtaking in the lowness of its brow:

The idea that the way to solve America's debt problem is by raising the debt ceiling is the most counterintuitive of them all. The public doesn't buy it.

Oh my. One hardly knows where to begin. In fact, the above demagoguery is so snicker-worthy, so utterly irreconcilable with the known circumstances as known by knowledgeable readers, I won't even make an effort beyond the customary dispatch: You unscrupulous imp, the debt ceiling relates to past spending.

That, however, was just a scandalous warm-up for Continetti, who either hasn't picked up an economic textbook published subsequent to 1933, or, far more likely, simply elected to further mislead what he populistically prays is a hopelessly unschooled public:

They have not read Lord Keynes and doubt whether his prescriptions work in the real world. For them, thrift is not a "paradox" but a virtue.

This intellectual divide between the president and the public is the reason his ratings on the economy are so poor. One suspects the gap is unbridgeable.

This pseudoconservative quackery about the "unworkability" of theoretical Keynesianism "in the real world" has been repeatedly debunked (Lord -- I mean Lord Keynes, does one still really need to point this out?) -- twice, for instance, by FDR during the Great Depression, and soon enough again throughout the vastest of all Keynesian "experiments," the Second World War. 

Continetti is a bright fellow who, with minimal but heroic effort, could rip those ideological blinders from his mischievous eyes and thereupon help "bridge the gap" between this intellectual president and those man-on-the-street ignoramuses whom Continetti labors to oppress with yet more validating ignorance. Such an act of independence would showcase the kind of small-r republican virtue about which his army of pseudoconservative ideologues so routinely blathers. But, Continetti is a good soldier, a magnificently loyal officer in the partisan-based war of class divisions, which his ruthlessly anti-intellectual army cares far more about.

Obama's assessment: We have a prepubescent Congress

"They need to do their job," barked the president of Congressional trolls. If his daughters, 13 and 10 years of age, can get their homework done ahead of otherwise guaranteed disaster, then surely the grown men and women of high elected office can settle, on a timely basis, a debt-ceiling dispute that's been charging down the foreseen tracks for months.

Jesus, I pity him. Obama is now having to publicly scold and even ridicule the infantile, recalcitrant yokels of the United States Congress, just to get them to do their bloody homework, for which they draw government paychecks.

On the one hand American voters have the pronounced macroeconomic dimwittedness of Jim Demint, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and others, who have pooh-poohed projections of catastrophic ramifications of not raising the debt ceiling.  

On the other hand Americans have the president of the United States having to plead the extraordinarily self-evident: that the debt ceiling is no "abstraction," and that "all the [negative economic] headwinds ... will get worse" if the ceiling is left unlifted. Plus, today the International Monetary Fund said in a report that "Failure to raise the debt ceiling 'soon enough,' along with too quick a cut in spending" poses a "severe shock" to the economy here and abroad.

The president says that, the IMF says that, virtually every economist with a human pulse says that, and still, the GOP obstructionists play games -- with dynamite.

It's a tribute to Obama's miraculous temperament that he doesn't explode more often.

Obama's presser

Moments ago, in this morning's press conference, President Obama was visibly indignant and as to close to manifestly incensed about the GOP's debt-talks intransigence as the president temperamentally can get.

It was a thing of beauty: "Call me naive," he said, but he believed that "leaders are going to lead" and "my expectation is they'll do the responsible thing" -- in contrast to the GOP's heretofore maniacal insistence that the middle class take yet more budget hits while billionaires, hedge-fund managers and corporate-jet owners glide through the debt-resolution talks unscathed.

Yet more intriguing, to me, was that in his opening, prepared comments, Obama emphasized not only the acute pain experienced by America's middle class from the Great Recession, but its enduring, pre-2007 socioeconomic challenges. The palpable reelection campaign message: another Obama presidential term will spell a judicious restructuring of America's intrinsically debilitated economy. His first term has been pragmatically limited to overcoming the GOP's ideological insanities and consequent material desolation, Obama seemed to be saying, but his next term will be about rebuilding -- fundamentally -- from the bottom up.      

That, anyway, was the way I read it -- I gleaned a touch of the Kennedyesque. Folks, just get me through the unavoidable pragmatisms of a first term, which always requires concessions to certain vigorous political realities that a second term does not. That lofty idealism demanded by the progressives will have to wait, but the loftiness will indeed come.

The pitiable end of Obama-bashing?

