Self Ownership, Obamacare, and Abortion Rights

I was asked to publish the following article at the Savvy Street.  I agreed, but I wanted to revise it a bit.  The revised version is entitled The Ninth Amendment, Self-Ownership, and Abortion Rights.  

The Supreme Court has noted that abortion is not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution.  It is not.  Neither is it mentioned explicitly that every individual owns his or her own life.  Yet those rights acknowledged explicitly in the Constitution in the First and Second Amendments would seem to have a basis in an assumption that every individual owns his or her own life.  The right to self-ownership is surely one of the rights that was meant to be protected by the Ninth Amendment.  "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Ninth Amendment is the most important amendment in the Bill of Rights philosophically because it recognizes that an individual's rights are not just a grant of government.  It recognizes, as did the Declaration of Independence, that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness --"  It is the Ninth Amendment that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual in accordance with our philosophy of government spelled out in The Declaration of Independence.

Tragically, those who seek to expand the powers of government far beyond its enumerated powers in the Constitution, have never wanted to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual.  His broad rights to self-ownership, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of association have been subject to frequent violation by government too eager to control the lives of its citizens.  The central role of the Declaration of Independence and of the Ninth Amendment have both been denied.  This means that many government overreaches that should have been held unconstitutional on the basis of the Ninth Amendment have not been so thwarted.  The Ninth Amendment has been almost totally ignored.  This has led to many very contorted rulings by the federal courts trying to find some protection of rights that many Americans believe they have somewhere in the Constitution.  Justice Clarence Thomas has been notable for his lone attempts to point this problem out.

It has been noted by many that the Justice Alito argument that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and therefore is not a right recognized by the Constitution, opens the door for making a similar argument against a right to same-sex marriages, the use of contraceptives, and interracial marriages.  Based on the Alito argument, each of these rights might be returned to the states for legislation limiting or protecting them.  These rights, as is the case with an abortion right, must have their proper basis in the right to self-ownership and freedom of association, both of which should be seen as protected by the Ninth Amendment.

The abortion rights decision by the Supreme Court has greatly angered many people, most of whom have consistently voted for the Democratic Party, though a sizeable fraction of Republicans also believe in abortion rights. The Democratic Party has been most vociferous in its denial of the right to self-ownership in all contexts but one and in its denial of the protections of the Ninth Amendment.  The existence of an abortion right must start with a woman's ownership of her own body. 

One of the best examples of the Democratic Party interfering with the right to self-ownership was the enactment of Obamacare.  Every Democrat Senator and 87% of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for Obamacare.  They spent an incredible amount of political capital on this highly unpopular legislation.  While there were other reasons why many Democrats wanted this control over the maintenance of every American's mind and body, many wanted and understood that they were  really asserting a principle that no one owned their own mind and body exclusively.  They asserted that there was a collective ownership of every person's mind and body, which gave the collective, acting through the government, the right to dictate how every American would maintain his or her own mind and body.  The principle of collective ownership of our minds and bodies was explicitly noted in the first income tax return Obamacare applied to that designated the tax penalty line Shared Collective Responsibility.  I made the argument at the time that this assertion of collective ownership was the real issue with Obamacare, but almost no one supported me in this.

So now many women are furious that their abortion rights may be limited by the state they or other women live in.  They insist that they own their own bodies and should have the right to decide for themselves whether they will have an abortion or not.  Unfortunately, it does not dawn on them that if there is a right to self-ownership, then it applies far more broadly than just to abortion issues.  It surely also applies to the right that every individual, man or woman, has to determine how they will use and maintain their bodies.  It applied to Obamacare and many other examples of government limits on our board sovereign individual rights to self-ownership, including the ownership of our labor and our freedom of contract.  But no, selective assertion of a broad principle is all they care about.  Because of that failure to think in terms of principles, the Supreme Court now has no basis to assert any national abortion right.  The matter has been turned over to the states to decide.

I believe a woman has an abortion right, but its boundary is limited by that time when the development of a fetus makes it a human being protected from murder, or by when it is capable of independent life.  I am not asserting where that boundary is.  That is a thorny problem.  Perhaps that is a problem best left to the states and the more local beliefs of the people who live in those states.  However, wherever those decisions are made, if a woman has an abortion right, it is critically dependent upon her right to self-ownership.  Women who want to assert this right, ought to assert the right to self-ownership for every individual, man or woman, in all the contexts to which it applies.  If they do this, government will be far more limited than it is today and everyone but a few invidious special interests will benefit immensely.

