Gay sex versus adultery

Army generals and Republican presidential candidates are swarming around the media making the following two-part assertion: gay sex is like adultery, and therefore it is immoral. This is just a short comment on this paleoconservative point of view.

First, on the surface, gay sex is nothing like adultery. Gay sex is some kind of sexual act between two or more people of the same sex. The marital status of the participants is completely irrelevant. Adultery is when a married person has sex with someone other than his or her spouse. The two concepts overlap, obviously: both involve sex, and, if a married person has gay sex with someone other than his or her spouse, I suppose that that would constitute adultery. In fact, if a person in a gay marriage has heterosexual sex, which would obviously have to be with someone other than his or her spouse, then that too would have to fall into the definition of adultery. But the very fact that we can compare the two things, to talk about how they differ, how they overlap, and how they interact, is proof positive that there can be no equation of the two.

What I think is going on here is that gay sex and adultery are both things that Army generals and Republican presidential candidates are expected to disapprove of, or in other words, that they are expected to consider immoral. That, and the fact that they both involve a sexual act, are the only ways that gay sex is "like" adultery. Strangely enough, the public statements made by these individuals imply that the reason why gay sex is immoral is because it is like adultery, which is completely circular. The reason it is circular is that if the main reason why the two concepts are similar in some people's minds is because they are both immoral, then the immorality of one of the concepts can't be the reason why the other is immoral.

But there is another, much more important problem with the statements from General Pace and Senator Brownback: since about 1970, it has been widely understood, even in America, that fully consensual adultery is not immoral. This started with the so-called "open marriages" of the 1970s, and it continues today in various permuations. That is, many people around the world believe that the basis of the older conception of adultery as immoral, being based as it was on the idea that a wife is the property of her husband, and therefore that adultery is a form of theft, is completely passé. Nowadays, what most people see as the problem with adultery is cheating. That is, dishonesty between married people, which can of course cause immense problems and undoubtedly contributes to the high divorce rate, is considered to be immoral, just as any other kind of lying, cheating, or dishonesty is.

To summarize this last point: lying and cheating and other forms of dishonesty are considered immoral by most people; adultery often involves all of the above; therefore, adultery is immoral.

But what about "open marriage", or wife-swapping (so-called), or group sex, to name a few situations where husbands and wives sample the fruits of someone else's tree, openly, with full consent, and therefore, with no dishonesty? Is that immoral? I believe that most Americans think that it is either not immoral at all, or at least that it is much less immoral than the stereotype of adultery based on sneaking around. Furthermore, I think that sneaking around sexually by unmarried people who believe themselves to be in a committed relationship with their partner is considered to be almost as immoral as actual adultery, by most people. In other words, it's the dishonesty, not the sex, and not the marriage, that is most relevant to morality, to most people.

If adultery per se is not immoral, which as I have just explained is a very widespread belief today, then the whole logic that gay sex is immoral because it is like adultery and adultery is immoral, falls apart.

In fact, just as adultery has lost its status as an automatically immoral act because of wives' loss of their status as property, I think it fair to say that for most people in America, and, I dare say, even in the Army and the Senate, gay sex is not necessarily immoral. Like adultery, it can be immoral: sneaking around dishonestly to have gay sex would do it, unprotected gay sex when there is the possibility of transferring AIDS would also count.

So in effect, there is another similarity between gay sex and adultery, one that is probably not understood among certain Army generals and Republican presidential candidates: they are similar in that (1) both were once considered immoral, and (2) now, except for situations involving other kinds of immorality such as dishonesty or harming other people, they aren't.

Some 2nd Amendment musings

OK, a federal appeals court panel in Washington, DC, has made a decision that the 2nd Amendment's right, commonly referred to as "the right to bear arms", means that all individuals have a right to own firearms, in this case, handguns and un-safed shotguns and rifles. If the history of American legal tradition is maintained, this decision, like other similar ones before it, will be overturned. However, as a random philosophizer, I feel compelled to write down some of my reactions to the decision as it stands today.

First, let's get the full text of the 2nd Amendment in front of us:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Much has been written about the strange wording of this amendment. To me, the key has to do with the expression "to bear arms", and also with "to keep arms". "To bear arms" means to act militarily. For example, a nation can bear arms against another nation. It does not mean, as commonly supposed, "to carry a gun", although of course in modern times, using firearms is usually part of bearing arms. You can also see the lexical connection between "military action" and weapons if you look at a word like "army", and reference it to its French source words "armée" (cf. Spanish "armada" for a similar connection).