Last night on "Hardball" there aired an engrossing discussion (hey, it happens) among host Chris Matthews, the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker and political commentator Ron Reagan about the recent and disappointing decline of trash talk and hardcore Obama-bashing by the GOP's more leading, shall we say, presidential candidates. Mitt Romney, for instance, has of late distanced himself from the "European-socialist" chant and thereby reduced himself to referencing -- get back -- those "good Democrats" (presumably he's including Mr. Obama) who love their country, and Michele Bachmann, bless her little McCarthyite soullessness, has now renounced all blather of the president of the United States' "anti-Americanism."

This development is, as hinted, most distressing. Its motivation is intrusively clear enough -- any primary candidate who persists in speechifying or interviewing like, well, a Michele Bachmann, risks losing as a general-election candidate the non-lobotomized vote -- nevertheless our sadness at the months-long prospect of, for example, a non-Bachmann Bachmann reaches the inexpressible.  

Yet my immediate question is, Can the Minnesota congresswoman even get away with it? The New Republic's Ed Kilgore seems to think so:

The hard-core Christian Right/Tea Party folk who are Bachmann’s base in Iowa and elsewhere ... [are] fine with the more outlandish things she’s said over the years, but also understand it may be necessary to bring Americans along slowly to the recognition of the high-stakes holy war that Bachmann is waging on their behalf as a self-described "constitutional conservative."

Doubt, however, reigns at this site. The "hard-core Christian Right/Tea Party folk" aren't exactly the kind of folk who prudently weigh the intellectual merits of a Fabian campaign and proceed with strategic caution. They want blood; they want to see it, smell it, hear it, experience it -- and they want it all now. And if Michele fails to deliver it -- as she must, to be taken "seriously" -- what's left of her singularly appealing shtick?

Palin's come-hither tease

Let's see. Sarah Palin has hired no political staff, to speak of. She timed her recent bus tour only to eclipse publicity of the Palin-skewering Blind Allegiance, or so the patently serendipitous timing would seem. Her favorability numbers within the GOP are diving, or have done dove. The conservative wagons are beginning to circle around establishment Romney and tea-partying Bachmann. Conspicuously Palin has made no attempts to familiarize herself with, uh, the issues? Like Mike Huckabee, she has retained her contract with Fox News, while genuine candidates were chased from the network. She was indifferent to governing when she governed, and she couldn't wait to cancel that contract. She is making loads of money.

Now Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman, tells Politico:

I’ve become convinced that there is no grand strategy behind Palin’s activity. There is no rhyme. There is no reason. The only common theme to her schedule of activities, statements and appearances is her seemingly unending ability to attract media coverage.

So, what does Politico conclude about the odds of a Palin presidential run?

[T]he mystery continues.

The media can't do it. They, like a cuckolded husband, just can't bring themselves to acknowledge the distressing reality that the easy woman of their sensationalist dreams is playing them for a fool. She only has to bat her lashes and flash an immodest come-hither look and back they race, swooning and speculating that she's theirs, all theirs, faithfully, once again.

Reversing radicalization

Politico takes note of the radicalization process in play, in that one formidable reason behind Mitch McConnell's accelerating fanaticism in the debt talks is that he "is only protecting himself from the tea party right."

This year, or next year at the latest, the GOP must decide whether its reason for being is to help govern the country or to avoid being primaried by the Tea Party. It cannot do both.

The problem is simple; it's the solution that assuredly boggles the minds of those GOP pols who know what they're now doing is borderline treasonous. No, I don't know how the solution can -- or if it even will -- play out; that is, I'm no influential GOP insider, so I can't possibly know how much pressure the GOP's residual structural integrity can bear -- how the party can wring itself and the nation out of the contemptible fix into which it has contorted matters.

What I do know, without any doubt, is that for all the GOP talk about President Obama being the one who needs to lead, it is precisely the opposite case, here, that is far more critical. Which is to say, GOP leaders must choose between their country and radical, tea party politics -- and if the former, then that will require real leadership.

'She shows up'

It's going to take me some time to start taking this incurable buffoon seriously.

Since coming to the House, [Michele] Bachmann has been the lead sponsor on 40 bills and resolutions, as well as several amendments.

None of Bachmann’s legislation has become law.

"There’s not been one single legislative accomplishment she’s had," said a GOP lawmaker who serves with Bachmann on the Financial Services Committee. "She shows up, but is that the foundation of her campaign opposition?" (my emphasis)

I'm intentionally taking my time. Because by the time she's worth taking seriously, she'll be a GOP primary goner and worthier of only occasional examination as a third-party "flake."

Eugene Robinson goes Will-fully Broderian

Quick -- someone find Eugene Robinson a first-rate political exorcist, so that the ghastly demon of David Broder's aggressive conventionality can be properly cursed and then sternly heaved from the unfortunate Eugene's head.

