Bad Science and The Flash

I'm going to change modes for a moment to write about something near and dear to my heart: namely, bad science on TV.  Before going any further, I need to mention that there will be

SPOILERS

in this write-up. 

I want to talk for a moment about The Flash, and the season finale.

Now, I know you may be thinking, "this TV show is based on a comic book, and comic books use a lot of bad science.  It's specifically a thing called 'comic-book science.'  It's acceptable."

Yes, that's true, to a certain extent.  You see, there are conceits that we make to accept the rules of any universe on TV, some things we write off a little bit, suspending our disbelief, because it makes sense to in the context of the story.

For instance, in The Flash, we accept that someone can travel at ridiculously high rates of speed without real-world problems such as friction.  If Barry Allen were a non-comic-book human, and he were to travel at the speed of sound, for instance, he would burn up from the force of air passing over his body.  In fact, if you were to drive at highway speeds with your arm out the window for long periods of time, you'd find yourself getting burns, even at night.  That's because even that low of a speed is enough to give you some serious friction.

We accept, for the sake of the show, that Barry is somehow immune to air resistance.

This same resistance should keep him from being able to pass Mach 1.  It took until October 14, 1947, for Chuck Yeager to become the first man to break the sound barrier in a jet, and he was doing it in a craft specially designed to slough off the buildup of air that would naturally develop in front of it.

Realbigtaco, "FA-18 going transonic," Wikipedia, 4 October 2008

At low altitudes, where water vapor is present in the atmosphere, we can see the pressure buildup as objects approach the sound barrier and form what's called a "vapor cone" (pictured above).  That cone is water vapor condensing in the presence of highly pressurized air.  If Barry Allen were to reach Mach 1 and not have some kind of air resistance, we would see a similar (although not-so-cleanly-shaped) vapor cone around him.

Yet, he uses his lack of immunity to wind to great effect in the very first episode, when he runs against the wind of a tornado to reverse its spin.

(Not quite like Bob Seger.)

Yet, we don't question such simple things because they're part-and-parcel to the comic book world - that is, Barry gets to enjoy both the usefulness of air movement and the freedom of frictionlessness.

And, of course, he's not frictionless verses pavement, as otherwise he couldn't accelerate at all.  They did, interestingly enough, give him new shoes to counteract the problem of ground resistance (yet he still runs in his street shoes fairly often, with no repeat of the problems he first faced).

All of these things I accept, because while they are wildly inconsistent with the rules they choose to follow or not follow, the one thing that is consistent is that they are all related to Barry's unusual powers.  That is to say, he is a stranger in a familiar land.  The Earth is still Earth, even with people with superhuman powers.  Physics of the real world still work the way they normally do, only to be disrupted when a superhuman power interacts with them.

And that's the key to why I find fault with some things on the show...

Here be spoilers.

In the season finale, the team of ridiculously-intelligent "scientists" (which for some reason includes an uber-scientist who has to ask what a "singularity" is) decide it'll be a good idea to create a wormhole to send Barry back in time.

We can accept that it's possible to create a wormhole because of Barry's weird super-speed force that enables him to see the past when he's only going Mach 2.

And, in actuality, creating a wormhole is fine.  We done here?

No, because sadly that wormhole has the capability of collapsing into a singularity for some reason.

So let's be clear about the science behind these two things.  Black holes exist.  Singularities exist.  A singularity is an infinitesimally small point of matter, where all that mass is crammed into space that doesn't have any dimensions, at least not as we know them.  Because there are no dimensions to the point, the density is infinite.

A singularity can be reached by an incredibly tiny amount of mass.  That said, such a singularity would almost immediately destroy itself, because they eject more energy than they can consume.  This is called Hawking Radiation, and it's why we work on creating microscopic black holes in real-world particle accelerators with no fear of destroying the Earth. 

(Black holes can, theoretically, exist without singularities, but I'll concentrate on singularities since the show keeps referring to it as such.)

So, to be clear, a singularity the size they're dealing with is completely unimportant.

A wormhole is simply a concept that "what goes up must come down" - that is... what if a black hole didn't keep all the mass it consumed, and instead that mass fell through space and time.  Somewhere in the universe, there could be a white hole - the reverse of the black hole, ejecting all that matter.  Now, if that's the case, no singularity would exist in the center per se - you'd simply fall through one end and come out the other.