There is also a more specific meaning of "to keep", basically "to maintain in readiness". Applied to the military domain, the phrase "to keep arms" would mean "to maintain materiel in readiness". Once again, there is a connection between this more specialized meaning and the modern gloss "to own guns", but there is clearly a bit more to "keep" than mere ownership.

The framers, in a stylistically elegant but ultimately misleading turn, put the two phrases "to bear arms" (i.e., to serve militarily) and "to keep arms", (i.e., to maintain military materiel in readiness) together in a single phrase, "to keep and bear arms". However, there was a reason why the two phrases could be joined together in this way, and the clearest source for this is in the 1777 Articles of Confederation, which was the law of the land while the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were in conception. Here is the key extract from Article of Confederation VI:

[E]very State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of field pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage.

This is the very likely source of "well-regulated militia", and it also comports with the "maintain in readiness" meaning of the phrase "to keep arms". To me there is no doubt whatsoever that this foregoing phrase from the Articles is exactly what is being described more concisely and with a different rhetorical purpose in the 2nd Amendment.

As for why "to bear arms" (i.e., to serve militarily) was considered so important, we have to understand that one of the major innovations of the Constitution relative to the Articles, was the centralization of the armed forces under the command of the president. As can be seen in the extract from Article of Confederation VI, the states were to have a much stronger role. In normal circumstances, it was Congress who declared war (Article of Confederation IX):

The United States in Congress assembled shall never engage in a war … unless nine States assent to the same

But the states continued to have an important role (e.g., Article of Confederation VII):

When land forces are raised by any State for the common defense, all officers of or under the rank of colonel, shall be appointed by the legislature of each State respectively, by whom such forces shall be raised, or in such manner as such State shall direct, and all vacancies shall be filled up by the State which first made the appointment.

There is one more very relevant piece to this puzzle: why was the militia considered so important? I believe the answer to this question becomes more clear once we recall that before July 4, 1776, all of the people in the Colonies were British, and so ultimately were their militias. The famous Redcoats were their own national military force, equivalent to the US Army today. The colonial militias, a concept that stems from a similar tradition in England, was primarily a list of able-bodied men who were available to serve militarily (i.e., to bear arms) in case of emergency, along with a few usually wealthy individuals who would contribute supplies and leadership. In some areas, the terminology of "active" versus "inactive" or "reserve" militias was used: active militiamen trained regularly, had their equipment, and so on; inactive militiamen were basically on a list somewhere and wouldn't do anything unless a crisis arrived and they were called up. A pre-revolutionary example was the French and Indian War, in which quite a few colonists served in the militia of their colony, along with militiamen from other colonies and of course officers and men from the regular [British] army. When the Revolution arrived, most (but not all!) of the militiamen in each colony maintained their allegiance to the colony (now "state"), but changed their national allegiance to that of the United States, and the most familiar part of the war was between the same militias that had supported the British military during the French and Indian war, and the regular British army. Once the British gave up and the world recognized that a new nation had been born, much of the credit was given to the state militias.

To be perfectly clear, before the Revolution, we had two independent, allied military forces in the colonies, the regular British forces, loyal to the King, and each colony's militia forces, equally loyal to the King, but also loyal to their colony. If the same injustices and opportunities that triggered the initiation of hostilities had occurred in the absence of an independent militia, there could have been no credible uprising and it is unlikely that the United States would have come into existence, at least not in the 18th Century. But the existing militia, trained and organized during the previous campaign against the French and Indians, supplied enough of a force to get the attention of the entire seaboard, and also of anti-English powers in Europe who seized the opportunity to get in a couple of licks against King George, and the rest is history. So while the militias cannot reasonably be given credit for winning the Revolution alone, it is completely clear that in their absence, it is unlikely that the Revolution would ever have gotten underway.

