INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW. SORT OF.

If you don't like answers, don't ask questions. This way your whacky theory on life can remain intact without any pesky facts interfering. If, on the other hand, you're curious, then by all means ask questions. Just don't complain when the answers aren't pleasing or don't fit into your world view. If your political view consists of "My country, right or wrong," odds are you're a moron. The complete quote would be "My country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong, to be set right."

Inherent in that quote is the ability of a nation to be wrong and the duty of its citizens to correct its mistakes. So when you say " My country, right or wrong," you're telling people that being wrong is fine, just as long as it's "My country" being stupid. So, "My country, Wrong!" would serve you just as well and is probably a more honest assessment of your politics. Be you left, right or smack dab in the middle, you have to ask questions, at least once in a while, and never settle for being wrong. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Many say the nature of right and wrong is in the eye of the beholder. Bullshit. People for the most part learn right from wrong before they go to school, before they can read or add or tie their own shoes. We don't always like it, since sometimes the right thing thing to do is not in our own selfish interests, as any five year-old can attest to or any parent teaching that five year-old right from wrong. But whether we like it or not, there is right and there is wrong and wrong acts cannot be explained away by national interest, cultural peculiarities or selfish expediency.

Nations can make grievous errors, and keep on making them until somebody tells them to cut it out. A responsible parent doesn't give into that five year old because they throw a tantrum. Picture this on a national level: "But Mommy, I want slaves! Daddy has them!" Now Mommy has to get Daddy to free his slaves so that junior learns right from wrong. In a perfect world, this moral lesson would not have caused a bloody civil war, but it did, and America learned not to be wrong about slaves anymore. It took another hundred years for us petulant children to give the former slaves full rights as fellow children of America, and it's taking forever to do the same for the 5% of us who are homosexuals.

Oh, we let the gays vote alright, take their taxes and wear the clothes they design for us and enjoy their musical theater and whatever other stereotypical things we think gay people do, we even let them die on the field of battle so long as they don't die as openly gay people (don't ask, don't tell), but we just don't let them marry the ones they love. We tell ourselves they these people are "wrong" to be born the way they were born, much like black people were once wrong to be born with skin dark enough to qualify for ownership. People cite their Bibles and various other dubious morality codes, neglecting to mention that slavery was pretty okay in the Bible, even laying down some guidelines on how to treat your slaves.

And that whole anti-gay thing in the Bible? Sounds like somebody doth protest to much. Consider where it was written and for whom; in the Middle East, for Semitic peoples for whom sodomy has been forever a popular and at the same time a taboo pastime, sort of an in-house scandal that has led to things like women being wrapped in potato sacks and placed under house arrest while their husbands buy presents for their teenage boyfriends. As it is with most religious instruction manuals, sexuality has always been closely associated with shame, beginning with God telling Eve to put some damned clothes on already. So you have to ask yourself what kind of sex issues did the authors of the Bible have, on the one hand praising God as perfect and on the other hand implying that he made a whole lot of mistakes making people the way he made them, what with our rampant sexual desires and all.

So, one supposes that "My Bible, right or wrong," isn't as absolute a dictum as all that. Can we decide which Bible teachings are right and which are wrong? Hell yeah, it's as obvious as the noses on our faces. We've done away with that whole "eye for an eye" business by banning cruel and unusual punishment and establishing courts of law to decide on appropriate penalties for poking somebody's eye out. We don't stone anybody to death for trivial matters, we don't give a rat's ass which Gods, false or otherwise, anybody worships and we don't condone genocide, which the Bible does. Check out that supposed order from God to "slay them down to the last man, woman and child, and take their lands and inhabit their cities."

Which is not to say that the Bible is worthless as a moral guide, but only that you have to ask yourself if it is completely accurate, which is where a lot of uncomfortable questions and answers arise. There's always that perfect gem of worldly advice, "love thy neighbor as thyself" to guide us, so just maybe we can stop penalizing people who are born different. Apply that to our nation, a country that was founded to treat people right, and ask whether our country is right or wrong to discriminate against people who make them feel uncomfortable. Hell, we let lawyers have their freedom, and who makes us more uncomfortable them them? And unlike gays, they don't free up a lot of members of the opposite sex for the rest of us. Let's set our country right.