He writes:

There is no good reason for negotiations on the budget and the debt ceiling to be deadlocked, because the solution is obvious: First, do no harm.

Just what was the point of that line? To reemphasize the obvious, of course that solution is obvious. And naturally any sane, responsible Congress would hew to that salubrious axiom. But, Eugene, when was the last time you heard anyone reference this Congress as ... oh, never mind.

He proceeds:

Democrats are right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts. Republicans are right that this is an awful moment for tax increases ... it’s hard to imagine how taking money out of consumers’ hands — either through cuts in government spending or tax increases — could possibly make things better.

Now that -- all that ghostly spooking of reality -- is scary. Not only are average Democrats "right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts," but above-average Democrats (whom Eugene seems not to have noticed) are even more right that this is a splendid time for spending increases. Since congressional intelligence has been banned this year by Tea Party fiat, however, I won't dwell on intelligent remedies. I would ask whence Eugene got the notion that this "awful moment for tax increases" is related in any conceivable manner or any material place to American "consumers." The only plausible tax increases under discussion are the elimination of some plutocratic subsidies -- not many consumers are panicked over losing their corporate-jet leg up -- and even disallowed discussions of raising income taxes on the top bracket are scarcely "consumer"-oriented.

In the end, Eugene resorts not to the pathetic ghost of Broderian conventional wisdom, but the desperate straw-man bugaboo of vintage George Will:

[I]t’s hard to believe that running trillion-dollar deficits every year is sound policy. Economists who confidently tell us that it’s no problem that the national debt is approaching 100 percent of gross domestic product sound as if they’re whistling past the graveyard.

For starters, no economist has suggested "trillion-dollar deficits every year" -- in perpetuity, as implied. Also, Eugene, in 1945 -- and in modeled accordance with Keynesian theory, which pulled us out of the depression -- the national debt stood at 117 percent of GDP, and the year after it reached 122 percent. Thereafter, because of sound fiscal management, it declined, steadily until ... 1982. It then continued rising until a few small dips in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but, then again, whoops, in 2002, it relaunched.

Gee, I do so wonder if there was some political causation behind those chronological correlations?

Sorry to be so snarky, but, come on. The same Laffable cretins who needlessly caused the massive indebtedness spikes of the last 30 years are now demanding -- and as the overall minority party, no less -- that their fiscally methodological madness be caressed and singularly favored, again.

Come back, Eugene. Come back to Earth, re-alight on reality, and for heaven's sake look around: When it comes to deliberating sane fiscal management, one must begin by acknowledging that the GOP is hopelessly out to lunch; it's primal aim is not to save the system, it's to destroy it.

Of Breitbart and other pissants

With a de rigueur dose of unimpeachable fair-mindedness, the NY Times' media correspondent Jeremy Peters reveals this, via us, about the guttersnipe Andrew Breitbart:

If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don’t, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

Well, well, what a conundrum. Breitbart could be either. It's all a subjective matter of how one sees him. And who's a media correspondent for the world's most distinguished newspaper to venture an opinion? That would be unprofessional. But, tell you what, he'll allow another professional, James McPherson, author of The Conservative Resurgence and the Press, to report the objectively unpleasant:

[T]here are no standards of fact anymore for a lot of people. We have gone from selecting sources of opinion that we agree with to selecting facts we agree with.

To offer this troublesome shift as a recent phenomenon, one would first have to define "recent." In 2009, for instance, 200 years after Darwin's birth, only one of every four Americans said they believed in the blithering obviousness of evolution. Roughly a couple of hundred years before Darwin's arrival on Earth, the Church insisted, in its ecclesiastically infallible wisdom, that Galileo's telescopic findings in the heavens were factually mistaken; and for hundreds of years before that, Western man knew not the correct number of teeth in a horse's head, since Aristotle had got it wrong but no one bothered to actually peak into a horse's mouth to learn otherwise.

OK, that last one slipped into personal reverence over the scientific method, nevertheless it still adds to the astonishing sum of human gullibility.

So it seems to me that what really troubles is not so much that human beings remain ignorant slates to be written on, but that virtually any jackass can do the writing these days.

I mean, Andrew Breitbart? Who the hell is Andrew Breitbart? Is he a thinker of uncommon depths? a magical political organizer of Van Buren-like talents? a visionary of Spinozan splendor? Again, one asks: Who the hell is Andrew Breitbart, except a bundle of ferociously ignorant biases with a Web site ...