The Articles of Confederation, which were written while the fighting was still going on, gave a good deal of the military power to the militias, even though they also made allowance for a centrally-controlled national military and naval force. To a large number of Revolutionary War veterans, who were an important block among those voting yea or nay on the federal Constitution, any attempt to eliminate the state militias would have been an absolute deal killer. However, the unwieldiness of the system required by the Articles, based as it was on state militias and a largely state-controlled central military, was one of the primary motivations for the Constitution. This was a difficult proposition: to gut the militia system with one hand, while affirming and guaranteeing its continuation with the other. But in effect, this was what the framers decided to do, and the 2nd Amendment was their most important instrument in assuaging the doubts of the veterans.

I believe that once the context of 1790 is understood vis à vis the military (and especially the militia) role of the states in the Articles of Confederation, compared to the changes proposed in the new constitution, then the strange wording and content of the 2nd Amendment becomes much more clear: it is a guarantee that the state [formerly, colonial] militia system would not be eliminated. It contains phrases lifted right from the Articles of Confederation which were surely chosen to make the connection completely clear between the new, reorganized state militias and the former militias, and it made the promise that this system would continue forever. It even contains a piece of blatant pandering to the former militiamen: the phrase "being necessary to the security of a free state"† was surely designed as a piece of basically meaningless feel-good rhetoric. In any case, it worked. The Constitution was ratified, and the new federal system became the law of the land.

The militias, however, basically withered away in the coming centuries. Even though the US Constitution today gives the state militias the right to wage war (Article I, Section 10)

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, … engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay

it is almost inconceivable that this could happen. The militias have become a source of manpower during natural catastrophes, and an adjunct to the regular military; their status as an independent military force no longer exists.

As the sacredness of an independent, powerful system of state militias has melted away over the years, the meaning of the 2nd Amendment has changed for most people. Since there is no longer a visceral attachment to the idea of a strong, separate militia, it has become very difficult to "get" the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment. Why have such an irrelevancy in the very Bill of Rights? What can it mean?

And a new meaning was invented: "to bear arms" can only mean "to carry a gun", and "to keep arms" can only mean "to own a gun". The part about "shall not be infringed" is clear enough. The part about "well regulated militias", well, that doesn't quite fit, so ignore it. And the new, 20th century version of the 2nd Amendment became "the right of all people to own and to carry as many guns as they like shall not be infringed". And that's the meaning that two out of three judges in the federal appeals court panel have decided on: there need be no connection at all to a militia or the possibility of service in a military force. Instead, everyone has the universal right to own and carry whatever weapons they want, and no law can be passed to limit that right, no matter how many people may be killed due to the absence of the law.

Well I hope sincerely that these two errant judges are slapped down as quickly as possible, and not just in order to save lives. I also think that it's important for Americans to know and to think enough about our own national history to understand why the courts have always insisted on at least a potential connection to militias when considering laws that limit the ownership or use of firearms. Judges Silberman and Griffith (and, sadly, millions of pro-gun zealots) have either not understood or have decided for reasons of their own to deny America's history and traditions.

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† There is one other comment I want to add here: if the "free state" phrase is not just feel-good rhetoric, there is another, breath-taking possibility. What if "state" here means literally "State", as in Virginia and New York? This possibility actually has some credibility, given the strong tie of the militias to the individual states, and given the intense paranoia on the part of many Americans around 1790 that the federal system would take all power, not just military power, from the states. This interpretation would make an even stronger tie between the 2nd amendment and the militia clause in the Articles of Confederation, and would vitiate even more strongly the "universal gun ownership" argument. It would also suggest rather strongly that the word "people" as used in the 2nd Amendment refers "potential state militiamen". But I admit that the "State" interpretation may not be justified. Cool, though.

Mr. Cheney: the waiting game in Iraq is already over

Vice President Cheney has suggested that those in Congress who seek to bring the American military adventure in Iraq to an end--at least he no longer calls them "Democrats", because more and more Republicans are leaving the sinking ship of the administration's foreign policy--are undercutting the war† effort. His logic is that if we establish a time limit, the enemy‡ will be able to "wait us out". The problem with this logic is that there was never any serious question about who will win a waiting game in Iraq.

The Iraqi people, including Saddam Hussein even before the invasion, understand very well how much is is costing America to maintain a military occupation so far from their home base, in a region where there is very little support from neighboring countries. How much does it cost for an IED or a suicide belt, compared to the cost of an attack helicopter, a nuclear aircraft carrier, or a stealth bomber?

