Daily Trojan: "Pro-gay rights and pro-proposition 8"

In today's Daily Trojan, Kartik Sreepada, a student who voted yes on 8 tries to explain why. I recommend you read the whole thing, but I want to address some of the main points. First, though, I want to stress again that I fully respect the views of nearly everyone who voted yes on 8, because I know they did so for genuinely good reasons. I think they made the wrong choice, of course, but I do not want to label them as bigots or imply that they think of me as a second class citizen or any such thing. Anyway, here we go:

I recalled the succinct words of Vice President-elect Joe Biden during the vice presidential debate.

“Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage... That is basically the decision to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths,” he said.

First, by voting yes on 8, you redefined marriage. Admittedly, the existing definition had only been in place for a few months, but by voting yes, you are taking a stand on the issue and redefining marriage. I would also like to point out that Obama and Biden both supported NO on 8. (Biden: "If I lived in California, I'd clearly vote against prop 8. ... I think it's regressive, I think it's unfair."; Obama: When you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about."

I think there is a misunderstanding going on here. Civil marriage--marriage as recognized by the state of California--is not a religious institution. A couple may be both legally married and married in a religious ceremony, but the two do not have to go together. The CA Supreme Court decision in May made it very clear that the ruling only affected civil marriage. It had no effect on the marriages of any individual church, just as a change in any church's definition of marriage would have no effect on civil marriages. Of course the official definition of marriage as recognized by any particular church is up to the leadership of that church. There is no reason this should be the same as the definition the state offers, and of course it's not the same in many cases.

I truly do not understand how allowing same-sex couples to marry violates separation of church and state. The only explanation I can think of is that Sreepada seriously misunderstood the way our state handled same-sex marriages between June and November this year. Going on:

While the California Supreme Court’s acceptance of gay marriage appeared to grant complete equality to gays, it undemocratically undermined another pillar of our Constitution: the separation of church and state. The decision could have led to a dangerous rift between religious institutions and our government, possibly putting patriots at odds with the religiously faithful.

First of all, there seems to be a very common sentiment that any time a court overturns an existing law, it is undemocratic, simply because that law itself was created through democratic means (either a legislature, or a ballot measure). The foundation of our government is "by the people, for the people" but it is also a system of checks and balances. And a very important part of that is the ability for courts to rule that a law is unconstitutional. You may disagree with their decision, but striking down laws is part of their job--it's not unconstitutional for them to do it.

But to address the real point being made, I fail to see how the decision undermined the separation of church and state. I can only imagine that this view resulted from a misunderstanding of what allowing same-sex couples to marry (again, I'm talking about civil marriage, not marriage in the eyes of any specific religion) did and didn't do. It did indeed create a "rift" (to put it nicely) between several groups and individuals, as did prop 8 being on the ballot, as did its passage. I don't see how that makes it wrong or right. It just means this is a controversial issue.

After this, Sreepada tries to elaborate on how same-sex marriage undermines the separation of church and state. There is an argument about religious leaders being "forced to act against their faiths," which did not happen during the period when same-sex marriage was legal here, and would have continued not to happen, regardless of the outcome of prop 8. Then it is claimed that marriage is "not a legal concept." Certainly, religious marriage is probably older than civil marriage, but then the idea of trading goods for money has existed much longer than any California laws regulating businesses. Does that mean that a business is not a legal concept? No, it just means that it may have different meanings in different contexts. And one of those is a legal definition. Marriage is most certainly a legal concept.

In time, maybe the Supreme Court will declare the term “marriage” unconstitutional. When that moment comes, it will be a victory not just for equality, but the separation between church and state.

Perhaps this sheds some light on what was really meant. It's not that marriage isn't a legal concept, but rather that it shouldn't be one. That is, it is a religious concept which the government has become involved in, so its become a legal concept. Maybe it would be better left to the churches, and the government should just stay out of it. While the idea of eliminating civil marriage altogether is a bit radical, it would certainly be equal. All couples would have the same rights under the law.

Basically, this person seems simply misled or misinformed. If you think you understood him better than I did, please tell me.

Looking Forward

Okay, so we lost. We're all angry about it. If it's going to take you a while to stop being angry, I understand. In fact, you probably shouldn't plan on ever "getting over it." So write angry facebook notes, take to the streets, unfriend the people who voted yes, whatever you need to do.

