Yes, it is. “Etymology,” on the other hand, is not a synonym for “meaning.”

Somehow this birther nut has avoided detection by Wiley Publishing, probably because they make it a pain in the ass for anyone to contact them. If they do find him he can scarcely plead ignorance, as the YouTube version” of this video even carries a disclaimer stating that FOR DUMMIES® is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. I’m sure they’ll find it eventually, though. Meanwhile, go check out that moronic video while you still can.

The factual misstatements in the video are too numerous to explain in detail, so I’ll focus on the most obvious one. Minor v. Happesett was decided in 1875. Chester Arthur, whose constitutional eligibility to the Presidency is identical to Obama’s (both were born on U.S. soil to a U.S. mother and a non-U.S. father, and both had idiot opponents claiming they were born abroad) was elected in 1880. If anyone believed in 1875 that Minor means anything close to what this lying crapweasel says it means, Arthur would never have been a viable candidate. Of course Dean knows this, but doesn’t care. note that there are only two comments posted to his entry, both by people who think he craps ice cream. My own comment, #13, is in moderation:

There is nothing remotely “educational” about this video. It grossly misstates the holding of Minor v. Happersett, flat out lies about Wong not saying anything about “natural-born” (a phrase it actually employs liberally), ignores Article III of the Constitution entirely and generally makes a hash of the entire issue.

Of course you birthers don’t care about facts, but if you did, here is all you really would need to know. If the 1875 decision of Minor v. Happersett really had held that only a person born to two parents is a natural born citizen eligible for the Presidency, Chester Arthur would not have been a viable candidate a mere five years later. It’s not because there weren’t any Chester Arthur birthers out there; there were plenty of them. It’s certainly not because anyone mistakenly believed Arthur’s father was a citizen at the time of his birth; it was well known he was not. No, it’s because nobody, and by that I mean literally nobody, believed that the then-recent decision of Minor v. Happersett meant anything close to what this hack claims it means.

Oh wait, did I say my moderated comment was #13? Why yes, I did. How do you get from only two older, displayed comments to mine being #13? Um….

UPDATE: The lying crapweasel saw this post right away, and responded less than an hour after it was posted. Yet, for some odd reason, three days have gone by and still only the two fawning comments out of 13+ are up. Seems like both this week’s idiot and last week’s know at some level that they are idiots and can’t defend their indefensible positions against anyone who challenges them. At least last week’s idiot, Kevin Lehman, admits that’s what he’s doing.

Contrary to conventional non-wisdom, Kevin A. Lehmann’s views are NOT protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Is there anyone in the three branches of government that can interpret our most sacred document (Playboy notwithstanding) correctly?

Like in Christendom where scores of sects believe mutually contradictory things but all rationalize that the others aren’t “real” Christians, so too has the clear and concise language of the Constitution and the 27 Amendments progressively undergone exegetical attacks over the decades – depending on which party is in power – to conform to a particular political philosophy. And both sides being heavily dependent on the votes of stupid people, both have taken full advantage of this skewed interpretation in their efforts to court them.

But this is one hermeneutical battle America can ill afford to lose. Our founding principles, i.e., Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness By Mocking Stupid People, hang in the balance. In short, unless you want to end up in Idiocracy, our nation’s very survival depends on it.

America faces a grave threat from stupid people. Stupid people are infiltrating our country in droves and they’re doing it under the guise of “Constitutional Protection.” And like that island that used to be Great Britain, if we don’t act now, then it will be later, by definition. Stupid people may be stupid themselves, but a few of their backers are actually quite cunning, crafty and clever. They’re using our ignorance of the understanding of our own Constitution against us, and they are clandestinely and methodically spreading their tentacles in a quiet and unassuming manner.

Federal, state, and local governments on the other hand won’t acknowledge the imminent threat of stupid people. With both parties relying heavily on the stupid vote to win close elections in battleground states, they incorrectly claim that stupid people have “Constitutional Rights” to express their stupid opinions, spam them across the Internet, form stupid discussion groups, and implement Teh St000p1d in their communities and in the public square. They’re dead wrong! And by and large, stupid people are getting away with it just like they have in Europe, particularly in Poland and East Frisia. Only unlike Europe, and in Poland and East Frisia in particular, it’s not too late to stem the tide, but we have to act now. Time is not on our side. In fact, this may come as a shock, but there are actually more stupid people than smart ones on the Internet today. We are already well under way to being stupidified.