Give Up Your Life Day

Well, it is once again Tax Day and once again the federal government and most state governments have confiscated many of the productive hours of each of our individual lives.  The more hours you chose to work and the more your productivity was recognized by others in trade, the more progressively the hours of your life were stolen from you.  The politicians and bureaucrats used this ill-gotten plunder to buy votes, to live the good life themselves, and to relish their success as our overlords.

Not content with just claiming many of the productive hours of our lives, this is the first year in which the claim that the government owns our minds and bodies generally has appeared on the tax forms.  See Line 61 below:

By virtue of government ownership of every American's body and mind, it claims the right to dictate how every individual will maintain their property in trust for the government, unless that individual pays tribute to the Mongol Horde in order to maintain a pretense of self-ownership.  Of course, self-ownership should mean the payment of tribute was not necessary.  So, there really is no way to maintain the exercise of one's sovereign right to self-ownership within the borders of the United States.  All payment of the tribute or the purchase of ObamaCare approved health insurance does is to cede one's right to self-ownership.  The government claims you must cede self-ownership one way of the other.

Did you know that 8 out of 10 tax filers in 2013 received a tax refund?  Did you know that in 2012 the typical tax filer received a tax refund of about $3,000?  Clearly this happens because the government provides tax tables to employers that demand over-withholding from income and few people adjust their allowances to eliminate this severe over-withholding.  It is clear that this does two things the wily government plunderers love:

• The government gets a large interest-free loan from most taxpayers.
• Most taxpayers are distracted by their refunds from the larger sum of money plucked from their hides.

Interestingly, if the taxpayer in any year should happen to owe the government $1000 or more and that sum is more than 10% of the total tax owed, the government demands an interest payment of 1.995%!  This is not a two-way, mutually respectful relationship.  It is clear that the government is the master and the taxpayer is the servant!

You might think you might just ignore the tyrannical Line 61 claim of government ownership of your body and mind, but the government will take the tribute out of your tax refund, if you have one.  I have heard it said that if you arrange to have no tax refund, unlike 80% or more of the filers, then the government cannot force you to pay the tribute, which they call a shared responsibility payment in the IRS 1040 Instruction publication.  But, the 1040 Form lumps it under the heading of Other Taxes, consistent with Chief Justice John Roberts absurd rationale for declaring ObamaCare a tax, even after it had been insisted over and over during the passage of ObamaCare that it was not at all a tax on the Middle Class.  ObamaCare was passed on the basis of innumerable lies.  This phrase "Shared Responsibility Payment" is most explicitly collectivist and makes it very clear that at most each individual owns only some portion of his own life and mind and body.  That portion is always subject to being reduced so long as the law that reduces the number of shares the individual holds in his own life is accompanied by a tax.  This is the Chief Justice John Roberts ruling.  The presence of a tax in a law allows the law to deprive the individual of any individual right, except insofar as that right is most explicitly spelled out in the Amendments to the Constitution and the courts choose to recognize that right in a reasonably broad manner.

Let us suppose you decide to ignore the abhorrent Line 61 and you have no tax refund coming or it is very small. You might think you are home free. Not necessarily. The IRS has a Catch-22 for almost anything. They may not be able to answer your phoned in question or if they do answer it, you may be more likely to be given the wrong answer than the right one and you will be 100% responsible for "your" error.  There is no sharing of responsibility in this.  But, there are a people in the IRS who are quite cunning and out to get you. So, how do they get you in this case? Did you know that the IRS may impose a penalty of $5,000 on top of any other penalties for what they deem a frivolous return? See page 92 of the Form 1040 Instructions:

"A frivolous return is one that does not contain information needed to figure the correct tax  or shows a substantially incorrect tax because you take a frivolous position or desire to delay or interfere with the tax laws.  This includes altering or striking out the preprinted language above the space where you sign." 

