By Gary Earl Ross
Buffalo, NY – To the Honorable Members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives:
I come before you a disgruntled citizen, appalled at your inertia, your lack of forward movement, your lack of vision and creativity. Led by a Republican majority more interested in the wants of the few instead of the needs of the many, you have abdicated nearly all responsibility to maintain a check on the power of the executive branch. Even if you hadn't permitted yourselves to be lied into Iraq, you surrendered with a smile your constitutional right to declare war to a president as inept as any who has ever sat in the Oval Office. You have made no serious challenge to the legality of his signing statements, which say, in essence, he is free to ignore the laws you wrote.
You have sat on the sidelines as the middle class the true spine of this nation has lost more ground economically and politically. True energy independence is still a couple generations away as your friends in the fossil fuels industry score record profits without even checking the integrity of their pipelines. You have pandered shamelessly to a right-wing fundamentalist constituency so convinced it has decoded the architecture of God's brain that it tolerates no deviation from what it sees as the Divine Plan.
With a war headed nowhere, an economy in flux, gas prices climbing a lot and falling a bit before they skyrocket, schools failing routinely, older northern cities on the verge of collapse, New Orleans still a shambles, underemployment on the rise, and an executive branch that dredges up Nazis like Indiana Jones, you have more to be concerned about than gay marriage, repeal of the estate tax, flag protection amendments, and the other simplistic issues you embrace to divide and distract. May I offer a few common sense solutions?
Gay people exist. They have always existed. They will continue to exist. My gay neighbor is no threat to my marriage. If being gay is a sin, the God you claim to know so well will sort it out Himself. Why not let Him? After all, judgment is His, if I remember my scriptures, not yours. If predominantly Catholic Spain permits gay marriage, as long as the ceremony is not held in a church, surely we can do something to permit same-sex partners access to automatic property rights and life-and-death decisions. If marriage is only for heterosexuals, then let's give the gay population something that is only for them. Let's call it homogamy. That way, there's no confusion.
The standard refrain is that unless the estate tax is repealed, inheritors will lose the family farm. Of the nearly 300 million persons we have in the U.S., the estate tax affects a mere 13,000, people so rich they couldn't lose the family farm in a high stakes poker game with all the free booze they could drink. They're so rich that repealing the tax will cost the budget a trillion dollars over a decade. But I'm willing to repeal that tax - if for every million saved, each of the 13,000 gives three one-time grants of $100,000 each to a family among the 13,000 poorest taxpayers. Every year thousands would rise from poverty without the needless bureaucracy of a government program. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Since only a handful of flags have been burned in protest in the past few years, a flag protection amendment may not be as necessary as a flag etiquette amendment. The care and use of the flag should be explained to all citizens, including use of the upside down flag as a distress signal. Imagine. Flag burnings, protests that end in less than a minute, would be replaced by the long-lasting images of flags hung in a specifically legal way to dramatize how much trouble we're in as a nation and a people. If you see enough of those, you'll have no excuse for remaining a do-nothing Congress.
Yours truly, Gary Earl Ross.
Gary Earl Ross is a writer and professor at the UB Educational Opportunity Center, and the flag on his home flies upside down.