To understand stupid people is to understand Teh St000p1d. The ideology of stupidity is nothing short of a totalitarian political, economic, military, social and legal system that’s camouflaged in religious garb. Their mandate (not objective) is to incorporate our country into a global zone of stupid, where empty slogans like “hope and change” pass for an argument and catch phrases like “lamestream media” and “gotcha journalism” pass for a rebuttal.

Sadly, they are making serious inroads towards their tyrannical mandate because America is not resisting. We are all that stands between freedom and a world of stupid. The United States of America is the world’s last bastion of hope.

Yet, the dreadful message we get from ignorant and incompetent lawmakers (and from smart but cynical ones who need the stupid vote) is that our Constitution renders us powerless to do anything about stupid people. On the contrary, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence – properly interpreted – actually give our federal, state and local governments justification and authority to stop Kevin A. Lehman dead in his tracks!

Here’s How . . .

Stupid opinions are NOT speech in the sense we understand speech. Teh St00pid—which stands for “stupid” or “duh hickey” – is about COMPLETE RETARDATION. It is a total form of non-thinking that controls every aspect of the lives of its adherents. It’s a barbaric form of life. It masquerades as good ol’ fashioned Judeochristanity rooted in Old Testament principles, but unlike most of today’s Judeochristians (whoever the hell they are), these guys actually buy in to the thievery and murderous thuggery of the old Testament, even seeking to outlaw any other religions formed after Roman thugs killed Jesus and Christian thugs invented anti-Semitism by blaming it all on the Jews. In fact, some stupid people think any religion formed after Jesus’s death and/or rumors of his resurrection doesn’t count as a “religion” at all!

Only their modern day tactics now include recruiting mentally ill, naive and gullible idiots who spread Teh St00p1d on the Internets. And Western countries indoctrinated with the lies of a U.S. Constitution and that politically correct “Bill of Rights” have reluctantly turned a blind eye. But like the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment, the separate but equal doctrine and handgun bans in our nation’s capital and our third largest city, the Constitution of the United States of America can’t stop us from doing anything. It’s just a piece of paper we can either follow or ignore. So let’s ignore it, Allah damn it!

Given that fact, we must understand our founding principles that (1) the Constitution, and hence any constitutional rights, derive from the smart people who wrote the Constitution, not the stupid people who didn’t, (2) stupid people do not have the right to divest us of our Rights (nor even to correct us for inexplicably capitalizing a common noun for no apparent reason), and (3) the purpose of civil government is to secure the rights our non-stupid founding fathers gave us.

What are our rights, and where do they come from? Playboy? The Jersey Shore? Anyone named Kardashian? No! The Declaration of Independence, whose sole legal effect is to separate us from the island that used to be Great Britain, says:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, except for the stupid ones who are vastly inferior to us, that all non-stupid people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness (which is most easily pursued by poking fun at stupid people) and the right to practice any religion they want, as long as it is Judeochristianity rather than Islam. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men who aren’t stupid. . .”

So, where do our rights come from? Encyclopedia Britannica, of course. And what are those rights? Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness and the right to mock stupid people.

Intellect is the very essence of Allah’s model for civil government in a secular, libertarian-leaning theocracy like our own. Inscribed on the Liberty Bell is Leviticus 19:28 – “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.” I mean, c’mon. Seriously. Who get tattoos?! Stupid people, that’s who.

Do stupid people respect the rights Allah gave us? Of course not! Teh St000p1d stands in stark contrast to Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness and all but the basest, least funny ways to poke fun at stupid people. Let’s have a look . . .

1. Life: Teh St000p1d is a culture of death, fascism, prejudice and, well, stupidity. [And if you didn’t see that last one coming, you’re probably not the sharpest tool in the shed yourself.]
2. Liberty: Teh St000p1d is a culture where freedom means nothing, the Constitution means less (OK, I’ve already said that it *does* mean less, but never mind that) and conversion to another belief system is grounds for expulsion or worse. But if you’re too stupid to know the difference, no problem; just call it “freedom” and the fascist who advocated it a “libertarian-leaning constitutional conservative.”
3. Pursuit of Happiness: Theirs is a dictatorship of boredom and distraction. How many times have we already heard of corrupt businessmen and politicians getting away with their crimes because we were all too busy watching reruns of Jon – Kate + H8 to care? Public stupidity is commonplace. Women who expose their breasts in public are stared at, ogled and sometimes even catcalled by men. Stupid women are no better. For all the suffering and misery in the world, what do they care about? Whether some man left a toilet seat up or not! Jesus H. Chr.. um, I mean, Kevin A. Lehmann, what is this world coming to?
4. Freedom of Speech: Try criticizing stupid people in Poland, one of our few remaining allies in Europe. Psych! Of course nothing will happen, as they’re too damned stupid to notice! You could waltz into any bar in Warsaw and call the drunkest, meanest looking patron a “Polack” to his face and he wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. That’s right, Polacks are so damned stupid they even call themselves Polacks. Is that where you want our country to end up?