The IRS will brook no challenge to its role as Master.  It will not allow you the "right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on your tax form filings.  The First Amendment is of no concern to the IRS, though we might think the IRS was a part of the Government.  But then we have all too clearly seen how this IRS does not believe in freedom of speech at all, with its vendetta against Tea Party and Constitution Education organizations.  The IRS makes it very clear that it is an enemy of the Constitution!  It is also very clear that the IRS and the Obama Regime are explicitly enemies of all of our individual rights, including the most fundamental right of all, self-ownership!

A Clearly Rational Federal Court Decision Against the IRS Rule to Offer Subsidies on Federal ObamaCare Exchanges

Among the cases challenging the IRS rule that subsidies for individuals and tax penalties for non-complying individuals and companies would be administered in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, is the case brought by Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of the state of Oklahoma.  Oklahoma and 35 other states did not choose to establish PPACA or ObamaCare exchanges, as the PPACA law tried to get them to do by taxing every American, but only allowing individual subsidies in those states establishing an ObamaCare exchange.  Non-complying states were to be penalized with taxes and the loss of any partial return of that tax money in the form of subsidies.  That this was the intent was very clear to those who followed the progress of the PPACA legislation through Congress.

Of course, it was also very clear that PPACA was a revenue bill which violated the constitutional requirement that it originate in the House of Representatives.  It is further clear that the only justification for the collectivist claim that the collective gets to dictate how every American maintains his or her body's and mind's health is based on a claim of collectivist ownership of everyone's mind and body.  This is a very clear and certain violation of the American Principle of a very limited government dedicated only to the protection of the equal, sovereign right of each and every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I for one am exceedingly furious that the government considers me its slave by depriving me of self-ownership and the right to pursue my own happiness.

United States District Judge Ronald A. White of the Eastern District of Oklahoma ruled on 30 September 2014 that "the IRS Rule is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. [paragraph] 706(2)(A), in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. [paragraph] 706(2)(C), or otherwise is an invalid implementation of the ACA, and is hereby vacated."

Judge Ronald A. White provided a very rational decision, which is very much appreciated in light of the three judge panel in King v. Burwell who decided that they would not help the plaintiff destroy the PPACA by ruling in accordance with the language of the law.  No, instead they decided on the basis of how they claimed Congress intended the law to work while not considering the actual history even of constraints on Congress in forcing the states to comply with handing control over health care insurance to the federal government.  Neither did they consider the actual discussions and trades within Congress needed to acquire even sufficient Democrat votes to pass the bill.  Similarly, the dissenting judge on the three judge panel that vacated the ObamaCare subsidies and tax penalties in Halbig v. Burwell for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals exercised a similar flight of fancy in interpreting the PPACA.

The Honorable Ronald A. White read the bill as written and said that if Congress had intended the bill to operate otherwise, it would have written the bill differently.  What is more, if Congress decides that the application of the law as written is not what it wants, then Congress can readily pass legislation to change the law.  This is exactly the way a rational person would expect laws to be applied.  Neither the IRS nor the federal courts are the legislative body and neither has the constitutional power to enact or to change laws.  How the 3-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court that decided the King v. Burwell case could have decided that the law was ambiguous is incredible.  What is more, if it were ambiguous, then it is up to Congress, not the IRS, to eliminate any such ambiguity.  Ridiculous consequences would result from any other principle and the People would lose all power to control any government operating as the 4th Circuit Court ruled government should work.

Unfortunately, the entire District of Columbia Circuit Court decided to rule on Halbig v. Burwell and the Democrat appointed judges are now in the majority on that Circuit Court.  They will hear the case in December.  What is more, the decision by the Honorable Ronald A. White will be appealed to the entire 10th Circuit Court on which 7 of the 12 judges were appointed by Democrats.  The case of Indiana v. IRS is also yet to be decided.  Given the otherworldly ability of Democrat-appointed judges to misinterpret clear English and to ignore the history of the passage of this law, the People of the United States may not be relieved of the ObamaCare tyranny.

But, the state of Oklahoma, Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, and the Honorable Ronald A. White of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma have all proved themselves Heroes for in their efforts to preserve the rights of the individual in this desperate fight to protect self-ownership against the brutal onslaught of ObamaCare.

The Critical Factor in American Politics: Who Owns Your Body and Mind?

