Drunk & Disorderly

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

In New York, where it is actually legal for two people who claim to love each other to get married, at least one elected town clerk there has decided the law is messing with her religious freedom to allow bigotry to trump her sworn oath to uphold and defend the laws of the state.

Rose Marie Belforti, town clerk of Ledyard, just doesn’t think it’s right that she should have to sign a marriage license upon which is written two names suspiciously sounding either both male or both female. Everybody knows, she says, God damns homosexuals, so why should she have to help them get married?

Plus, it’s confusing when some of the names on the certificates she’s required to sign — names like Jessie, Leslie, Jamie, and Jackie — could be either gender. Good Lord, what’s she supposed to do when Frankie and Johnnie want to get married? She could accidentally be aiding and abetting something really…dirty.

So I couldn’t agree with her more: she shouldn’t have to be forced by some secular-sounding governmental technicality to participate in this mess. No, she should definitely seek holier work elsewhere that doesn’t profane the word of God. Let someone else do the obvious work of the Devil.

I’m guessing the upcoming November election may prove it is God’s will to let her off the hook.

Either way, she could spend much more time in church, perhaps signing the visas God needs to legally send all those damned homosexuals to hell.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Nature magazine has published a study of rats showing that when deprived of sleep, as many as half the tiny little neurons in their tiny little heads shut down for brief periods of time while the rats are still awake and going about their business.

Sort of makes you wonder whether some prosecutors ever get any sleep at all.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Last time here I wrote about a couple of stupid laws in Florida. Turns out there are even more stupid laws in Texas, which is a shame because my mother was a Texan. If I really put my mind to it, I could probably do nothing but write about stupid laws in all the 50 states and all the countries of the world. I could call the blog “Stupid Laws in All the 50 States and All the Countries of the World.”

These Texas laws are particularly stupid because they are directed at schoolchildren, some of them really, really young schoolchildren. According to The Daily, a newspaper you can only read on the iPad and so I won’t link it here, Texas police have issued hundreds of thousands of criminal citations to kids as young as 6, for such awful things as talking in class, jumping up and down on your seat on the school bus, and launching paper airplanes to sail over the heads of teachers writing on the blackboard. These aren’t mere disciplinary actions, either, like getting a certificate for “Caught Being Bad.” These are real tickets that create a criminal record. For 6-year-olds.

One kid — let’s call him Billy — was cited for the criminal violation of…wait for it…farting in class.

C’mon, Texas.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

If nothing else, the Florida State Legislature concentrates on the really important work of groundbreaking criminal law.

This week that great body sent two bills for Gov. Rick Scott’s scrawl. The first would insure that anybody who gets too friendly with a sweet-eyed heifer will get to contemplate the meaning of animal magnetism from behind Sunshine State bars. Scott reportedly is reluctant to sign for fear of losing the farm vote.

The second bill gives real teeth to the fashion police. It will force school kids to wear their pants higher than they have since at least 1972. Anybody caught with their pants down far enough to show their underwear or, God forbid, buttocks cleavage, could face suspension from school, or other dire consequences. It’s a setback for Calvin Klein.

Word is the legislators have their eye on construction workers next.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

President Obama has now posted his “long form” birth certificate on the internet, and for that Donald Trump is very proud of himself. We know Trump is very proud of himself, because this wannabe cartoon candidate held a press conference to announce he is very proud of himself. I look at his baby-fat cheeks and wonder what compels this grown man to say that about himself. Did Mommy Trump or Daddy Trump never hold those cheeks and croon to Baby Trump, “Donald, I’m very proud of you!”?

Turns out the long-form certificate is one page. My birth certificate is a page, and my son’s birth certificate is a page, even though it’s written in French because he was born in Paris (mama and papa were born in the USA, so he still gets to be President), so that sounds okay. But I’m guessing someone is going to find that a little fishy. I never got to write a long-form essay that was only a page, so what’s up with that?

I’m sure the fact that this is the first President who has been asked to prove he’s an American, and the first to be more than a little black, is just a coincidence. But I admit I’ve already forbidden my daughter, who in twenty years is eligible, to run for President. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking there’s a lesbian in the family.

I hate to admit this, but I too don’t think Mr. Obama is eligible to be President. I don’t think Mr. Trump is, either. I don’t think anyone is.

Article 2, Section 1, Paragraph 5 of the United States Constitution has this to say about who’s eligible for that office:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…”

Now I’m an old English major, and can follow a comma as well as the next old English major, and I read that to say that only a person who had been born in the United States, or who had already become a naturalized citizen under qualifying law of the day, on or before 17 September 1787, is eligible to become President.

Under that reading, the last President eligible for the office was Zachary Taylor, and the two Presidents before him (Tyler and Polk) were mere pretenders.

I wonder if Donald Trump is aware of that.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, always pretty in pink, has discovered yet another fresh take on how best to trash basic human dignity. Now the people he arrests get to appear on a kind of American Idol contest, with their booking mugshots displayed on Arpaio’s website. People get to vote on the ugliest, most ridiculous, or stupid-looking portrait of the day. At the time I looked at the website, 5290 people had cast their votes for seven contenders, including a man who is missing his lower jaw (2nd place) and an apparently naked man who appeared to have fallen into a mountain of cocaine (runaway favorite).

Sheriff Joe is trying the idea out, and asking people if they think it’s a good idea. By about 10-1, more than 26,000 Jerry Springer fans have indicated it’s an excellent idea. Presumably none of them thinks he or she has a chance in hell of ever appearing in this gallery. Presumably none of them has ever been in Maricopa County.

Just to take the sting out of the competition, there’s a cautionary on the site advising “Pre-trial inmates are innocent until proven guilty!”