For every right supposedly given to us by Allah – or actually given to us by the Constitution – stupid people seek to eradicate.

Do stupid people have the “right” to impose Teh St000p1d in this country which strips us of our rights? No! If Allah wanted stupid people to have the “right” to take our rights away from us, he would have given them half a brain to pull it off. The reason he gave us the wits we have is so we could take those same rights from them!
Lawmakers tell us stupid people have a First Amendment “right” to express their ill-formed opinions, form Facebook groups, proselytize, and implement Teh St000p1d right here. But is that what the First Amendment says? No! See for yourself:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, provided, however, that no rights described herein shall be available to stupid people.”

OK, so maybe I made that last part up but never mind that. Consider the verbiage of what came before very carefully. A lot of lawmakers and most Americans make the exegetical error that the First Amendment grants us rights. It doesn’t. Just like the rest of that quaint, politically correct Constitution, the First Amendment is just a bunch of words on a cheap piece of parchment. It doesn’t grant any rights to anybody, any more than a stupid Facebook note like this one does. All it does is say Congress isn’t supposed to do what Kevin Lehman and his fellow stupids want it to do. It doesn’t prevent Congress from actually doing squat. Therefore, stupid people do not have a First Amendment “right” to publicly express their ill-formed opinions, create Facebook groups, proselytize, implement Teh St0000p1d in our country or copy and paste the same trite phrase several times in a single essay.

Not only do stupid people claim the “right” to impose Teh St000p1d on the stupid communities that are rapidly spreading throughout our country, they also claim the “right” to impose Teh St000p1d on the rest of us in the public square. They demand a stupid-compliant Constitution, private financial institutions that “voluntarily” refuse to comply with the belief systems of others, and that such other abominations as non-Judeochristians be banned from their presence. Moreover, they commit both religious bigotry and first-degree quotation mark abuse, whichever is worse, in denigrating the prayers of other non-Judeochristians as mere “quote, prayers, unquote.”

All this begs the question: Do Americans have any Constitutional protection against the invasion of stupid people being foisted upon us? Absolutely! Article VI, Clause 2 of our Constitution states:

“This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Did you get that? Oh wait, you actually did get that? Never mind what you just read, and instead allow me to tell you what it means. While it says the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, it means that the Constitution is authorized by the supreme law of the land, which in turn means my own Allah-given distaste for stupid people. And anything to the contrary, including that politically correct “Constitution,” must fall.

The practice of Teh St000p1d in the United States, at any level directly violates our Constitution. Stupid people who therefore seek to overthrow our Constitution or otherwise usurp or circumvent it are guilty of Criminal Sedition, or at least of capitalization abuse. The federal government has the duty to prosecute them for sedition, or deport them, even if they are U.S. citizens and there is no place to deport them to. We gotta get rid of those idiots somehow, dammit.

The Declaration of Independence says the purpose of civil government is to secure the rights Allah gave us. Stupid people seek to take away our Allah-given rights. Civil government is supposed to protect us from those who seek to divest us of our rights. Therefore it’s incumbent on every American citizen to insist that our federal, state, and local governments immediately STOP the stupidification of OUR COUNTRY- starting with an immediate cease and desist on the formation of all stupid Google, Facebook and Yahoo! discussion groups! The purpose of our civil government is to protect our ALLAH-given rights. And again, if Allah really wanted these idiots to succeed, he would have given them half a brain.

The Declaration of Independence, whose sole legal force in the U.S. is to separate us from the island that used to be Great Britain, recognizes Allah as Creator, Supreme Judge and Regulator of the World – our Divine Protector.

