Referendumb Guide: Deja Vu Edition

     I know I promised not to write about Question 1 again, but I have to meet a word count. So I've come up with a compromise: instead I'll write about less-publicized imaginary Question 1a:

    "Do you think the government should have the right to determine which expressions of love are legitimate and which are not?" 

    Where I come from, the only moral love is love that could yield children. Love is supposed to be for reproduction. Therefore, no one should be able to get married unless they could make a biological family. This includes any man with a vasectomy and any woman over 50.  Sorry!  You are not worthy of the term "marriage." 

    I don't want fat people exchanging vows, either. Yeah, they can technically reproduce, but it's not natural. If you know anything about evolution, you know the obese would not survive long enough in nature to propagate their doughy DNA. Eew.

    Meanwhile, a raging, abusive man addicted to glue can marry a neglectful, alcoholic woman who has already been divorced four times. That's what I call true love, because they can have nine kids and live off the state.

    Um, yeah. So:

    If your beliefs about love are so superior to everyone else's that they should be reflected in our laws, vote "yes." 

    If you're willing to let other people live in accordance with their own morals, even if their beliefs are different from yours, vote "no."

    Moving on: last week I showed questions 2, 3, and 4 who is boss. You won't see them moping around this space again. The rest shouldn't take long, since no one cares about them.

    Question 5: Possession of marijuana for medical purposes has been legal in Maine since 1999, but is still a federal crime. This question asks: "Should we expand the diseases for which people can take pot to include cancer, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, Crohn's Disease, Lou Gherig's Disease, depression, shingles, rickets, herpes, acne, halitosis, that gunk you sometimes get in your eye overnight, persistent fish odor, and the gout?"

    If you're scared that people might abuse the system and get high, shockingly, for no medically necessary reason, vote "no." If you've noticed that this is already happening anyway, but this law might help reduce suffering, vote "yes."

    Question 6: "Dude, how about we borrow 57 bajillion dollars, so the feds will kick in another 97 quadzillion dollars, so we can upgrade highways, bridges, airports, seaports, railways, medical helicopters, and that little Dumbo ride at the state fair?"

    Vote "yes" if you suddenly have little dollar signs in your eyeballs. If you live in Aroostook or Piscataquis Counties, vote "no," since you'll be lucky to see one red cent.

    Question 7: "Hey, can we have a little more time over here to verify all these goddamn signatures for all these frickin' referenda? Like, maybe two weeks instead of one?"

    I am always skeptical of anything that might slow down our remarkably fast and efficient democratic processes. However, the number of citizen petitions in this state is getting unreal. Why pay overtime or hire extra people just to cross check signatures against cemeteries?

    Vote "yes" if you don't give a rat's rectum. Vote "no" if anyone working in your local town office is fat.

Your Referendumb Guide Resource Manual Handbook

Twice a year I write a semi-annual guide to the Maine referendumb process, which comes out biannually.

I translate the questions into language people can understand, so they can make sense of the wording and comprehend the verbiage.

Why all the repetitive redundancy? Well, it seems in all the rage in politics. This fall we have mostly questions I could swear we've voted on before.

Anyway, this week I'll deal with Questions 2, 3, and 4. Check back next week for 5 through 7. I promise not to write about Question 1 again unless I feel like it.

Question 2:  "Do you want people who can afford to buy fancy new cars to pay less tax on them so that state and local governments will have to turn around and collect the money from somebody else (you)?"

If you own any car less than six years old, your excise tax would get cut by an average of 55%. If you think they won't try to squeeze the difference out of my 1997 Ford Ranger, your last reality check must have bounced.

Whoever wrote this bill probably thought environmentalists would fall all over themselves to get behind it because it also exempts hybrids and other "highly fuel-efficient" vehicles from all taxes for three years. As it turns out, environmentalists aren't thrilled about the idea of more cars on the road, and would rather the government have enough money to keep trying to catch people who dump toxic waste into rivers.

If this were really about CO2 emissions, and not just another tax cut for the wealthy, we'd be voting on whether to cut taxes for people who can prove they drove less than 6,000 miles in the previous year.

Vote "Yes" if you just bought a brand new GMC Yukon hybrid and now can't afford groceries. Otherwise, vote "no."

Question 3: "Would you like to tell Gov. Baldacci that he is a short-sighted little twerp who is pulling us through an eight-year existential quagmire?"

Question 3 is ostensibly pointless. Yes, the governor shoved a school consolidation law down our throats, and I have yet to see any published account indicating that consolidation saved anyone money. But it's not like reversing it is going to save any money either. Districts that did what they were told aren't going to fire their new administrators and un-consolidate. 

But communities that thumbed their noses at the law would presumably be off the hook, and Baldacci would finally find out what we really think of him, after we smiled politely all these years through his dumb little restaurant stories.

Vote "Yes" if you would like to give John Baldacci the middle finger.  Vote "no" if you are related to him.  

Question 4: "Don't you wish you'd voted for Question 2, now that you have to buy a new car because you drove through a pothole the size of Isle Au Haut, and TABOR has starved funding for highway repairs and maintenance?"

Yes, let's set an arbitrary formula to dictate how much government budgets can increase from year to year. Any spending increases in a state or local budget would have earn voter approval.

