All posts by Chuck Fager

The Supreme Court Marriage Decision — Made Readable!

The Court, in this decision, holds same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all States. It follows that the Court also must hold—and it now does hold—that there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another State on the ground of its same-sex character.

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No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

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Richard Nixon’s First Cover-Up: His Quaker Religion

A former Nixon speechwriter-turned newspaper columnist compared Nixon’s personality to a many-layered birthday cake: cut into his persona and there was layer after layer, after layer.
It’s a striking image. But historian Larry Ingle’s new book about Nixon’s religion left me with a very different visual sense: that I had been peering down a deep, dark well, then shining a small but sharp penlight into the depths, hoping to glimpse the reflection of water, but finally seeing only a distant, dry emptiness, with an accumulation of trash, the deposit of endless lies.
And without Ingle’s saying so flatly, I also got nearly as strong a sense from the book that Richard Nixon, the second Quaker president, learned his lying ways first from, of all people, his supposedly “sainted” mother.
What’s the evidence for this?

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Nine Hometown Realities more important to me than trying to ban the Confederate flag

For me, I’d rather focus on realities over symbols. And all the items here are real right where I live; not stuff I see only on TV, a tablet screen, or a license plate. (Oh wait – I do see the flag on license plates. Whatever.)
. . . The reality that at least 40,000 mostly black voters were successfully deterred from voting in the 2014 NC election by racist vote suppression tactics — and that 40,000 was the margin that sent another New Confederate to the U. S. Senate. (And in this case, I actually did get arrested two summers ago, protesting NC’s vote suppression campaign, which is expanding.)

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After Charleston: Ban the Confederate Flag?? Let’s Do Something REAL.

And let me repeat his main point: the U.S. Civil War had two phases; only the first one ended in 1865, and southern white supremacists won the second phase.

They didn’t form a separate country; but they established a widespread common culture of segregation, maintained by both law and terrorism; and they recreated many slavery cognates.

Let’s call this the New-Confederacy. Not for nothing was the movie that became their epic called “The Birth of a Nation.”

Birth-of-a-nation

New-Confederate rule was somewhat disrupted in the 1960s; there have been some important changes since then. But the New-Confederate forces have come roaring back in the past decade, to regional dominance and national impact, on numerous fronts.

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