In fact, some stupid people even interpret Article VII of our Constitution, which which explicitly forbids titles of nobility even for citizens, as nevertheless recognizing everyone’s favorite non-citizen, Jesus H. Christ, as a “lord” solely because the framers identified years in the same Allah-damned way everyone else in the western world does:

“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Seven…

ZOMG! Did you just see that? They called the year 1787 “in the year of our Lord,” so by Jove, that must mean that someone who was living 1787 years earlier was a lord. Who might that be? Herod? Pilate? The mind boggles. Next time you catch an atheist identifying the current year as 2011 “A.D.,” be sure to ask him whose lordship he is asserting.

In Summary:

1. Our rights come from Allah. Stupid people think they mean whatever stupid people want them to mean, which is nothing, and that their own stupid interpretations trump the Constitution. Our Constitution doesn’t give “rights” to anybody. So stupid people don’t have “constitutional rights” to come to our secular nation, make up a religion called Judeo-Christianity, and do those other stupid things I copied and pasted umpteen times before.
2. Stupid people take away from non-stupids the rights the Constitution gave them (and the rights which Allah himself would surely have given us, if we could be sure he existed at all). Since our Declaration of Independence makes us a separate country from the island that used to be Great Britain, the purpose of civil governments is to secure the rights Allah gave us, it is the duty and responsibility of civil governments at all levels to protect us from the stupid people who would take them away without even knowing WTF they are doing (because they are, like, stupid).
3. Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution – the “Smart Supremacy Clause” – is the silver bullet that makes it unconstitutional for stupid people to open their mouths anywhere in our Country.

Let me be perfectly clear. Stupid people are not friends of America. They may act like affable dunces but they are, at their core, our enemy. The very notion of “Judeo-Christian” – a syncretistic fusion of Judaism and Christianity – being promoted by such notable stupid people as Kevin A. Lehmann, author of the widely spammed essay “Why Islam is NOT Protected Under the US Constitution!” is an abomination. It’s anti-American, or at least un-American, and antithetical to the religious liberty upon which our great nation was founded. It is imperative that you understand the inherent danger of stupid people, and the amalgamation of folding religion into Teh St000p1d.

Your state senators and congressmen are completely oblivious to the imminent threat that stupid people pose to the sovereignty of our nation. Some are dependent on the stupids and the rest are uneducated and weak. It’s imperative you demand they get informed very quickly and embrace the fight to stop the spread of Teh St000p1d at the local level. MENSA, whose name is Spanish for “stupid,” issued a report last year entitled: “Stupid People: More Dangerous Than You Think (Unless, of Course, You Are Stupid Yourself, In Which Case You Don’t Think At All).” Demand they read it and take immediate action to defend your community from Teh St000p1d.

Are you curious to know what life is like when your community has been infiltrated with stupid people, especially when you consider that nearly half the population is now stupider than average? Click here to listen to my radio show back on February 30th with Anders Behring Breivik, a stupid person who hates Muslims even more than Kevin Lehmann does. Since that time, he has murdered almost 80 non-Muslims and stands to serve a whopping 21 years in prison for his entire rampage. Do you seriously doubt that the stupids are taking over?

Europe, in the interest of multiculturalism and political correctness, made a grave error. And now they are hopeless to reverse it, especially in the island that used to be Great Britain, without a civil and very bloody religious war. An entire country, even with it’s apostrophe abuse intact, is now at the mercy of Kevin A. Lehmann and the Stupid Brigade. Recently exonerated actor Hormel Chavez, famed star of “Ow, My Balls,” listed ten steps Western countries must take to halt the stupidification of their countries. All ten steps would be mandated by our Declaration of Independence, if only that documented mandated anything at all beyond our separation from the island that used to be Great Britain. All are consistent with the Constitution stupid people loathe (or would loathe, were they smart enough to understand it at all):