The critical question whose answer determines the balance of power in American politics today is: Who owns your body and mind?

There are three answers to this question which are given by significant numbers of Americans.  They are:

1) I own my own body and mind.

2) God owns my body and mind.

3) The collective, effectively the government, owns my body and mind.

The idea that an individual owned their own body and mind was essentially a cornerstone idea of the Enlightenment and one which played a critical role in the thinking of the minds of the Founders of the United States of America and the Framers of the Constitution.  The purpose of government was to protect the individual rights of  the people.  Only if an individual owned their own mind and body did such an idea make sense.  Only then could a person have a sovereign right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

Yes, some of them thought that God also owned their minds and bodies, but that even then an individual had a right to acknowledge that or to deny that ownership.  The individual, in their minds, could either freely give themselves to God or they could sin.  They believed in free will.

Some who believed that God owned their minds and bodies believed the state must help God assert this ownership.  Many a nation had established a religion and was all too committed to using government power to force others to make value choices these people believed God wanted them to make.  In America, the early Pilgrims were such an example.  Later many Calvinists in New England had similar ideas.  The colony of Virginia had an established religion, The Church of England, which was funded by the colonial government.  In addition to establishing churches, the colonies frequently codified many of their religious beliefs into laws.  By the time of the American Revolution and in the decade that followed, many of the thinking Americans came to the conclusion that government should not play this role of trying to force people to act within the confines of religious beliefs.  The need for a broader freedom of conscience was becoming widely recognized by thinking Americans.

The idea that the collective owned one's mind and body has been around probably as long as people have associated in bands or tribes.  Medieval European city and nation states used this idea to build hierarchical societies in which the serf served the local aristocratic lord and that lord served the King.  The King pretended to serve God, built and protected the state, and pretended to be the caretaker for the poor, dumb serfs.  The serfs were to devote their lives to the nation, the King, and God. 

The socialists extended this ancient idea to the state alone with no particular pretense that they depended upon God's authority to take control of the masses of the people.  As socialists became more and more common, thanks largely to government controlled education, the demands of the state based on collectivist ownership increased.  The Prussian government began such an expansion of the state based on socialist ideas of collective ownership of the people's minds and bodies.  It provided schools, medical care, and retirement benefits to the people in exchange for fairly complete control of their lives.  The Marxists advanced their version of such claims, as did the fascists and the National Socialist German Workers Party.  The Progressives in America borrowed the idea of the socialist government-run state schools, heavy regulation of productive labor, control of medical care and retirement benefits, and have created their own socialist variant.

As I have noted many times, ObamaCare is based on the assertion that the collective owns every individual's body and mind.  There can be no other basis for a governmental demand that each American must care for the maintenance of his or her mind and body in accordance with rules established by the government.  The government is claiming the right to have its property maintained.  It is telling Americans what medical care they must pay for coverage on in their insurance whether any particular individual has any need for that coverage or not.  The government is doing this very explicitly on a collectivist basis.  Someone needs that coverage and therefore every individual will pay for it.  This requirement is so important to the government that ObamaCare will actually cause many millions of individuals to lose the insurance they have and were happy with.  After all, there is nothing so important to the socialist as the principle of collective ownership and its assertion.  This is not actually being done for the sake of the welfare of each American individual.  No, it is being done to create a strengthened mandate that every individual's mind and body belongs to the government.

Of course this idea was asserted already in many other laws.  For instance, Progressive governments have long asserted that almost any activity that earns income or salary comes under its powers of regulation, control, and taxation.  American governments also believe they have the right to dictate minimum wages, which means they assert that they have the right to prevent individuals from earning a living at all.  Progressive governments have long levied taxes on an individual's pay from their own labor.  These are very blatant claims that an individual's labor belongs to the government.  Now what is your labor but one of the most critical ways you use your mind and body to support and maintain your own life.  Yet, these same governments pretend they are not violating anyone's right to life.  Controlling and taxing your labor is effectively a claim of ownership of your mind and body.

The balance of power in America today is the result of a two-party system in which one party, the Democratic Party, is wholly of the belief that every individual's mind and body belongs to the collective, or effectively to the government.  The other party, the Republican party, is more disparate in its parts.  It is composed of three major factions, which either hold that:

1) An individual's body is only self-owned.