An useful parallel can be drawn between the colonial insurgents during the American Revolution, compared to the British soldiers. Once the fighting began, the British, who in effect became military occupiers of what was formerly considered their own soil, could no longer count on getting food and other support domestically. They were separated from their home base by weeks of sea travel. Once the French navy made it impossible for English ships to come and go freely, the war was effectively over for the British. The American rabble starved and had a miserable time of it at Valley Forge and so on, but anyone who looked at the situation in the longer term understood that in the end, England simply couldn't win the waiting game.

In fact, there no longer is a question as to whether we can win a waiting game. The actions in Congress and in the public polls can't cause us to fail, because what they clearly indicate is that we have already lost. This "war" is already longer than the American portion of World War II. Even though the Iraq action is, from the American perspective, much smaller than WWII (probably it doesn't seem so small to the Iraqis), we are war-weary even though much of its dust has been swept under the mass media rug in this country, and by "dust", I mean the toll in terms of death, injuries, broken lives and families, not to mention the true cost in $$$. For the American people, most of them, the thrill is gone. This wasn't true in the adventure's first year, although I'll never understand why it wasn't, but it certainly is now.

As usual, it is easy to complain about a war, but harder to suggest an alternative (although see my post on this blog called Cheapskate philosophizer's Iraq withdrawal plan). I think that we must withdraw, because as I just said, almost all of the violence in Iraq stands on one shared leg: the occupation. Once our military leaves, that leg will be gone and much of the support for the violence will be gone with it. So leave we must. But we also have a moral obligation to the Iraqi people to repair the damage we have done to them and to their country, and these reparations can most usefully take the form of foreign aid, not in the form of bringing in Halliburton and its clones to make thousands of millions rebuilding what our bombs have destroyed, but as aid to the Iraqi people as directly as possible. Let the Iraqis themselves rebuild what we have destroyed, on our dime but according to their preferences and on their timetable.

Will there continue to be violence once we're gone, and will the violence spread throughout the region? There will be, as there has been for centuries, violence among religious factions in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Did anyone really think that we could stop that by establishing the neocons' erstwhile "stable democracy"? Does it contribute to the magnitude of the failure of our invasion and occupation to admit that there will still be civil, interconfessional violence there? I think not.

Will the violence spread throughout the region? Well, perhaps it will, but hasn't been obvious for years that foreign involvement against America in Iraq has been largely motivated by a perversion of the Bush-Cheney mantra that we are fighting them in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home? That is, if you are really angry at America and want to harm Americans, then even if you could never amass the time, materiel, and other resources required to mount any kind of attack against the American homeland, you can still hitchhike to Jordan and go across the border into Iraq, where you'll be given the means and the opportunity to make your attack. In other words, our occupation forces are a magnet and an accelerant for violence in the Iraq region. I believe that the odds of regional violence will decrease, not increase, once we leave.

There could be one important exception, but it is a self-limiting one, I think. If Iran, in cahoots with the present Shiite-dominated national government, attempts to annex militarily part of Iraq, then there could be regional violence, because Iraq's and Iran's other [Sunni] neighbors would not sit still and let that happen. The most straightforward way to prevent it would be to have negotiations in advance with the Iraqi government and those of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and so on, in order to establish limits and consequences. Neither America nor Isreal should be present, although I see nothing wrong in those nations working behind to scenes to make the meetings happen. And even without formal meetings of that sort, the balance of power is fairly well known there, and while Iran can be belligerent against American-occupied Iraq without serious regional repercussions, I don't think the same would be true once the Americans leave. There is a somewhat similar, but (I believe) less likely possible scenario with the Kurds and Turkey, who of course fear that a stable and largely independent Kurdish nation will destabilize their own Kurdish region. However, there are also natural counterweights to any major action by Turkey against Iraqi Kurdistan, including the potential intervention by neighboring countries. Furthermore, Turkey's own ambition to join the EU, which would seriously harmed by blatant militarizing against the Iraqi Kurds, reduces the likelihood of action by Turkey.

The bottom line has three parts: (1) Mr. Cheney, we have already lost the waiting game and never had a chance to win it in the first place. (2) We must make reparations to the Iraqi people after we withdraw our forces, and we should do it in a way that maximizes the role of Iraqis in the rebuilding process. (3) Violence, and the threat of future violence, will go down only once our military forces leave Iraq.