But I'm going to try to do what I can to look forward. Right now there are already lawsuits being filed, and whether anything comes from those or not, it's not clear what the next step will be. Whether it will come through the courts, the legislature, or another proposition showing up on the ballot, we don't know. But regardless of what it is, proposition 8 has started a long conversation on same-sex marriage, and I think it's important that we allow this conversation to move in a new direction.

To the "yes on 8" voters:

Marriage has always been between a man and a woman in this state, up until this past June, and I understand that kind of change is difficult for you, in the same way that anything new or unfamiliar is always difficult. The Supreme Court of California recognized a new right that had never been legally considered a right before (at least not here). Of course there will be at least some part of you that objects to that kind of change. I realize that, despite what you heard from the protesters on the streets of West Hollywood on Wednesday night, your vote was not intended to be bigoted or hateful, or to treat anyone as a second-class citizen. Change is hard, and we will never get any closer to reaching any kind of agreement or understanding on this issue if we don't recognize that fact.

That said, many of you were tricked into voting yes. You bear much of the responsibility for that, and of course, so does the official "yes on 8" campaign. The campaign consistently misled and lied to voters, in an effort to move the conversation away from the real issue (same-sex marriage) and scare people into voting yes. No church has ever been denied their tax-exempt status for refusing to marry any particular couple. If topics like marriage are taught in California public schools, they have to give parents the right to opt out. Barack Obama stated very clearly that he was against prop 8. Nearly all the official material that came from the yes on 8 campaign was absolute lies or at least implied false statements. It is your responsibility as a voter to be smart enough not to fall for such things, and to call out your own campaign when you see it happening. If you want to use the electoral process to prove that a majority of Californians are on your side, then you need to actually get out there and convince people. As it stands now, all you've proven is that people are very susceptible to emotional advertising.

To the "no on 8" voters:

First of all, next time, get angry before the election. And then channel your anger into volunteering or donating, or at least making sure all your friends will vote our way. And if they say they're not going to, then talk to them about it (see below). In any case, get angry and take action before the election. I'll only say it one more time. Get involved BEFORE the election.

When I was volunteering for the No On 8 campaign over the summer, trying to recruit new volunteers to join us, I would explain briefly how the campaign needed so many thousands of volunteers in order to win. Often, they would then assure me that such a proposition would never pass, not here in California. I don't think anything more needs to be said about those people.

I want to stress again that I understand how frustrated and disappointed everyone is right now. However, slogans like "Stop the hate, no on 8," referring to your opponents as bigots, saying they've treated you as a second class citizen, insulting an entire religious group: None of that helps us very much. Changing the minds of millions of people is not easy, but insulting them is a sure way not to do it. I think we did a great job in this campaign of making sure our messages were always positive and truthful. Next time around, we need to do exactly the same thing, and work even harder to combat the lies that we now know the other side will probably tell.

To people on both sides of this issue:

Even though this fight is over, the conversation that will lead us to the next fight has to continue. So keep talking about this issue, not just with your friends on your side, but with anyone you know who voted the other way. This can be a somewhat painful experience, but we all have to live in this state together, so let's at least try to understand each other a little bit. We will never all agree on everything, and there are people on both sides who will never be swayed. But if we don't start talking to each other soon, trying to understand where the "other side" is coming from, then the "yes" voters will always be "hateful homophobic bigots" and "no" voters will always be "in league with activist judges trying to redefine marriage for us all." This is California. We should be better than that. All of us.

Finally, an update

Since the last time I posted anything of substance:

* I turned 21. That went pretty much how it should have gone.
* Classes have started again. I have two Physics classes, both of which started off kinda slowish, one much more than the other, but are now starting to become legitimately challenging and fun.
* I'm an SI Leader for Physics 152. I don't think I'm doing so well with that, but it's hard to know. I think I'm slowly improving.
* I've been working hard on the no on 8 campaign, which now has a small but mighty corps of volunteers here at USC, with phonebanks two days a week.
* I did the USC Programming Contest again, but I didn't really prepare for it at all, like I did last year. Did very badly, but it was also a tougher contest than the last one. And we all got t-shirts!
* I've agreed to help Elizabeth with a journalism project that will require some programming. I'm not even sure how I want to do it. It's the kind of thing that would be web-based in real life but Javascript is meh and other web programming languages I don't know at all. So I'm going to see if I can build up a proof-of-concept in Python. I guess.

Next post will be something about prop 8 I think.

Flash

Fuck yes.

Actual informative post coming soon. Hopefully.