Vote "yes" if you think we elect people just to go on TV and look pretty. Vote "no" if you think we vote enough already.

Marital Problems?

You've probably heard: marriage is in jeopardy.

Whose marriage, you ask? Don't be silly. Everyone's, of course.

To find out just how bad things are, I set out to do some research, and learned that the government agency responsible for keeping track of marriages is the Centers for Disease Control. 

The fact that our government considers marriage a disease has to raise a red flag.

As you probably know, roughly half of all marriages end in divorce. The other half end in death. That's not a good track record for Holy Matrimony, if you ask me.

But what happens after divorce? Nearly 40% of women who remarry will divorce again within 10 years, often after another set of kids has been born (the CDC doesn't offer a corresponding statistic for men - go figure).

Most divorces happen early - statistically, if you and your spouse can make it past 10 years, you're much more likely to stay married until one or both of you lose all of your mental and physical capacities and have to rely on surly, underpaid nursing home staff to make you feel sub-human. 

But those first 10 years can be tough. There are usually small kids running around, needing attention. If you're lucky, your job and your kids are all that stand in the way of you working on your marriage.

Good luck finding a marriage counselor available at 9:30 pm. You can TiVo Dr. Phil, but that's not going to cut it.

Let's face it: our society does not demand that we nurture our families. It demands that we make money, first and foremost, and hopes that we can keep our families together on the side.  We teach the former in schools and colleges; the latter you figure out on your own, if you're lucky.  

So, yes, the nuclear family, once the backbone of our society, has a slipped disc or two. 

At this critical juncture in our cultural history, conservative churches are devoting immense resources to supporting young families. They're sparing no expense in offering and publicizing free professional marriage counseling and courses in parenting and interpersonal communication. 

Just kidding. They're actually trying to keep gay people from getting married. Apparently, that's the bigger threat.

Marriage has been in trouble for a long time. Why wait until gay people asked for it before coming so ardently to its defense?

Maybe it's because they're afraid homosexuals will do marriage better. Maybe the divorce rate among homosexuals will be half of what it is for the rest of us, and they think people will want to turn gay in order to have stable families.

Or maybe, as I've long suspected, it's not as much about defending marriage as it is about not tolerating homosexuality. Recent ads for the "yes" campaign would suggest as much. They claim homosexuality will be taught in schools, even though the marriage equality law mentions nothing about education. 

It makes me laugh at anyone who defends the "yes" vote but still claims, "I don't have a problem with gay people." Right. You just want to perpetuate their feelings of isolation and shame by erasing all public acknowledgement of their existence, and you want them to only marry people to whom they're not attracted.

Yowza! I'd hate to see how you treat the people you do have a problem with!

Like a spouse, maybe?

Brilliant Solving

Do not skip over this column! Failure to read it could result in severe personal consequences.

David Thurber of Battle Creek, Michigan had a chance to read this column, but ignored it instead. Now he is a homeless paraplegic with a boil the size of a tangerine on his face.

Linda Menendez of Roanoke, Virginia did read this column, and she now spends her days basking in perpetual orgasm while handsome male servants feed her exotic fruits.

Only a naïve fool would call this coincidence!

Why is this week’s edition so unusually valuable?

Because this is the first installment of my annual feature “Brilliant Solving,” or “B.S.” for short. I will dissect life’s most nagging and annoying mysteries so you can feel like you actually got something out of reading your newspaper, besides intellectual stimulation.

First question: When cleaning the bathroom, how do you manage to remove hair, as opposed to just wiping it around?

Seriously! I use industrial strength carcinogenic spray chemicals of doom in my bathroom. This stuff is so strong that it removes actual layers of porcelain from my toilet, and even hard water stains, if you can believe that.

But those pesky hairs just get swished around. Exasperated, I resorted to a pair of tweezers, which is okay for the outside but problematic in those “hard to reach” places.

To solve this mystery, I went back to my most trusted research method: ask any woman born before 1980.

It turns out I couldn’t pick up the hair because I was using paper towels. I’m told a coarse cloth of some sort, or even a washcloth, will pick up the hair. (What you do with the cloth after that is up to you. I recommend dipping it in acid and throwing it into a bonfire the size of a UPS truck.)

At any rate, I will definitely let you know how well this method works next time I clean my toilet seven months from now. I am thankful that I will no longer have to listen to my wife read me the riot act for inadequate bathroom splendor.

Next question: Where does the phrase “Read the Riot Act” come from?

I assumed this is some sort of historical reference, in which some people were rioting, and parliament passed a “Riot Act,” and messengers had to go around and sternly read it to people in town squares, which probably resulted in more rioting.

Good luck finding a woman born before 1980 who knows anything about riots. So I consulted phrases.org, which confirmed that I was basically correct, for a change.

The British Parliament did, in fact, pass a Riot Act in 1714, which allowed local authorities to disperse or arrest any group of 12 or more people assembled in one place. (This sounds pretty harsh until you remember men in Afghanistan are allowed, by law, to demand sex from their wives every four days, and women can’t leave their houses without a male relative.)
Authorities were required to read the act to such a crowd before they could begin beating people with clubs and throwing tear gas.

Last question: If your goal is to prevent people of the same gender from having sex with each other, shouldn’t you encourage them to get married?

I don’t think any amount of B.S. is going to touch that one.