Black Shards Press – Electronic Gumbo is Our Specialty

The Supreme Court of the United States says it’s OK to be gay. Charming. Thanks, Justices, for your help in raising strong, healthy children in the cesspool of modern life. And thanks to the Houston Chronicle, for assenting.

I love Anthony Scalia’s statement: “Even if the Texas law does deny equal protection to “homosexuals as a class,” that denial still does not need to be justified by anything more than a rational basis, which our cases show is satisfied by the enforcement of traditional notions of sexual morality.”

In this statement, Justice Scalia illustrates what law really is: the commonly held judgements and values about right and wrong. The clever reader will notice the correct application of the relative terms “rational” and “traditional”, because the fact is that consensus is not required to validate laws, nor is inclusion in society guaranteed for every person.

Many people will be watching what comes next. Gay rights groups will not stop here, and their push for recognition of same-sex marriages will be met with resistance from the normal elements of society. I shudder to think of the day that this country gives a perverted relationship between two men the same weight as a real marriage and what the reaction of the normal majority will be.

For many Americans, myself included, should this ruling come to pass it will mark a part of the end of the legitimacy of our government over the people. Who can say what will happen then?

Frankly, no matter how much it pains me, I have to agree with this ruling, Justice Scalia’s passionate dissent notwithstanding. But there is a difference between proper and perverted behavior that our government would do well to recognize.

Thom Marshall wrote about a girl who wants to live with her step-mother instead of her biological one, only to be stymied by the courts.

When will judges learn to keep their noses out of business like this? A 12-year old knows well enough what’s best. Far better, I might add, than a judge who’s too busy to even hear the cases in his jurisdiction.

Similarly, the courts need to uphold the rights of adoptive parents who have committed their hearts, lives, and wallets to the raising of their children and stop favoring biological parents who re-appear into the lives of these children.

Biology means very little, in the scheme of life and our legal system should concern itself with the stability and quality of a child’s upbringing rather than rewarding under-achieving sperm and egg donors.

It’s nice to see a real academy of education win an NCAA (baseball) championship for a change. Congrats to the Rice Owls!

I’d love to see something like that happen in basketball.

When pigs fly…

In a better ruling than was issued in regards to the scourge of affirmative action, the Supreme Court ruled it is constitutional for libraries to filter porn on public computers.

As you may know, I still believe it would be most effective to begin to partition the Internet into zones using top-level domain suffixes like .porn, .sports, etc., to make filters more effective.

But at least 6 people inside the Washington beltway used some common sense today, so it’s a good day!

The Supreme Court has voted to allow “limited” forms of affirmative action in college admissions policy. Here’s what Houstonians had to say.

Notice anything odd about the feedback page? Of those pictured, only one was a minority and I use that term loosely when referring to a college graduate. I found that highly amusing. Are the Chronicle’s demographics such that minorities don’t read the paper?

Affirmative action, reverse discrimination, whatever you want to call it, has been around for over a generation and its benefits have been minimal. It’s time for absolute standards to be applied to everyone equally.

National columnist Jacquelyn Mitchard is taking her email address out of circulation because of spammers.

This is the same problem as us common-folk have; perhaps someone important will care about her, though.

Ultimately this is probably going to boil down to people being assigned an IP address the day they are born so as to fix and secure Internet communications. Pair this with a “do not spam” registration database and you have the only real solution to the problem.

So much for privacy. Don’t tell John Ashcroft about this idea!

How about telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?

If Christie Whitman cares so much about the report’s integrity, she ought not to have run out on her job.

Now that’s the legal and ethical vision a U.S. Senator should have! I’m just sorry that Orrin’s presidential bid floundered…

I suspect there’s a band of 19-year old hackers looking into Hatch’s on-line presense even as I type…wrong bunch to poke a stick at…

And who ever would have guessed he was a song writer?

Update:

Dwight Silverman of the Chronicle had some comments about Senator Hatch’s desire to trash music downloaders’ PCs.

One cannot hold back the tides of change, Mr. Hatch. Better to adapt to the changes that are inevitable.

Internal Revenue Service employees using thousands of computers accessed prohibited Web sites, blah, blah, blah.

There’s nothing unusual about this; every company has the same issues in this day and age.

But maybe this is why I just got my tax refund this past week…

Now they’re complaining about hydrogen as a new environmental debate as erupted over hydrogen fuels.

Can anything be worse than burning oil and driving Ford Expeditions???