It's entirely possible, though, that the point in the center of the wormhole is still a singularity... that is, that you have to get crushed down to a point infinitely small before coming out the other side.  Which would not make for great space travel, as you'd be a string of particles rather than a cohesive creature.

Which means that the wormhole in Barry Allen's story can't have a singularity at the center... it has to instead be an open tube... and if it's an open tube, it can't just collapse into a singularity (there's no accretion of matter, which is an absolute fundamental requirement of a singularity).

But... let's just say that somehow enough matter gets in there to form a singularity... then what?

Then it dissipates thanks to Hawking Radiation.

Ok, but what if that doesn't happen?

Now we're getting way outside of what is possible in the real world...

Let's say that Barry's speed force also enables the singularity to grow... that it's somehow a part of the singularity.  Then what?

Well, now you have a big @#!$ing problem.  Because if the singularity is not destroying itself by radiating off all of its mass, and it's somehow consuming mass from stuff around it (which would happen a lot slower than the TV show indicated, but who cares at this point), then it's going to eventually consume everything nearby.  The entire Earth will be slowly sucked into it.

But right now, at this moment, the Earth is a WAY bigger source of gravity overall.  Very close to the singularity, the singularity is a bigger source, which is why it can suck up stuff on the Earth and the rest of the Earth is fine.

But these two things are both massive and attracted to each other.  What SHOULD happen next is the singularity falls to the ground (it should've started there, frankly), and it starts eating into the Earth, gobbling up mass on the way to the center of the planet.

Instead, it magically floats into the sky to start consuming the Earth from a height of about 2,000 feet above sea level.

This is also not possible...

We see then that the singularity begins developing what's called an "accretion disk."  This happens because singularities are always spinning.  Heck, all matter is spinning.  Your own protons and neutrons and electrons are spinning.

But, as mass clumps together in the middle of that singularity, it also spins, and increases its spin rate the closer it gets to that center (the classic illustration of this is an iceskater who spins, and if he puts his arms out wide, he spins slowly, and if he pulls them in close, he spins quickly).  The accretion disk is actually a bit of good science in all of this bad... the tidal forces of massive gravitational spin cause it, and things that get pulled in close to the singularity would join this accretion disk first (at varying levels).

What's not good is what the so-called "scientists" of the show decide next.

You see, you can't just let a black hole gobble up the Earth.  It causes a few limitations on their ability to have a Season 2.

So, these "scientists" decide that the only way for Barry to destroy the singularity is to run in the opposite direction of its spin...

There's just so much wrong with this I can't even wrap my brain around it...

First of all, the black hole is super massive.. so massive, that it's defeating the Earth's gravity and pulling buildings apart to gobble them up.  If it's that massive, then what's the mass of one human going to do?

It'd be like Barry trying to slow the rotation of the Earth by running around it the same direction as the spin (which would push force in the opposite direction of the spin).  Except that in the case of the Earth, that mass is spread out over a huge area.  In the case of the singularity, it's in an infinitely tiny area.

Remember your grade school experiments with simple levers?  The entire reason a crow bar works, for instance, is because you're applying the force over distance - the further away from the fulcrum of a lever you are, the more force you can apply thanks to the distance.  Running around the Earth would work similarly - small amounts of force applied over a huge area.   Running around the singularity would require much greater speed still...

Both far more speed than Barry can generate.

But, let's say for the sake of argument that he can somehow conquer the spin of the singularity, then what?

Because there's the biggest @#!$ing problem with this whole theory... the spin is a result of the singularity, not the cause of the singularity.  The mass is still present, even if the spin is gone.  The moment Barry stops moving, the spin will come right back.  And that spin doesn't somehow destabilize the black hole - if anything, it helps prevent it from growing faster, thanks to centrifugal force.  Some objects would be thrown away rather than gobbled up.

Instead, what would really need to happen would be to in some way break up the singularity...

The only answer to which is "Hawking Radiation."

Maybe the "scientists" are hoping instead to create what's called a "naked singularity" - a situation that occurs from just the right amount of angular momentum for a black hole so that light CAN escape from the center... allowing us to see the singularity.  Maybe they'll analyze it and figure out how to beat it at that point... but I'm not holding out much hope.

The Naked Truth

Here's a dangerous topic to discuss - nudity.

Dangerous because I can't really Google research on the topic without a certain expectation of getting Google Image Search results on the topic, which would certainly be a form of research (if you need a research topic with billions of primary sources, this may be the one for you), but would not exactly be what I'm trying to achieve.