Innocent, maybe, but captive targets.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Give it up for the Italians, they just have more interesting political trials than we do.

I can’t tell you how many times I almost fell asleep during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial for not semantically properly having sex with a big-haired intern. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on the other hand, knows how to party.

The Roman press is awash in tales of the Italian Stallion hosting “bunga bunga” sex parties, not with one or two ambitious interns, but with dozens — dozens — of women, all of whom seem to be awarded cash prizes just for attending. I’m not sure what “bunga bunga” sex is, but it may explain why he never returns my calls.

Lest you think the Italian authorities are mere moralizing adulterers, like the geezers in the United States Congress, Berlusconi is accused of handing out one of the cash prizes to a 17-year-old. Under Italian law she just misses the safe zone of legal prostitution. Berlusconi isn’t one to hide behind Clintonian language precision, though while he isn’t denying he actually did have sexual relations with that girl, he does think that technically he may be entitled to a refund.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Last month an outfit called NewSouth Books almost published a new edition of one of the greatest (some people believe it to be the greatest) of American works of fiction, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was written by a man my mother’s mother’s family knew as Sam Clemens. My grandmother Ethel Clemens was passing proud of her Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam, of course, wrote under the name Mark Twain.

I say “almost published” because the so-called editors of this new edition contrived their editorial effort to the intellectually parsimonious task of replacing one word with a different word, wherever that one word appeared. That one word is nigger. A better, less offensive word, these editors decided, is slave. It must have taken them all of three seconds to use the find-and-replace tool to desecrate this American classic and emasculate the power the original word still holds. Thus have the editors made Huckleberry Finn more pleasing to the delicate.

Now the word slave shouldn’t give pause to anyone: few people are slaves by choice, and any negative connotations impart to the masters rather than slaves. But the word nigger has negative connotations galore, which are at least intended to impart to the nigger. That word was very much a part of the time of Huckleberry Finn, and remains a part of our own time.

I grew up with the childhood rhyme, “Eenie meenie minie mo, catch a nigger by the toe.” We sang “Little black Sambo lived in the jungle, and today’s his happy birthday.” (That tune and lyric still go through my mind from time to time, uncensored.) I didn’t know any niggers, hadn’t met any black people. I think I knew the word was somehow wrong, but I didn’t know why. But the people who taught me the rhyme and the song knew, and with the dawn of the civil rights movement I learned the why of it.

It was the ungodly why of it that made it important never to forget the word is a scourge coming from the lips of the ignorant or hateful.

Uncle Sam wasn’t a hateful man according to the people who knew him. And Huck wasn’t a hateful boy. He loved the nigger Jim, and at the same time lived in a hateful world that tagged the slave with that obscenity. So Sam used the word in his book, used it 219 times. That was at least a part of his point. The NewSouth editors think he can make the same point with the word slave. I don’t think so. I doubt anyone has been struck by the six times I’ve already used slave in this piece. I’m pretty sure everyone has prickled at least a little at the six times I’ve used the other word, the word NewSouth doesn’t think you should have to look at. I want you to take a good look at it:

nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger

That’s the other 213 times. I look at that block of words, and feel sadness, hatred, and shame. You probably feel something too. I know Uncle Sam did.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Illinois today abolished the death penalty.

That makes 16 states of the United States that are no longer in the business of executing people. I consider that an honor roll, and so name those states: Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia also has rejected the death penalty.

That also makes 34 states that remain in the business of executing people. In Texas particularly, business is good. Since the U.S. Supreme Court re-enabled the death penalty in 1976, Texas has put to death 466 men, women, and children. No wonder then-Governor George Bush had such a pleased smirk on his face when talking about one of the women he was about to execute at the time: those boys are sending souls to God hand over fist.

Six years ago the Supremes struck down the death penalty for juveniles, after presiding over the executions of 22 children of the nation.

In signing his state’s legislation to end state executions, the Illinois governor noted that 13 times the state had wrongly condemned the innocent (it’s actually 20 times, but 13 is bad enough). Said the governor, “It’s not possible to create a perfect, mistake-free death penalty system.”

But it is possible to create a more perfect union of our nation states. Offhand I can think of 34 more ways to form that more perfect union.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Even Beelzebub is protected by the Constitution of the United States, and that’s a good thing.

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that God-fearing (if not God-inspired) Baptists who like to attend military funerals — and scream at grieving survivors that the reason their sons or daughters were killed is that God hates America because we don’t stone gay people — are protected by First Amendment freedom of speech.

Just so all Baptists don’t get smeared with the same broad brush (my mother was a Baptist), these particular folks are Fred Phelps (I believe the Devil owns a driver’s license issued in that name) and six American idiots related to him — to be fair, they may only be morons — who comprise the congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church. That Topeka, Kansas, outfit spends an inordinate amount of time thanking God for dead soldiers.

One dead soldier’s father sued, and a jury — gratefully not of Fred’s peers — held Fred and kin (collectively the Flintstones) liable for millions of dollars. The Flintstones challenged the verdict as grossly excessive, especially considering the weekly collection plate averaged a buck ninety-eight. The case made it to the Supremes, who rightly found that even stone-age sentiments are protected by the First Amendment.

Fred and his Flintstones, as noted in Justice Alito’s sole dissent, have brought their hate parade to almost 600 military funerals. They also like to picket the funerals of police officers, firefighters, and victims of natural disaster, accident, and crime. They even announced their intention to picket the funeral of the 9-year-old girl killed in the Tucson shooting spree. I don’t know if they did; that might have been too much even for God.

I’m glad I wasn’t there if they did: some people are just too ugly to look at. I would like to be there, though, if Fred ever gets his personal meeting with God. I’d like to see the look on his face when he discovers God is a cross-dresser.