2) One nominally owns one's own body and mind, but ought to give them to God of one's free will.

3) God owns everyone's body and mind, but God is too weak or lazy to force everyone Himself to obey his will and acknowledge his ownership, so the government must perform this task of forcing obedience for Him.

As far as the use of government power through its monopoly on the use of force is concerned, there is little friction and little difference between Factions 1 and 2.  The consequences on the use of force by government of Faction 3, however, are profound.  The most critical and common issues affected are government policies with respect to sex and procreation.  The portions of our society most directly affected are women and those who are lesbians, gay, bisexual, or transgender.  Many American women and LGBTs find the use of force by Faction 3 of the Republican Party to be extremely threatening.  More often than not, these groups find this threat more frightening than the broader and more equally applied, by gender and sexuality at least, threats to self-ownership of the Democratic Party.

I am fully in agreement that the use of government by Faction 3 for its purposes is highly immoral and highly irrational.  It is threatening.  But, I see the claim of collective ownership by the Democrat Party as even worse.

First, the collectivist agenda of the Progressives, in full control of the Democratic Party, has been very successful in getting the government to control our daily lives in many ways.  It dictates what values we are free to pursue and it takes many hours of our time and effort from each of us by force.  The amount of our labor it commands has steadily increased, but for secondary fluctuations such as major wars.

Second, more and more Americans, especially younger Americans, find the claims of Faction 3 to be wrongheaded, even as many of them embrace the idea of collective ownership of our minds and bodies.  Faction 3 has poor prospects of controlling the government to do its will on a national level, because many Republicans oppose them, as do all of the Democrats.  Only a very few states are so dominated by Faction 3 that there is a practical likelihood of their enacting their program.  At the national level, even when the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency, this faction was never able to accomplish much of anything toward their agenda.

Third, the range of those aspects of human life claimed as the purview of government control by force is much larger on the part of the Progressive collectivist agenda of Democrat Party.  It applies to everyone and to almost anything we do.  It is without any real boundaries at all.

Most Americans say they want smaller government, yet the dominion of government keeps growing.  The Republican Party is clearly the party of at least less massive government, though it is not really the party of smaller government as it ought to be.  Yet most Americans favor the Democratic Party in Generic Congressional Polls.  The reason is primarily due to the fear of many women and almost all LGBTs of the agenda of Faction 3 of the Republican Party.  If this agenda were to be put into effect, that fear would be well-justified, but it has almost no chance of being put into effect.  Yet because so many women and LGBTs vote for the Democratic Party out of this exaggerated fear, the less massive Republican Party is unable to attain enough offices to prevent the Progressive collectivist attack upon our individual rights which has been very successful in many ways.

At this time, the biggest issue of government is the repeal of ObamaCare with its takeover of 16 to 18% of the US economy, its many harmful effects on medical care and its cost to individuals, and its blatant claim of government ownership of our bodies and minds.  Most Americans recognize that ObamaCare is a massively troublesome program, even if most underestimate its harms.  Yet, we have seen anti-ObamaCare candidates for the Senate defeated by Democrat collectivists who favored ObamaCare and the rest of the Progressive collectivist agenda because women, young people, and LGBTs found the ideas of Faction 3 Republicans abhorrent.  And even though Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican candidate for Governor in Virginia, has vowed that he will not try as Governor to implement his previous Faction 3 agenda as required by his support from the Tea Party, he is likely to lose that election to a highly corrupt collectivist, Terry McAuliffe.

There are many who believe that the Tea Party is a movement of Faction 3 Republican types.  It is not so.  It is primarily people more aligned with Factions 1 and 2.  There are also a few Faction 3 types who have agreed that the threat of the Progressive collectivist agenda has become so great in America that they will give up trying to codify their religious beliefs in the law at least until the collectivist threat is defeated.  Ken Cuccinelli is a man who has made this pledge.  He has fought ObamaCare with more determination and effect than almost any politician.  He is strong in his support that we each own our own labor and should be free to cooperate with others to our mutual benefit in the private sector.  He understands that government should be smaller.  It should be dictating fewer of our values to us and less involved in our lives.  He is a strong Tea Party promoter and candidate who has agreed to live by the rules of the Tea Party to leave his religious beliefs in the private sector and not use the force of government to promote them.