That's not to say I mind naked people - quite the contrary, as a nudist I'm quite used to them.  However, the images returned from such a search are not often simply naked people, and even if they were, they would not be what we lovingly refer to as "safe for work."

And that brings up an interesting problem: What is safe for work, and why?  What is nudity, and why?  Why do we draw lines on the human body to divide up the acceptable and the profane?

From a conservative Christian perspective, of course, the answer is easy: the world is only 6000 years old, Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden, they sinned, God made them wear clothes.  The end.  Of course, this simplistic understanding leaves even the 6000 years of history that the most hardcore conservatives acknowledge skipped over - that is, it disregards several historical anomalies:

1. The common practice in much of the Roman Empire during the first century was communal bathing.  The practice is entirely unmentioned in the Bible despite discussion of other Roman practices.
2. People were commonly nude for a variety of tasks, such as fishing (Peter is described as naked in some translations of John 21:7) and gardening (Karl Kästner says that the reason the women in Jesus's posse mistook him for a gardener is that he had left his garments behind in the tomb and was therefore naked, and gardeners at the time would have worked naked.). 
3. In first liturgy of baptism, participants were naked: "Then they shall take off all their clothes," it says, and later, "after these things, the bishop passes each of them on nude to the elder who stands at the water. They shall stand in the water naked."  (source)
4. European art from throughout Catholic dominance depicts people naked, especially after Europeans began studying Roman and Greek history and art.  This art is often highly religious in nature, depicting stories directly from the Bible.  Michelangelo's David, for instance, depicts the king of ancient Israel and Judea. 

Of course, if we separate our morality from the morality of the Christian Church, and take a look at ancient history, we see that humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, about 30,000 years after we became homosapiens, and about 800,000 years after the species that would become human lost its body hair. 

So, other than comfort in mild conditions and health in extreme conditions, there's really no reason to be wearing clothes, nor any reason to be concerned about the sight of nudity in others.  The sexual desire of certain parts of the body is merely a social construction, one which we can choose to deny.

Doing so would solve a commonly-listed problem fear of some people, especially those on the Right: the fear of other people using the bathroom with them just to sneak a peek at their genitals and breasts.  The argument goes something like this: I'm a man, and I'm worried that another man who is gay might use the men's room next to me and leer at my penis while I'm peeing; or, I'm a man, and I'm worried that a woman might dress in men's clothing just to use the men's room and leer at my penis, etc.  Same argument with genders flipped for women.

There are countries in the world where they don't worry about gender with regard to the bathroom.  Even in the U.S., there's a growing trend for colleges to offer unisex bathrooms.  I recall a female friend of mine confiding in me that, while on Christian mission work in Romania, she stayed in a hostel with only one set of showers that were open and unisex - meaning that everyone who showered did so in full view of everyone else. Initially she had typical American reservations about it, but the needs of getting clean after sweating through mission work necessitated using the showers, and her fears about them subsided.  She discovered that there was nothing wrong with them.  They were simply different.

Acceptable Losses

I mentioned in my post about the death of Eric Harris in the Tulsa reserve-deputy-involved shooting that there was another shooting around the same time in Sand Springs.

It was of a mentally ill man named Donald Allen - "a paranoid schizophrenic who ha[d] been off his medication for a year" according to the Allen's wife (source).  He was a Vietnam vet, and I don't think there's anyone in this country who doesn't agree we should be doing more for the mental health of our veterans.  Yet, here he was. 

He was having a breakdown, and came out from his house with a gun, charging at police.  Some might call this sort of attack "suicide by police," but this seems to brush under the rug the horrible truth about it - that had we simply had better support for him in the first place, this would have been entirely avoidable.

There are a couple of key differences between this death and the death of Harris; key among them, perhaps, is the presence of a gun in the hands of Allen.  Officer intent is another, and race is certainly one as well.  The reason race plays into it is that black men finally - and rightfully, I might add - are having a national voice to protest police violence.  It's catching our attention in a big way, and leading to small changes that will hopefully save lives.  Allen, on the other hand, has no voice - while he is white, he is also a member of the Mentally Ill minority group.  This group is still voiceless.

To the credit of the Sand Springs Police Department, though, they acknowledged this same problem, and admitted that our system is broken and we need to find ways of providing better assistance.

