Thanks For Clearing That Up

Very interesting Letter To The Editor in today's Idaho Statesman (2nd letter down). The writer wants to clear up some misconceptions that other letter writers have, and provides some information that, frankly, I hadn't ever known:

There are frequently misstatements made in the Letters section. Allow me to correct these false impressions:
• War: War is an armed conflict between or within countries (and involves all of its peoples.) There is no war against individuals, ideologies, drugs, crime or terrorism. Only way to "win" a war is to destroy the enemy and leave. To stay for any reason is a loss. (Reparations, occupation, controlling the government, etc.)
• Abortion: A medical process, with mother and the unborn. A baby or a child denotes live birth. For the reason of abortion — and there are many — every one of these is saved from abuse, not by individuals, but by society for medical, economic, mental, psychological, neglect and other reasons.
• Morality: An individual's code of conduct. Everyone has different moral values. There is no universal standard. ("I'm moral, you're not," sort of thing.)
• Marriage: Not biblical. According to history, the institution of marriage was established just over 300 years ago, and the legal rights and privileges of such a union were created long after. These are the benefits sought by the gay community — not the ceremony so many heterosexuals violate every day.

The first point is patently ridiculous -- apparently our occupations of Germany and Japan after WWII were the reason we lost the war -- and the second point lacks, well, a point (as well as any hint of sentence structure). Is he saying that everyone who is born is abused by society, so we'd be better off not being born? The third point is pretty much the crux of the conflict between the religious and non-religious, so I'll give him a grudging pass on that one.

Now we reach his "point" on marriage: "According to history, the institution of marriage was established just over 300 years ago..." Huh?!? I'm not sure what history this guy's been reading, but I was always taught that marriage was a pretty big deal back in the time of, for example, Henry VIII (which was almost 500 years ago). Some say it goes back even further. Maybe the writer is one of those people who thing the Earth was made 6,000 years ago, and he's compressing time.

Seriously, he's obviously concerned about the Gay Marriage Ban amendment being proposed for the Idaho Constitution. There are lots of reasons to oppose such an amendment -- my main reason (among others) is I don't like the idea of being able to amend the Constitution with a simple majority vote, so I'm voting against any Constitutional amendment on general principles -- and lots of ways to try to convince others, but making up "facts" that have no basis in reality isn't one of them. It does provide cheap laughs for newspaper readers, though...