Trivial Pursuits...

The latest thing on electoral politics is the judgement from the New Jersey Supreme Court which in essence repeats the Massachusetts gay marriage constitutionality arguments!

It couldn't have happened at a worse time! Perhaps the Jersey court consists of a panel of ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christian judges who wish to ‘pump-up' the lagging ‘values' voters! I can think of no other reason for presenting this two weeks before the election!

It has long been argued that people can't govern themselves but that benevolent dictators are few and far between. Perhaps this election will settle that argument.

Our representative republic has been turned into a real life version of ‘trivial pursuit'! Our foreign policy is centered on the Jewish side of Judeo-Christian politics in the Middle East rather than being centrist or mediatory. This is despite the fact that Jews amount to only 1.7% of the American population. In the same sense only 0.9 to 2.0 percent of American men are gay (depending upon the survey - not the 10% usually quoted) and women (lesbians) who are more difficult to gage are reportedly fewer than that - although, I wonder.

Yet the marriage of gays were the driving force for the 2004 elections and mysteriously have been resurrected again for the 2006 election!? If you couple that with the hot buttons of futuristic "stem cell research" and the old saw of "abortion", you end up with compounded trivia which has very very very little affect on the lives of virtually any of the American people! The numbers simply don't justify the effort. In defense of the Democrats, I don't believe many are arguing those points - that most of the noise is coming from the right.

This trivia is especially true when one considers the daily mass murder of Iraqi civilians and our own American boys in a war perpetrated by our government and big oil. The slaughter will be allowed to continue if we Americans continue to pursue such trivia!

It is also true when one considers the economic recession we are going to experience next year after the elections and regardless of who wins. It will be due in large part from the cost of the war, outsourcing jobs and the gradual destruction of the middle class - all condoned by the political right. It is too late to change from this 'correction', but it can be made worse.

The thing that makes it so sad is that those trivial hot button subjects are generally not part of anyone's legislative agenda - but the war and the economy are!

Even the active duty troops in our military are queuing up to call for withdrawal from Iraq. The effort has just started and will become very strident in the next few months. It is the same phenomenon which occurred during the Viet Nam war and helped end it. This is not trivial!