How would we avoid these deaths in the future?  Well, larger cities (such as Tulsa) could and should invest in psychological task forces, given the role of handling cases where a perpetrator has a known history of mental illness and helping to identify cases of mental illness in those cases with no history.  Expanded mental health care would also help, though Obamacare greatly increases it already - many people are not aware of their ability to access mental health services through their insurance, and this needs to be broadcast more.*

But as long as we continue to have a stigma surrounding mental health issues, we will continue to have people avoiding getting help.  Perhaps that is why Allen was avoiding taking medication - because to take medication is to admit that you still have a problem, and most of us would like to think we've overcome our mental health issues, that they are only temporary.

So to start out, I'd like to publicly declare - I've sought mental health assistance myself, for depression and anxiety brought on by abuses I received as a teenager.  My mind had reacted to those abuses by creating these two issues, which had protected it from further damage, but had left me unable to cope with certain things.  I will never be *over* these issues.  But I refuse to back down from them, either. 

And I hope and pray that each of you who might be facing your own mental health issues will realize that you have mental health assistance through your insurance and that seeking help for it is not an admission that you are weak, but rather that you're human. And, as a human, throughout your life you've developed a toolkit for dealing with problems that arise.  Some of those tools are damaging, some are healthy.  A trained professional can help you develop new, healthier tools, and help you spot the ones that are damaging.

* - of course, eliminating guns would also help, as a cop doesn't need a gun in that case, either.  But that'll never happen in this country, so I'm trying to be realistic.

Tulsa shooting

I'm doing this on my phone so it'll be a little light on research and punctuation. 

I thought I'd throw some thoughts about the Tulsa shooting out there. The basic story goes like this - a man ran from sheriff's deputies during a sting on a gun buy. One of the officers was a reserve deputy who is a citizen volunteer with the sheriff's department. Another deputy asked the volunteer to taze the suspect after two deputies had already wrestled him to the ground. The volunteer mistook his revolver for the taser and fired a round into the suspect. The volunteer immediately apologized. The suspect complained that he couldn't breathe, and a deputy said "fuck your breath." The suspect died. The reserve deputy has been arrested and charged with manslaughter. 

Where to begin...

The suspect was black and the reserve deputy was white. This could imply some racism, but I think everyone can acknowledge that the shooting was unintentional. But that's not quite right, either. 

The reserve deputy DID intend to shoot the suspect - he just didn't intend to use a gun. We seem to accept the use of a taser as an acceptable way to avoid death, but the taser itself is a deadly weapon. See http://m.livescience.com/36418-tasers-kill-cardiac-arrest-stun-gun.html

All that has to happen for a stun gun to kill is for that electricity to travel through the heart.  Just as it makes a subject's other muscles cease up, so to can it make the heart cease, causing cardiac arrest. A stun gun, like a bullet gun, should only be employed in an emergency, but its use by police is anything but. 

It is a way of inflicting violence at a distance that tricks its wielder into a false sense of safety - and that means it still holds all of the original prejudices and animosities under its surface. 

Now, I don't blame the shooter here, despite the fact that claims have been made that he lacked the requisite training. I think that's a false flag to the real problem. He did as he was told by an officer of the law, and had he not made a mistake, we'd never have heard about it. 

The deputies had the suspect on the ground, face-down. Rather than let him struggle and wear himself out, they opted to deploy their taser. It was unnecessary and potentially deadly even without a mistake, and that to me means they didn't respect the life of the suspect in the first place. 

They proved as much for their willful ignorance to his breathing pleas. 

That's where the systemic racism lies in this case, and what we desperately need to focus on to help prevent further abuses of power by our force. 

On a final side note - did anyone know that within a day a Sand Springs cop shot and killed a mentally ill man?  There's a real story there, too, but we've been ignoring it. 

More on the Indiana debate

Someone made a good point on an Internet post - what if we were talking about a more participatory role than baking?  What if the photographer, the DJ, or for that matter the priest, had objections to the wedding based on religious grounds?  Should a priest have the right to refuse to marry two people?  Should a photographer have the right to refuse to take pictures? Should a DJ have the right to refuse to play at the reception?

These are mostly self-solving questions - generally speaking, no gay couple would involve people in such roles unless those people were comfortable with serving in them; that said, we said the same thing about the bakery question, that no gay couple would want a homophobe to make their wedding cake, and then it happened. 

The problem is, I think, that sometimes your options are limited (perhaps by distance, perhaps by money, perhaps by social constructs such as a family member knowing the person, etc.) and you don't have a choice who you turn to for these services.