... who gets profiled by the New York Times. Thus the artificial eminence of Breitbart, and Beck, and Limbaugh, and all the other right-wing pissants mutated by the modern media into real political players.

By 1870, we were toast

Lately I have tried to recall what presidential election was void of the classically hyperbolic "turning point" rhetoric, most recently on display during Jon Huntsman's self-draft, in which he declared with no little degree of doomsdayism that "Everything is at stake. This is the hour when we choose our future."

Naturally every hour chooses the future in one way or another, but we get Huntsman's drift: In the 2012 year of choice, we face Elysium or Hades. It's one or the other. Just as we did in 2008, and 2004, and 2000 ...

One can advance in this backward trip into the utterly forgettable 1920s' elections or even the more distant, more forgettable late 19th-century presidential snoozers, in which for instance adjustments to the tariff of a few percentage points here and there were campaigned on as momentous, earthshaking matters of national identity and existential righteousness. (Quick: Who saved us in 1884? Who, four years later, rescued us from salvation? And who re-saved us in 1892?)

I confess a delightful cause and effect behind these musings. Over the weekend I was reading the eponymously magnificent The Education of Henry Adams, in which, by page 280, he cried out in horrified resignation:     

The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970. The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.

A trifle too Kantian for my taste, but as with Huntsman, we get Adams' drift. Behind him, due to our "moral" choices, there lay steady goodness; ahead nothing but "likely" doom, unless of course we chose a deviating path.

Did we? Not really. Soon we'd experience a great depression, and 40 years later an even greater one; we were still to see Teapot Dome, Watergate, global wars and Vietnam and Iraq. Hells, all.

Am I suggesting that 2012 will make no difference? Certainly not. Should we be on a road to perdition, our choice of a Romney or Pawlenty as driver would (partisan alert) unquestionably accelerate our journey, whereas the reelection of President Obama would once again forestall the barbarians. Then again, we have -- have we not? -- been forestalling the barbarians every four years since 1788.

They're 'the kiss of death'

Maybe I'm a victim of fanciful thinking, but I can't help reading more into the story -- "2012 contenders shun Hill support" -- than Politico explicitly reports. "The chase for congressional backing [by GOP presidential aspirants] has been moving at a snail’s pace this year compared with the previous election cycle," which is, or so says Politico,

a reflection of the slowly forming presidential field, concern in Congress about the strength of the candidates and a desire by White House hopefuls to keep their distance from an unpopular Washington.

The first given reason has nothing to do with the story's thrust -- it is individual candidates shunning the Hill, so the pace of presidential field formation would have little to do with actual endorsement requests; the second excuse is essentially an irrelevant reversal of the story's theme -- it is candidates shunning the Hill, not the Hill shunning the candidates; however in the third excuse we creep perhaps closer to the story -- Republican White House hopefuls view Washington as a toxic dump. 

But Politico's reporting of this all-inclusive dump -- "an unpopular Washington" -- has a fishy smell to it. For 222 years America's bumbling, incompetent Emerald City has been unpopular among the virtuous munchkins as a kind of alternating good-natured or ill-tempered sport. If, in this 222nd year, Washington seems more unpopular than ever, then might there be a reportable reason? -- and might it lie in the stench and swill of both a partisan and empirical miasma?

Ah, now we're getting somewhere (I either know, or fancy). If you're not quite tracking me yet, then this ambiguous quote from one of Washington's leading wizards should put you on the unambiguous scent:

"Given the landscape, would you want to be endorsed by some Washington insider?" Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who plans to remain neutral in the race, asked half-jokingly. "It’s the kiss of death."

McConnell has seldom encountered a straightforward situation that he couldn't glibly molest into a crooked half-truth. The elementary trick to reading McConnell is simply to assume the unctuous deception, the devilish partial reality, the malicious misdirection, and to keep in mind that if he seems vague, he's terrified. Thus "It's" the kiss of death translates rather easily into "We" -- congressional Republicans -- are the kiss the death.

Put yourself in, say, Mitt Romney's shoes. Would you want Paul Ryan's endorsement? Or Eric Cantor's, or John Boehner's, or the Senate minority leader's -- the guy who led his fellow GOP senators into House Republicans' Gallipoli?

Today's presidential candidates' "We'll call you, don't call us" approach to congressional Republicans is one of judicious distance. McConnell & Co. may want to depict the lay of Capitol Hill as one of generic desolation and universal toxicity, but it was the singular pathogen of the House budget bill -- namely, its feckless crime against Medicare -- that poisoned relations between presidential candidates and congressional incumbents.

