Saturday, September 13, 2008

Separation of Me From Daytime TV

I watched a video clip of The View, that strange show where 5 rich women tell the housewives of America how to live their lives.

Last week, John McCain paid the gals a visit. The group asked him about the Supreme Court (surprise, surprise, Roe v. Wade came up within 10 seconds), and Whoopi Goldberg also asked McCain if she should be worried about becoming a slave.

Whoopi asked that question because McCain says he wants Supreme Court justices that interpret the constitution the way the Framers intended. That is, not to write legislation, but to weigh the legislation against the words written in the constitution.

This is where Whoopi pounced, asking if she should be worried about "becoming a slave again." Poor McCain had to murmur that no, that wouldn't happen, but that he understood her concern. The crowd applauded. Whoopi comically fanned herself with a slip of paper and admired her own intelligence. McCain had to give her a hat tip because, though talking to an idiot, he was in the idiot's house.

The irony of Goldberg's stupidity is rich. Just as McCain finished saying that he doesn't want justices writing law, Whoopi asked if the justices will bring back slavery. It was too far above her head to grasp that 1) the Supreme Court cannot write slavery into law, and 2) even if the legislature wanted to write slavery into law, it would be against the 13th Amendment of the constitution, making the law moot. Therefore, Goldberg is in total agreement with McCain: the Supreme Court shouldn't be writing laws, and they should be interpreting it the way the Framers intended.

The 13th Amendment reads like this:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.


And that's that. No slavery. If Goldberg wants to worry about new laws, she should be looking to Congress, not the Supreme Court.

The hosts of The View need a refresher course in the different branches of government. I'd be happy if they even bothered to Google it.

Whoopi also took a run at McCain for the separation of church and state mumbo jumbo, which isn't in the constitution. The Framers batted the concept around in correspondence, but they never made any specific rules about it (though most people use the First Amendment to cover the subject).

Atheists have been using the church/state argument to paint ever widening circles intended to shut Christians up, thinking that church/state is written in stone. The logical conclusion of their argument seems to be that leaders should never be religious. Untrue. What the Framers seemed to intend was that no president should also be the leader of a religious group. That is, a religion's beliefs don't write the rules. But there's a flipside: the Framers didn't want the state to tell a religion what to do either. That's the whole point of the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause. It isn't there to protect the government, it's there to protect the religious worshipper.

In any case, contrary to what the View gals want, nowhere in any US rule book is there a passage that says a president cannot say the word "God." Unfortunately, there's no rule against being forced to hobnob with daytime talkshow hosts, either.

The church/state deal is a problem for Whoopi and the gang because Palin prays. Whoopi says that it worries her. She agrees that the US may have a Judeo-Christian tradition (McCain brought up the term, which is why Goldberg used it later to sound smart), but she says that there's Muslims and Zoroastrians in America, too. When she said that, five people applauded and McCain, to his credit, said, "There's a few Zoroastrians at the back."

Church/state. Palin prays. There goes the neighbourhood.

Everybody's been lionizing Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln these days. I'm sure Whoopi thinks that Lincoln was a great man for freeing the slaves and fighting the Civil War. I believe that, too. Still, this statement from Lincoln regarding the Bible would scare the hell out of Goldberg:

"In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it."

Yikes. If Honest Abe were running for president today, Whoopi would rake him over the coals for that. Civil war? Suspending habeus corpus? Bible thumping? The man's a murderous Jesus-freak and a tyrant.

As for Roosevelt, here's his take. Whoopi should listen carefully: "If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office."

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