It is a serious mistake to allow the Progressive collectivist Terry McAuliffe to become governor of Virginia.  His strong support of ObamaCare and all things collectivist will do serious harm to the people of the state of Virginia.  If you value your rights and you are voting in this election, it is a serious mistake to vote for McAuliffe or even to vote for the Libertarian candidate.  The Democrat will bring nothing but evil accomplices into the state government, while Ken Cuccinelli will bring in many Faction 1 and Faction 2 Republicans instead.  This will be very good for the people of the state of Virginia.

Betrayal: Republican House Votes to Fund ObamaCare Again

Once again the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has betrayed our individual right to own our own bodies.  They have again sold our bodies to the government for momentary power for themselves.  On a vote of 267 - 151, a continuing resolution to fund the government for the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year was passed.

Only 14 Republicans voted against this monstrously tyrannical act.  Many, many representatives who had pledged they would defund ObamaCare voted in favor of funding ObamaCare.  What is more, the 2010 Pledge to America to post bills up for a vote online for 72 hours was violated.  The efforts of 14 Republicans to defund or to at least keep funding from infringing upon religious freedoms was beaten down by the Republican Establishment.

This Establishment has been re-asserting itself so it can maintain control of the party in the face of efforts of the Tea Party and libertarians to make the Republican Party a true party of limited government and a defender of individual rights.  This heinous act of betrayal by the great mass of the Republican Party representation in Congress must not be forgotten or forgiven.  These unprincipled men must be replaced.

The only principled Republican Representatives were:

Justin Amash (Mich.)
Jim Bridenstine (Okla.)
Paul Broun, M.D. (Ga.)
Ron DeSantis (Fla.)
Scott DesJarlais, M.D. (Tenn.)
John J. Duncan Jr. (Tenn.)
Phil Gingrey, M.D. (Ga.)
Louie Gohmert (Tex.)
Jack Kingston (Ga.)
Tom McClintock (Calif.)
Thomas Massie (Ky.)
Bill Posey (Fla.)
Matt Salmon (Ariz.)
Steve Stockman (Tex.)

These men are heroes.

The rest of the Republicans are villains.  It was in their power to prevent the funding of ObamaUncaringTax during this critical period of its implementation.  Instead, they calculated that it was politically expedient to lay their hands upon our throats and strangle the last vestige of self-ownership until it is dead.

If we do not own our very bodies, are we not slaves?  Yes.

Is the power held by any slave-master ever legitimate?  No.

Allow Same-Sex Marriages as a Basic Individual Right

For centuries, most people of the Judeo-Christian tradition have believed that God frowns upon people of the same sex having sexual relationships.  Indeed, for centuries they often thought God demanded that they execute, often very gruesomely, men thought to be having sex with men.  This vision of morality has been transformed for the better, but translated into governments only recognizing opposite sex marriages.  In recent times, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and then Massachusetts came to recognize same-sex marriages.  Today in the United States, the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont recognize same-sex marriages.  In addition, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin offer either civil unions or domestic partnerships to same-sex couples.  Forty-one states forbid same-sex marriages, including North Carolina which just passed a ban by referendum earlier this year.

The referendum ban of same-sex marriage in California was challenged in federal court and was declared unconstitutional.  This ruling is under appeal and is still working its way through the federal court system.  Washington passed a law authorizing same-sex marriage and Gov. Chris Gregoire signed it earlier this year.  The Maryland legislature also authorized same-sex marriage this year and Gov. Martin O'Malley has signed it into law.  But, referendums to ban same-sex marriage in Washington and Maryland will be on the ballot in November.  Maine, which presently bans same-sex marriages, has a referendum on the November ballot to allow them.  Minnesota, which presently bans same-sex marriage by statute, has a referendum on the November ballot to additionally forbid same-sex marriage in their state constitution.