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†Well, Cheney calls it a war, but it seems to me that while there was a very brief war against the former government of Iraq, which we won in a few weeks, and even declared victory, more or less, or at least displayed banners that said "Mission Accomplished", what we have there now is nothing more than a post-war occupation. Iraq is occupied territory, and while there are quite a few factions that are going around killing people, the one thing that unites most of them is their desire to throw off the yoke of the occupier.

‡Again, Cheney views the people who are blowing each other up as "the enemy", which I suppose is shorter than a more accurate characterization. But they aren't really our enemies in any conventional sense. First and foremost, once we leave, very few of them will have any interest in attacking us any more. To the extent that they attack Americans at all, their purpose is simply to get us to leave. But far more of the attacks are on their fellow Iraqis, and are motivated by both attempts to seize and to consolidate power that will remain after the current chaos resolves and the Americans leave, and by ancient animosities and recent grudges and the desire for vengeance against their former oppressors, or for re-vengeance by the former oppressors against those who have already taken vengeance. So it would at least be more accurate to call them "the enemies", since almost all of them are someone's enemy. But calling them "the enemy" as Cheney has done is a grossly misleading oversimplification of the problem. I'm 100% certain that he damn well knows that, and that his terminology was chosen very carefully in order to cast the Iraq occupation for the American electorate as a conventional war, with "enemies" and "victory".

Fighting the Taliban

Iraq is receiving, and has been receiving, much more attention than Afghanistan, but I think that that may be about to change. There is currently talk of a massive build-up of Taliban forces, with as many as 2000 suicide bombers among them. This is enough to wreak probably almost as much havoc in Afghanistan as has been wreaked against us in Iraq, at least in the short term. And it comes at a predictable moment: the international force is winding down, the American people have turned against any further military build-up; basically, the sleeping dragon awakened on Sept. 11, 2001 is yawning and getting ready to go back to sleep.

Well, I want to go back to two more fundamental questions that have received particularly short shrift regarding Afghanistan: (1) what was our purpose in invading their country, and (2) who is our enemy there.

The invasion, even though rather weak in terms of the number of American soldiers on the ground, was well supported around the world, primarily because it was seen as a form of "hot pursuit". That is, a band of murderous thugs had made a particularly brutal and effective attack against us, and we were chasing them down. That it meant that we needed to cross the boundary of another nation was widely accepted at the time as OK.

However, even then I was concerned with how little respect we showed for the sovereignty of the Afghan government.

Mullah Omar, the leader of the country, had made a deal with Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda that they could operate freely in the mountainous outlands of the country if, in exchange, they accepted Afghans loyal to the ruling party as trainees. This deal was a win-win for them, because in fact, Mullah Omar and Osama bin-Laden shared a view of the world that required them, as a matter of their religious faith, to be militant against those whom they perceived to be enemies of their religion. Omar apparently had no interest in anything beyond the borders of his own country, while bin-Laden apparently did not involve himself in the domestic affairs of his host; their arrangement was made for practical reasons and because of their agreement on many theological and ideological matters.

During the very rapid build-up to our invasion of Afghanistan, we demanded that Mullah Omar either hand over bin-Laden and the leaders of al-Qaeda to us, or to get out of the way and to allow us to get them. He actually agreed to do it, but only if we gave him hard evidence that it was bin-Laden and al-Qaeda who had attacked us. At that time, we had no such evidence, and in fact, it was quite some time before we got it. We had a compelling circumstantial case, but in the Sharia law which Mullah Omar attempted to follow in ruling Afghanistan, circumstantial evidence carries little weight. We could have waited to gather hard evidence, and used it to convince Omar to comply, but we didn't. I believe that the reason that we rejected a diplomatic/law enforcement approach was primarily political. People all around the world were clamoring for action. If the Bush administration had put every possible resource into developing a bullet-proof case against al-Qaeda as the perpetuators of the WTC/Pentagon attack, and used the pressure of the entire world to persuade Omar either to let us in or to declare bin-Laden and the al-Qaeda leaders personae non gratae and forcing them out, while also declaring our intention not otherwise to interfere with the internal affairs of Afghanistan, I believe that we could have done a much more effective job against al-Qaeda then we did.

However, we decided to lump al-Qaeda together with the Taliban as our enemies, and to invade the country, to overthrow its government, and to set up a puppet government which we are still propping up today. Instead of pursuing those who attacked us, we had to fight all of the government forces of the entire country, making them our deadly enemies for life. Our attackers, for the most part, survived, and, conveniently for them, are still attacking us, but without the necessity of a long commute around the world to do so. In fact, we are commuting around the world, at great expense, to become their targets.