The latter collectivity is glowing like a cockroach at Alamogordo, the former collectivity knows it, and therein lies the political mortality of both.

New York's human-rights exception, Con't

This morning after reading my email from, and the comments to, yesterday evening's post -- "New York's human-rights exception" -- I must protest some rather vast misreadings and gross misinterpretations.

First, I scarcely argued against such an "exception," if that was the pragmatic step required to complete this much greater and much worthier journey. Indeed, my opening observation mirrored my acceptance: "Only the poisonous reactionaryism of organized religion could contaminate the human-rights ecstasy of NY's new law." One should note -- rather, should have noted -- that I did not philosophically disallow the contamination. I merely observed it. If coddling the parsons and priests of organized delusions is what it takes to guarantee all of New York's citizens their full citizenship, then by all means coddle away.

Second, at no time, and in no place, and certainly in no words did I advocate a state dictatorship over organized religion. The latter institution may require Kierkegaardian leaps of faith to sustain itself -- and that's perfectly fine with me, since I adore the contemplation and debate of the abstract and metaphysical -- but only a gratuitous leap of logic could have landed on the conclusion that I had advocated, or even suggested, the secular regulation of religion.

Third, it is genuinely odd that for all the indignation expressed over what I did not write, there wasn't a whisper of deliberation over what I did so clearly write: my resentment -- and the resentment of millions of other Americans, be they agnostics, atheists, or the believing but fiscally distraught -- of organized religion's exemption from taxation. This has long existed as a subject of legitimate debate: Does the Constitutional phrase of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" necessarily mean that, say, revenue-starved municipalities are barred from taxing the profits of sprawling, locally housed corporations of a spiritual twist? I think not, but then again I'm no lawyerly Constitutional authority; yet some who are, think not as well. 

Now, do the above opinions suggest an unmistakable anti-organized-religion point of view? You bet your etymologically corrupted Bible and Augustine's epistemologically corrupted City of God they do. As one participant to the scholarly "Jesus Seminar," I believe it was, once opined, and I paraphrase only from memory: Christianity is spent. It's had 2,000 years to prove itself as a positive world force and it has failed. I would add the same holds true for Islam, Judaism, and, as earlier denoted, any other organized delusion. Until these collective mythologies go the way of Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, Molech and Osiris -- and they most assuredly will -- however, than they can, by God, render unto Caesar -- i.e., pay taxes. 

Again, does any of this mean I would have opposed the "exception" under discussion, if only the insertion of such a characteristically small-minded religious exception meant the state of New York could thereby join the modern, authentically spiritual and humane world? Of course not. Nor did I say so last night.

***

postscript: I shouldn't have to add this, but, odds are, otherwise someone would come along and express the additionally illogical objection that the above arguments are likely founded on a godless abomination. In every discussion of the merits of organized religion I've ever experienced, that rude illogic has intruded: the popular conflation of opposition to organized religion and a disbelief in some higher, universal power. So, just to clarify before any such folly takes cyberflight, I stand firmly on the first ground of opposition to man-manufactured "religion," but hold open and even largely accept the possiblity of the second.

The cultural fact that such a testament is not uncommonly required for full admission to "theological legitimacy" only indicates how intellectually oppressively organized religion has strutted throughout the course of human history. As Montaigne either did or would have observed, his cook would know as much about God as the priest, but for profoundly vague reasons, the priest is granted an irreproachable, epistemological edge. Go figure.

New York's human-rights exception

Only the poisonous reactionaryism of organized religion could contaminate the human-rights ecstasy of NY's new law:

Language that Republican senators inserted into the bill legalizing same-sex marriage provided more expansive protections for religious organizations and helped pull the legislation over the finish line Friday night....

The amendment that was passed stated that barring access to same-sex ceremonies, or failing to provide services for them, would not "result in any state or local government action to penalize, withhold benefits, or discriminate against such religious corporation, benevolent order, a not-for-profit corporation operated, supervised or controlled by a religious corporation."

In short, a "religious corporation" is free to discriminate. (What if the Restaurant Association of America had successfully inserted into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that private restaurants were exempt? Yes, I know, restaurant owners don't have their own First Amendment, although the Rand and Ron Pauls of America believe they should.)

Meanwhile, these bigoted religious corporations are free to hold huge tracts of land -- tax free -- and operate immense healthcare and other private and (in reality) quite profitable concerns -- tax free.

The earthly scams of organized religion press on: it's too holy, too sacred to be bothered with honoring all humans' rights, or even pitch in for the material betterment of society on April 15.

It just kind of sticks in one's craw.