1. Stop kicking me in the nuts. There’s nothing remotely funny about that, and it hurts like hell. How would you like it if someone did that to you? Just stop.
2. Stop pretending that your stupid ideas are “speech.” The free speech clause was intended to protect the expression of intelligent speech, not yours.
3. Show the true face of one stupid person or worse, a group of stupids acting in concert. It’s not pretty.
4. Stop all immigration from countries whose citizens have an average IQ lower than our own. For stupid people who are already citizens, tell them that if they STFU and do what smart people tell them, they may continue to live here as dimmies. [And don't worry about that obvious pun, either; it won't be obvious to the stupid people who are the butt of it.]
5. Outlaw Teh St000p1d and deport everyone who says anything stupid in public.
6. Require Kevin A. Lehmann and every person who spams his essay across the Internets to sign a loyalty oath or be kicked in the nuts. Once they grudgingly sign it, kick them in the nuts anyway, cuz you know they’re going to violate it eventually.
7. Yeah,that’s great that you love my show. Don’t kick me in the nuts. Seriously. Kick Kevin in the nuts instead. He deserves it, I don’t.
8. Seek reciprocity with Poland and East Frisia for non-stupid people who wish to reside in those countries. Shouldn’t be too hard to do; just draft an agreement using really big words in very small type, tell them it says the opposite of what it actually says, and they’ll sign it to look smart.
9. Close all stupid schools, public or private. They are fascist institutions teaching hate, or would be if only they were teaching anything at all.
10. Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop kicking me in the nuts. That is so nut funny. Err, I mean, not funny. Damn you, auto correct.

In closing, we are at war with a very evil and cunning enemy. An enemy which, notwithstanding the lacking intellect of its adherents, seeks to destroy everything that is good about the United States of America; Everything we value; Everything we cherish, the whole friggin’ point of going to school for all those years as a kid. Everything our forefathers and successive generations fought and died for, so that we could receive the torch of freedom and pass it on to our children and grandchildren.

This is our moment. It is our time to boldly split an infinitive, confuse a pronoun with a contraction, and stand up for Allah, our independence from that island that used to be Great Britain, our Constitution, and all the rights stupid people would yank away in the name of Lord Jesus. H. Judeochrist. Let us exercise our Allah-given unalienable rights and say “Yes to Freedom!” and “No to Oppression!” We owe it to our children, our grandchildren, our grandparents, a few of our great-grandparents, but not to our great-great-grandparents, who really ought to be dead by now. And of course we don’t owe our great great grandchildren anything, either; that would violate the rule against perpetuities. But everyone from grandparents to grandchildren is definitely owed.

Until next time . . . Go back to sleep, America!
Kevin, A. Lameman

UPDATE: <beavis>Are you threatening me?</beavis>

UPDATE: Apparently an idle threat. The idiot in chief wrote:

@ Xriq: I don’t know who the hell you are, but if you want to keep insulting me, you’ll give me no choice but to give you a verbal smack down. What is it with people of your ilk? Your ignorance is only surpassed b your sheer ugliness. Just once, baffle me with a glimmer of brilliance, would you?

to which I swiftly replied:

Sorry, @Kevin, no can do. Anyone who can’t tell “its” from “it’s,” a state from a religion, the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution, his own butt from a hole in the ground or when to capitalize a common noun is just too damned stupid to know brilliance if he saw it. I don’t know why you think I’d be remotely threatened by the idea of you giving me a verbal smackdown. Quite the contrary; I’m sure any attempt would be every bit as deranged, poorly-reasoned and downright Unabomberesque as this essay was – and therefore, equally entertaining. My only request is that whatever pearls of non-wisdom you choose to share here be copied to the comment area of my blog entry, so my readers can appreciate them, too.

As of August 22,2011 at 9:12 p.m. EDT, my reply remains in moderation, while three subsequent comments from two other readers have been approved. Apparently my response was too “ugly” for Mr. Lehmann’s feelings, even while his own bigotry was not, nor was this:

Amen!! There is NO MIDDLE GROUND!! Deport and expatriate all Muslims from American soil. They are citizens of a foreign nation, Islam, which dedicated to the destruction of our God-given inalienable rights. Deport now!! And start with the Muslim in the WH.

Or this:

KEVIN THE CONSTITUTION IS NOT A SUISIDE PACT THERE FOR WE DO HAVE THE RIGHT TO OUT LAW THIS MURDEROUS CULT.PISSLAM HAS TO GO JUST LIKE COMMUNISM AND ALL THE OTHER FRONT GROUPS WHO ARE TRYING TO DESTROY OUR “REPUBLIC”.I THINK TREASON TRIALS ARE IN ORDER FOR THIS ADMINISTRATION TO SAY NOTHING ABOUT THE FELONIES COMMITTED BY BONGO AND PALS.

Some stuff is just too dumb even to mock.

FINAL UPDATE: No surprise, the coward takes his ball and goes home.