Prisoners and Lightbulbs

I've been chatting on IRC a little bit, after discovering that, yes, people still use IRC sometimes. I really had no idea. Anyone, someone there posted this problem called One Hundred Prisoners and a Lightbulb, and it was driving me insane trying to figure out the answer. Unfortunately, the paper they linked to also had the answer, so I looked after a little while. Still, a fun problem, and it might be interesting to derive the details of the solution just using the basic outline.

Python Challenge

I've been learning Python lately, both for my job and just for fun. After all, all the cool kids are learning Python, aren't they? Best of all, I found a great puzzle called Python Challenge, which consists of several cryptic puzzles that require programming to solve.

If you're learning programming, or want to learn, or you already know some and want to expand your realm of expertise, I highly recommend it. Out of the levels I've done so far, there is one that requires Python. The others were designed to be solved in Python, but could probably be done in any other language.

If you get stuck, there is a help forum, but they usually help you more with the concepts rather than how to write the code, so I wouldn't necessarily think of it as "cheating"--but try to do them on your own. It's more fun that way.

Lawmakers

I never intended for this blog to be political in any way, and I'm not trying to change that now. But I do have one question. Here are some quotes from 365gay.com's article on today's historic California Supreme Court decision:

The dissenting opinion to Thursday's ruling was penned by Justice Marvin Baxter.

While he agreed with many arguments of the majority he said that any changes to the state marriage law should be decided by voters.

[...]

Schwarzenegger has previously vetoed bills that would have legalized gay marriage. Both times Schwarzenegger said that the courts or the people through a plebiscite should decide the issue.

I'm not an expert on how government works, but these two people, a California Supreme Court justice, and an actor-slash-governor, should both know a little something about how it works. If I'm not mistaken, we have three branches of government, just like the federal government does. One of them, the legislative branch, is responsible for making laws. We, the people of the state, are responsible for, among other things, electing the members of the legislative branch. The only reason for having the voters decide an issue directly is if the legislative branch is not responding to a pressing issue for some reason, and the citizens need to take things into their own hands. Now, it may be that the legislature is unwilling or unable to act on some issue, and in that case, it might be a good idea to have a ballot initiative. However, this is not that issue. The legislature has tried to make a decision, and, as it says in the article, Schwarzenegger vetoed their decision twice. I see no reason that this issue ought to be decided by the voters directly. Except perhaps that Schwarzenegger doesn't want to have a bunch of conservative anti-SSM people mad at him.

I'm not even looking at this from a gay rights point of view. I'm just saying, there are people in Sacramento whose job it is to make laws, and while there are other ways of doing that, I see no reason those other ways should be invoked now.

Writing "code"?

My friend from freshman year, Elliot, has recently started a new blog, Anyone Can Code. I guess he's going to teach some programming courses over the summer, partly because he, like me, doesn't like the way most of the courses he's taken at USC have been taught. And because he believes that, well, anyone can code.

His first post on the Anyone Can Code blog lamented the people who are somewhat interested in computer science, but think they can't code. I've always thought that "people who can't do math" were just people who had terrible math teachers and never took them time to learn any math on their own. There isn't really anything wrong with this, but it's now become relatively socially acceptable to know almost no math. It's also socially acceptable to know literally no coding, since most people never take any computer science classes.

I've digressed a little, but the point I wanted to make here is that perhaps referring to programming as "coding" is not good for making it accessible to the general public. Code, in everyday language, is a message which is unreadable until a person or machine performs some kind of operation on it to decode it, so that humans can read it. Back in the days of punchcards, that may have been somewhat accurate, but now writing computer programs is (or at least should be) almost the opposite. You write down what you want the computer to do, in as clear and straightforward a way as possible. Then the computer compiles or interprets it, which is when it becomes completely unreadable. But the programmer isn't writing "code". They're just writing down a set of instructions, in another language. So maybe instead of "coding," we should look at programming as writing in another language. Because that's all programming languages are--they're just languages, where the rules of grammar must be followed much more strictly than in languages like English or Spanish.

Oh great, you say, so coding is just like learning a language, except with even more emphasis on grammar? Sounds lovely. Well yes, but there's very little emphasis on learning new vocabulary. In fact, most of the important words in most languages are actually words you already know. And the grammar rules are much clearer and completely unambiguous, especially in languages like Ruby and (from what I hear, although I haven't used it myself) Python, which were deliberately intended to be easier to use. I think Elliot is right that anyone can code. It doesn't mean everyone will find it fun. But if we stop thinking of code as "code," perhaps everyone will be able to do it.