I don't believe that we should ever have considered the Taliban our enemy. Yes, as a democratic republic, we do not agree with the theocratic or Islamic approach to government, nor they with our approach. We disagree, even strongly. They believe that our licentiousness endangers the souls of our citizens and prevents them from finding and submitting to Allah. We believe that their restrictive, superstition-filled way of life represses their citizens and prevents them from pursuing happiness or justice. But those are not differences that rise to the level of a casus belli.

So now that we have made the Taliban our enemies, what should our approach be to dealing with them? It appears very clear that they will always be a formidable force in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don't think it would be in our interests to wipe them out to the last person, and I don't think that's even possible. But, if we just push them back, killing some of them (i.e., some brothers, fathers, sons, wives, children, sisters), then they will become even more adamantly our enemies.

The bottom line is that our only choice, unless we are committed to empire, is to withdraw from Afghanistan just as we must withdraw from Iraq. Withdraw while making the sincerest possible apology, and accepting a commitment to assist those states that we have ravaged with our war machine, with economic aid, training, and, if necessary, material aid.

If our withdrawal means the return of the Taliban, which it might, then I maintain that that would be better than the status quo. The Taliban will never stay in power indefinitely. The entire weight of history is against them. But it is never right or even helpful for an alien nation to go in and force a regime change on a people who has not attacked them, that just slows down the process by creating enmity and violence.

Koran-squatting

Much is being made today of reports that interrogators in Guantánamo squatted over Korans in order to infuriate Muslim prisoners. As I read that, I wonder if the prisoners would have been equally upset if someone squatted over any other book, or any other stack of papers. And, I'm wondering if the guards would have been upset if the prisoner turned around and squatted over a Bible.

In fact, I couldn't keep the rather bizarre image of a multi-confessional squatting session as a substitute for blowing people up.

The Muslims would squat over Torahs, Bibles, Vedas, and the texts of any group they wanted to terrorize. Christians, Jews, and Hindus would retaliate by squatting over Korans. All over the world, young men would sidle into cafés, and, before anyone could stop them, they would throw a sacred text to the floor and squat over it. In the relatively more secular USA, American flag squatting would undoubtedly be even more effective than Bible squatting.

As the level of terror raised, there would be escalations: women and young people would be recruited to go on these squatting missions. Imagine the horror of sitting in a dimly-lit café with your love, sipping espresso whilst staring into one another's eyes, when suddenly, without warning, a young child of nine or ten would throw the Stars and Stripes on the floor and squat over it!

The next level of escalation would involved dropping trousers or lifting skirts. This would surely bring the police into play, not to mention the sanitation services of the country. And of course, the level of horror would be incredible, because truly, who can imagine anything that could match the devastating impact of witnessing someone squat over your sacred object? Especially someone whose lowered trousers revealed a patched and stained undergarment!

The only possible response would be to fight fire with fire: vendors of sacred objects the world around would experience a surge of sales. Soon, everyone would be carrying around a copy of their enemy's most holy thing. That way, if someone squatted over the Koran in the presence of a Muslim, the response would be quick and certain: the Muslim could whip out a Torah and squat over it! The lex talionis would be the rule of the day.

Soon, however, even the widespread horror of sacred-object squatting wouldn't be enough to satisfy the lust of would-be squatters around the world: the next inevitable step would be desecration. Yes, although it may seem impossible to imagine that any human being could so depraved, soon Koran-squatting would involve Koran-spitting and Koran-peeing, and outraged Muslims would counterattack by publicly adorning flags, Bibles, Torahs, and Vedas with their own bodily fluids. It would be a spit-bath of global proportions.

Clearly, strict laws and punishments must be imposed to prevent this. More honorable methods such as aerial invasion, car bombs, and martyr operations can be used without disrespect for each other's sacred objects, which, after all, is the only human thing to do.

The interrogators guantanameros who started down the slippery slope should be publicly embarrassed for the use of such methods: they should be forced to witness prisoners squatting over the interrogators' own sacred things. Hopefully, the sight of this extreme punishment will discourage other would-be agressive squatters enough to nip this chain of horror in the bud.