Whose posting privileges on all Google fora (beginning with this one) should be revoked forthwith. If, however, he finds this post or my comments on Google fora and finds a way to get me shut out of my own GMail account, consisting of my first name (Jeff) followed by my middle initial (W) and my surname (Bishop) followed by the usual Google Mail domain, I shall give him credit for being a more resourceful prick than previously thought.

For the past 2 1/2 years, birthers have screeched “Where’s the birth certificate?” despite having been provided with one a long time ago. Now that the long-form certificate (or, in Birther-ese, the “birth certificate”) has also been released, I’m frankly at a loss as to what the Birthers thought Birth Certificate #2 was supposed to accomplish that Birth Certificate #1 didn’t. Below is a table of the information provided by each:

So Birthers and former Birthers (and to the latter group, welcome back to earth, it’s good to have you back), please do tell us. Did that narrowly averted constitutional crisis turn on…

• …whether the Hawaii Department of Health was or was not located in Honolulu, Hawaii U.S.A. from August 1 through August 8, 1961?
• …the precise location in the City and County of Honolulu, on the Island of Oahu, at which he was born?
• …whether he was born at 7:24 P.m. or PM?
• …whether his does or does not include a comma?
• …whether Stanley Ann Dunham’s residence at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway fell inside or outside the city limits of Honolulu?
• …whether Stanley Ann Dunham’s residence at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway was or was not on a farm or plantation?
• …whether the County of Honolulu, on the Island of Oahu, really was part of the State of Hawaii, U.S.A.?
• All of Honolulu, that is, not just the Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital?
• Something more hair-splitting and technical still, cite>e.g., whether “Stanley Ann Dunham” was his mother’s full maiden name (as only the long-form certificate includes the word “full”)?
• None of the above, of course we were going to write off the second birth certificate just like the first. Check out this nifty site, which contains smoking-gun proof that a file called “birth-certificate-long-form.pdf” is actually a PDF! What more proof do you need, you silly Obama fanboy, you?
• None of the above, but we birthers were just dying to finally get something in writing from Hawaii to prove that someone named Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya.
• None of the above, but I think Donald Trump is cool.
• Other (specify).

We interrupt this Family Law is FUBAR series to point out something else that is now FUBAR: my employment situation. If you have any leads for an attorney position, especially any combination of corporate / regulatory / insurance / commuting distance from the Triad, please let me know.

We will return to the original bitch session shortly.

When you get accustomed to something, you tend to feel like you own it, but usually you don’t. No one feels entitled to a job they just started, but if you’ve been working for the same company for 20 years and suddenly get laid off, you feel like your rights have been violated, even though they probably haven’t been. Conversely, you probably don’t feel as “entitled” to the house you just bought as you do to the one you’ve been living in for half your life, even though your legal entitlement is the same in either case. So when, and under what circumstances, is being accustomed to something actually a factor in deciding if you are entitled to it? As a former President might say, it depends upon what the meaning of the word “it” is. Here’s a table:

Doing nothing while married to someone who does something can pay big dividends. For Lorna Wendt, doing nothing paid $20 million. Nice work if you can get it.

One fundamental problem with family law over the years, particularly here in the Bible belt, is the paternalistic notion that family law should aim to keep the divorce rate low, rather than accepting divorce as a reality and trying to smooth the process as much as possible when it happens. The theory seems to be that happy, perfectly functional marriages end abruptly because one partner wakes up on the wrong side of the bed one day and gets a divorce on a whim. Of course few if any couples actually divorce that way. Getting married on a whim, that’s another matter, so if we really are going to go the paternalistic route, perhaps we should stop worrying about the divorce rate, as such, and worry instead about the crappy-marriage rate that feeds into it. As Clemmons dentist Kirk Turner infamously told his late wife Jennifer, there is “more than one way to end a marriage,” only one of which impacts that dreaded divorce rate. So if we’re going to play the paternalism card, we should do so with an aim to prevent bad marriages from happening in the first place.

Needless to say, few states adopt this brand of paternalism at the front end. Individuals don’t (when was the last time you stood up and objected at a wedding when the preacher invited you to?) so it should come as no surprise that democratically elected governments don’t, either. Per About.com, no state requires couples to wait more than five days to marry after applying for a marriage license, and only six (Alabama, Kansas, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Texas and Wisconsin) even limit one’s ability to remarry within the first six months following a divorce. By contrast, North Carolina requires a full year of physical separation before either party can even file for divorce, and another month or two after that before a divorce will actually be granted. Despite this, our divorce rate has held steady at 4.5 per 1,000 in 2001 and 4.4 in 2004, well above the national average in both years. More recently, our rate has increased even as the national rate declined. While inter-state comparisons are always tricky, it seems clear that our long waiting period for divorces is certainly not helping matters, and may even make the marriage failure rate worse.

