The Electron Pencil

The Obvious

To this day I haven’t written a word about the efforts of Indiana statehouse legislators to get a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the ballot before Hoosier voters.

I apologize to all loyal Pencillistas who’ve been wringing their hands, wondering what they should think about this issue without my firm and wise counsel to guide them.

Wait and fret no more.

The House Vote, Last Month (photo: Charlie Nye)

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Monday, the Indiana Senate Rules Committee passed on the resolution to the full Senate. If the Senate okays the bill, HJR-3, it would be the second of a three-step process to ensure that people who love people of their sex would never, ever, ever achieve the full rights and privileges heterosexual married couples enjoy here. In other words, the wise legislators are loath to grant homosexuals the same imprimatur that they would happily bestow upon the likes of, say, Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries…, oh, wait, they divorced after 72 days of marriage. Hmm. Alright, how about Katy Perry and Russell Brand. Ah, no. What about…, aw, forget it, you know what the Senators mean.

Don’t you?

A Holy Union

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Anyway, I haven’t written about the bill because, well, it’s stupid. And wrong. And hateful. I could write those six words every day. What else could I possibly write about it?

I know, this: Let’s all make it our business to vote out the idiots who are behind this vile bill.

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A Nation Of Stars

The National Science Foundation tells us that Murricans are fast becoming less skeptical of astrology.

Yep. Acc’g to a study released this week, the NSF has found that in 2012 only 55 percent of us believed astrology is not scientific. That’s down from 62 percent in 2010.

The Zodiac

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Astrology, of course, is the belief that the apparent positions of stars and planets affect human behavior on Earth. Many people confuse astrology with astronomy, which is like mixing up the Bible with Newton’s Principia.

The term scientific, in this case, refers to the process by which we rigorously discover, test, and verify knowledge. The scientific method, just as a reminder, includes the following steps:

• Observe and identify a problem or question
• Gather information
• Form a hypothesis
• Conduct experiments
• Record and analyze the experiment results
• State a conclusion or theory
• Publish the theory to allow others to confirm or rebut it

That’s how we know, for instance, that the nearest star to Earth is 4.243 light years away. That would be just a shade under 25 trillion miles. Trillion. With a T. Or 25,000,000,000,000.

The shoe covers that the obstetrician wore when she delivered you exerted far more gravitational influence on your physical body than did the nearest star to the Earth.

But the people of this holy land who, in the last few years, have chosen to devote far fewer financial resources to our schools, more and more are coming to accept astrology.

Sigh.

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The Nazis Are Coming! The Nazis Are Coming!

And, of course, science is not the only discipline we blithely laugh at in this holy land. History is a joke here as well.

To wit: New York Times best selling author Dr. Ben Carson the other day warned that progressives, liberals, and secularists are changing Murrica in the most despicable way possible. They, Carson told a Republican fundraiser, are leading us down the same path that Nazi Germany took.

Carson

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He said:

There comes a time when people with values simply have to stand up. Think about Nazi Germany. Most of the people did not believe in what Hitler was doing. But did they speak up? Did they stand up for what they believed in? They did not, and you saw what happened. And if you believe that same thing can’t happen again, you’re very wrong.

Leaving aside the historical untruth that “most of the people did not believe in what Hitler was doing,” Carson clearly equates people like me with, oh, say, Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death.”

To which I reply, with all due respect, Fuck you, Dr. Ben Carson.

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