How does one rationally analyze the role of governments with respect to marriage and with respect to same-sex marriages in particular?  We have to decide what marriage really is and why government has necessary and legitimate functions with respect to marriage.  In the oldest Judeo tradition, marriage was commonly not a domestic partnership between one man and one woman.  Each husband might have several wives.  This was surely not marriage of the nature of those recognized by government in America today.  Early Christians commonly did not marry, since many thought the end of the world was rapidly approaching with the return of Christ.  After that brief period, Christian marriage was often a means of cementing favorable relationships between families, clans, tribes, aristocrats, and even nations.  A young woman was pretty much the property of her father and the father eventually traded her to a man for a degree of allegiance and goodwill in many cases.  She was now her husband's property.  Marriage was not the spiritual union of two people in the way many think it is today.  It was a commercial and political act in many cases.  The church supported this viewpoint of marriage by providing a patina of spirituality, though spiritual connections between the husband and wife were very commonly missing.

Even today, the role of government is not to provide a spiritual content to marriage or even to assess whether such a spiritual basis for a marriage exists.  An honest evaluation of marriage as provided by government license and contract is that every marriage is a domestic partnership and any spiritual meaning to the union is provided by the married partners independent of government.  The domestic partnership that governments offer is a legal contract with legal implications for shared property, procreation and the raising of children, taxes, mandated time off work to care for one another, and permissions to make medical decisions for one another if one partner is unable to make such decisions.

The only case of such issues in which the sex of the partners may make any difference at all is with respect to procreation and the raising of children.  In the modern world, adoptions may easily take the place of procreation, but many married partners also have no children and there is no title of aristocracy demanding an heir.  Should children be adopted in the relatively rare case by two partners of the same sex, there is little reason for one having to be a high-earning man, since many women are now high-earners.  The domestic partnerships that are formed by government marriage licenses are just as appropriate today for partners of the same sex as they are for partners of opposite sexes.

Each and every American adult competent to care for himself has a very broad sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his own happiness.  Legitimate government cannot violate that broad range of fundamental individual rights.  There must be a strong presumption against laws that limit the exercise of personal actions which do not do harm to others.  Legitimate government does not interfere with the association of one adult with other consenting adults, unless substantial harm is thereby done to others.  Legitimate and individual rights-protecting government is highly limited and minimal government.  If it acts to place limits on the relationships and associations of individuals, it must have a very substantial reason for such limits and a strong case for the harm those associations or relationships would do to others.  The only way such harm to others occurs is if the partnership uses force to harm others, but there is no new issue here since initiated harm done by force by any individual to others is already prohibited.  There is no more reason to prescribe the number and sex of domestic partners than there is to do so for a business partnership.  Indeed, a domestic partnership is very much like a business partnership in all respects relevant to the role of government.

Not only is there no reason to place a prohibition on same-sex domestic partnerships, but because our individual rights are equal, we cannot limit marriage contracts to only those who desire a single partner of the opposite sex.  While anyone may exercise their own freedom of conscience in the belief that same-sex domestic partnerships are immoral, abhorred by God, or simply biologically uninteresting to them, government and the People whose individual equal rights are to be protected by government cannot make such judgments in the political realm without violating the freedom of conscience of others with a differing viewpoint.  They cannot legitimately use force to prevent others from exercising control over their own bodies and minds, from evaluating and choosing whose most intimate company they desire, and from pursuing their most personal and individual happiness.

Individual human beings are complex and highly differentiated.  We are all different in the way our minds observe reality, analyze and evaluate it, and assess our own relationship to it and to others.  Our biochemistries differ, our senses operate at many different levels, our nervous systems feel differently, our bodies take very different forms, and we respond very differently to other individuals.  Among the most complex and highly differentiated aspects of an individual's nature is his or her sexuality.  We cannot be serious about the individual right to pursue happiness if we have government place obstacles and unequal treatment in the way of individuals whose sexuality is different than that endorsed by a religion or just recent and local tradition.

It is a basic violation of individual rights for government to discriminate against individuals based on their sexuality.  Legitimate government ought to provide same-sex marriage contracts which are equivalent to those it provides to couples of the opposite sex.  It should even provide a more enlarged concept of domestic partnership contracts as broad in terms of the combination of adult individuals bound in the contract as is the case in small business partnerships.  Government commonly interferes with our freedom of association in far too many ways.  It is time that it stop interfering with that broad freedom of association in our domestic partnerships which it is the right of each and every adult individual to claim.

Understanding this, one should vote for Question 6 in Maryland to allow same-sex couples to marry in Maryland.