While lengthy waiting periods do little or nothing to prevent divorce, it does plenty to make the process uglier and more expensive than it needs to be. Not only does requiring one spouse to move out create an unnecessary financial burden for both in the short term, it also sets up the spouse who doesn’t move to cry “abandonment,” which should be irrelevant in a no-fault environment but which does wonders to privilege the spouse who drove the other away over the one who had the cojones to leave. The law shouldn’t favor either spouse over the other. Whoever files has to pay the filing fee, and in return, they get to choose the venue (if more than one is available) and most importantly, they get the warm and fuzzy feeling of having filed an official court document stating that they hereby “complain of” the estranged spouse who for years has been complaining of them. That’s the only difference it ought to make.

As you’ve probably noticed, I don’t post here much anymore. These days, most of the links and snarky remarkies that would have have gone to the blog end up on Twitter or Facebook rather than here. However, I do still think there’s a place for the blog, particularly when it comes to lengthy, often link-ridden discussions that don’t play well on Facebook or come anywhere close to the 140-character limit. This post is the first of several such entries.

Re the heading, no, I didn’t turn gay, but yes, I have mostly flipped on the issue of gay marriage. I still believe, as I did before, that the issue ought to be decided by the democratic law-making process, and not by judges straining to give the Equal Protection Clause a meaning none of its proponents or even opponents anticipated, and which almost certainly would have been worded differently if they had. Cf. Phyllis Schafly, who almost singlehandedly killed the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, in part by arguing that a comparably worded clause in that amendment would be construed to cover gay marriage. Most thought her argument a stretch but we now know it was prescient. So while I don’t want judges getting involved in this, I do think that allowing same-sex marriage is a legislative decision that voters or legislatures, depending on the law of the particular state, should seriously consider.

The reason for my change is simple. In my heavy blogging days, when Mrs. Ex was Mrs. X and divorce was unthinkable, I naïvely assumed that our existing family law was brilliantly developed over the millennia to make the laws specific to traditional marriages as absolutely perfect as they possibly could be. Well maybe not quite so absolutely, but in that direction. I did not oppose civil unions as an alternative to same-sex marriage, but did reason that the concept of a permanent same-sex union – something most gays themselves didn’t want as recently as a generation ago – was an experiment that should be conducted separately from traditional marriage for at least a generation, with each legislature considering changes to each law separately. Maybe certain blood tests are needed for straight marriages, but not gay, or vice versa. Maybe some are needed for male-male unions but not female-female ones. Maybe no-fault marriage was a terrible idea for straights that should be rescinded someday, but for reasons having nothing to do with gays (and maybe in fact a reason gays didn’t want marriage at all in the bad old days). Too many variables that needed to be experimented with separately for a generation or so. After that period, if our Legislature’s best ideas for male-male unions, female-female unions and male-female unions all just happened to be exactly the same, we could merge the legal concepts then. In the meantime, let’s not corrupt almost a thousand years of common law genius with a brand new experiment. Baby, bathwater, etc.

My new view, after having recently gone through a divorce, is that family law is FUBAR. If you are one of those fortunate ones whose marriages go swimmingly from the day you say “I do” until one of you is dead, good for you. Family law is technically just as bad for you as anyone else, but that won’t matter since none of those crappy laws will ever be applied in your case. But those of us who they do apply to know firsthand just how bassackwards and, in some cases, downright ugly, the laws can be. North Carolina in particular is a judicial hellhole in this regard. In an ideal world, are the best rules for gay unions the same as the best rules for lesbians, let alone straights? Who knows? But I do know that both should be written on a clean slate, and if adding gays to the mix is the political catalyst we need to get the debate going, so be it. The next few posts are going to explain why I think family law is messed up, and what I think ought to be done about it. As always, comments are welcome.

It’s official: Chicago voters will get the government they deserve. The only thing they didn’t deserve was for two unelected judges to deny them that choice because “resident” means one thing and “reside” means something totally different. Good on the IL Supreme Court for straightening that out.