POLITICS AND RELIGION ALERT

I am a globalist, a more-than-somewhat Libertarian capitalist, a practical feminist, and a Christian (though not a fundamentalist). 

I get very impatient with the people who oppose movements like the European Union on the grounds that such a "New World Order" will provoke the Apocalypse. What's the matter -- are they afraid they will get hauled off the Wrong Way? (Besides, wouldn't that solve the whole situation?)  I have more respect for those who say "I'm just not comfortable federating with the country next door.  We still do things too differently". I think school vouchers should at least be tried out, to see if they even work in a given market. To those who are afraid that their personal tax money would get spent at a school based in a religion they don't approve of, I say "So put your muscle where your mouth is." Go find a church school you do approve of, and get with the school board to see where they can use some volunteer expertise. (I never met a school board yet who couldn't use some expert volunteers somewhere in the system.)  Besides, if you have kids of your own in school, you will get back more in vouchers than you put in in property taxes, if  Little Rock is anyway typical of the ratio. I am in favor of a national-standard exit exam for high school graduation. The job market is national (hell - it's global, going-by how many quasi-legal resident non-citizens are scrambling for green cards nowadays) and so is the list of college-options. If we want to stay competitive as a nation, we need to be sure all our graduates are ready for their next step, be it entering Friendly Neighborhood Vo-Tech for auto-mechanics training, typing want-ads for the newspaper, enlisting in the Armed Forces, or applying to the college or universiity of their choice (be it Vine Covered U, Enormous State U, or Charlie Tuna Scientific Institute). The entrance/proficiency minimums of all these need to feed into the test composition, to-where if a student passes the test in (for instance) English, they need have no fear of being required to take Grammar Zero wherever their next educational stop may be.

I have heard very little good about "bilingual education"  The point of going to school is to become functional in the society. In the United States, this means fluency in English. At the same time, since there are more students (of all ages) than ever before who were not born in an English-speaking culture, fluency in the appropriate non-English languages for the particular community should be a bonusable skill for teachers.

This goes double for government workers. That news story of the welfare worker in Arizona who was fired for "violating" the state's English-Only rule by speaking Spanish to an elderly client really spiked my blood pressure. There are 200+ years of various governmental records in English in most of this country, which is reason-enough (for me) to retain English as the Language of Records. But government workers DO need to be able to translate for the newly-arrived or the too-old-for-ease-of-learning.

I have in mind the Marksmanship Bonus, which the Army and Marines (at least used to) pay, as the model for such an incentive-pay.

And speaking of newly-arrived workers scrambling for Green Cards:
Listening to the coverage on NPR of the protest marches about immigrant labor the blood-pressure started up again. 

One thing you gotta understand: my maternal grandmother Katie Reissig McCutchen was an immigrant.
And I’ve lost track of how many generations back the McCutchens came over: sometime after the 1754 Jacobite fracas.
Somewhere in-between came my Dad's side of the family, the Eblings and Suesses.

So I have absolutely no patience with the “keep them out” faction.
I also have no patience with employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants and pay them substandard wages.

My personal preference is that three things would happen approximately concurrently:
[a] Remove the current limitations on how many legal immigrants are allowed each year.
[b] Come up with a simplified application process and hire a shitload of clerks to process the current (years-deep) backlog USING THE NEW RULES. 
[c] Pick a date (fairly soon) after-which anyone who wants to can apply to come into the country legally. 

Persons whose applications are in the pipe (backlog or new) should be allowed to come on and start getting established.  If there are glitches in the process on any of them, we’ve got their declared addresses to be able to find them to iron out the problems. If any are not at their declared addresses when problems crop up, they better have a really compelling reason why they didn't file a Change of Address, but we're willing to at least listen to their side.

People who are currently in the country illegally would be allowed to go back across any border, and re-enter on a legal application after The Date.  Their current employers would be strongly encouraged (via a broadcast PR campaign) to organize transport and lodging to turn their workers around in the new process, and bring them back to their jobs as legal alien workers.

Employers found to have illegal employees after The Date would be stuck with a fine large enough to
[a] transport their illegal employees back to a border at approximately the Greyhound Bus level of comfort,
[b] lodge them there for a night or two while their new applications get started, and
[c] pay the salaries for a year for the clerks who will be processing this batch of new applications.

These employees would NOT be required to return to their former employers. 

[dang! This almost sounds like a job for the I.W.W.! Somebody ping Leslie Fish!]

Yes, things will get more expensive.
That's what happens when you pay workers what they're worth. The current flap about separation of church and state simply confuses me. Keeping in-mind what a hell English politics  had been all through the Colonial period as a result of the Catholic-Protestant differences, I can see where the drafters of the Constitution were coming from in not wanting to specify a religion that was required of all governmental participants.  Where I have problems with is the interpretation that says that government support can't be offered equally to all religious organizations right alongside secular organizations doing the same work.  A panelist on a recent NPR talk show tried to explain that the underpinnings of that opinion go all the way back to James Madison.  I wish someone would direct my attention to an explanation (in non-lawyerese) of his train of logic. I was very gratified with the recent court decision which agreed with me that if all the religions get an equal shot at the voucher money, it does not constitute establishing any of them

In the aftermath of Iowa's legislating a thumbs-up on same-sex marriage, one of the opposition interviewees on NPR  was going-on about how “The State doesn’t perform baptisms or circumcisions so why should it perform marriages?"

Because marriage is more than a sacrament: it is also a merger of personal assets which has effects on taxation and inheritance, among other things. 

The Church needs to ratify the sacrament separate from the State ratifying the merger.  Most European countries do this already.
Any two human beings should be able to appear before a JP and get that merger ratified. If we ever identify intelligent non-humans I expect this to be extended to “any two sentient beings”. 
For that matter, why limit the merger to only two partners, as long as the contract is carefully written?

updated 11 November 2012