In the case of the photographer, it may be difficult for him or her to take pictures of the couple kissing if they're gay and the photographer thinks their orientation is sinful.  For the photographer, it'd be akin to seeing someone stealing and not doing anything to stop it.

If it was me (if I somehow developed both homophobia and the ability to take good pictures), I would tell the couple that I have these concerns and doubted my ability to take good pictures as a result.  They would probably not pick me.  But if they did, could I go through with it, or would I be willing to risk the social and potentially legal ramifications of turning them down?

It gets complicated somewhat if we add additional weird situations into the mix: What if a wedding for another group (not a gay one necessarily) would involve additional things that are morally objectionable to the photographer, like an orgy?  It's not inconceivable that a group of swingers, for instance, might hold a private wedding ceremony and make that a core feature of the ceremony.  Should they request the services of a photographer, would it be acceptable for the photographer to turn it down?

These are difficult questions, and ones which I don't think our current debate is complex enough to handle.

If we think back a bit, though, we see that people had moral objections to serving blacks.  Those objections were completely unfounded (as are the current ones to homosexuality, imho) by our modern standards, but the apologies for those positions were elucidated in great detail.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the one that required businesses to serve without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  Adding "sexual orientation" to this wouldn't necessitate adding exceptions for other crazy things - even if the orgy wedding described above was part of a religious ceremony.  That is, you can still turn down things based on the activities present at the ceremony, just not on the basis of the people themselves (That is, "Yes, I will photograph your wedding, so long as it doesn't involve an orgy.")

This leads back to the gay kiss, though - could you turn down the wedding for something as relatively innocuous as a kiss?  I think we can apply the "what do we expect to see in public" test to that - we don't allow sex in public, but we do allow kissing.  You are not protected from seeing a kiss based on our laws.  At some point in your life, you will see gay people kissing.  As a result, I think it's unreasonable to expect a legal protection from that in your line of work, too. 

Running with the Devil

If you're a frequent reader of this blog (both of you), you might have noticed a small but annoying change to the format.  I added advertisements.

No, I don't honestly think it'll make any money, but I've got to try.  After searching for a while for decent freelancing gigs to make some extra money, I have given up.  They pay a ridiculously low amount of money for a ridiculously high amount of work, and even though I'm a fast writer, there's no way I can write well with the amount of research I would need to collect and the amount of time it'd take to put together thoughts about that research, etc., on topic that I just don't care that much about for that little money.  There are gigs that seriously expect to pay half a cent per word for that kind of effort. 

Sadly, they're able to pay that much because there are people willing to earn that little.  I can't imagine quality is the name of the game for such sites, but there's something to be said for producing a mountain of garbage, apparently.  Monkeys and typewriters, and all that.

It certainly works for Cracked.

(I tease because I love.  Or something like that.)

Anyway, the result is that I've made a bit of a deal with the Devil.  I hate advertising.  Oh, in theory it is good, and it's that hope that hides at the edges of my reason and gives me cause to justify including it in my blog. 

So, let me present the corresponding arguments that are going on in my head...

Companies aren't evil per se.  Michael Porter, in his TED talk, gives a good bit of argument in favor of companies, and makes some salient points.  One of them is basically this: almost everything produced in our world is produced by companies - the coffee I'm drinking, the table I'm sitting at, the computer I'm typing on, etc.  We all get paid by companies, and we all pay into companies.

Without companies, we wouldn't be able to organize production.  Oh sure, the government is responsible for some of our GDP, but it's a tiny fraction compared to that of companies.  We also wouldn't be able to innovate - companies move large funds of money, and are able to do extremely-costly things to drive innovation as a result.

Advertising is, at its essence, a chance to get a message out to an audience that might not otherwise have the opportunity to hear it.  It doesn't matter how amazing my blog is, for instance, if none of you will share it on your pages.  (hint, hint.)  It doesn't matter how amazing the new iPhone is if Apple doesn't tell anyone they've released it.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few channels to the consumer.  Television is still the big dog, and the commercials on it are the most expensive, unless you're happy with late-night TV when all of the commercials are targeting lonely people with 900 number scams and the next shamwow-hopeful.  Facebook gives a somewhat-free path to reaching customers, but it requires active participation from existing fans of the product or service to share the message. 

This, I think, changes how advertising functions.  It ceases to be a tool for every potential company, a pathway to having a voice in the chaos of existing advertising voices.  The costs of effective advertising mean that only very large or very-well-invested companies can afford a speaking place in the collective consciousness. 

That is, only the big companies have a voice.

This is true of our politicians, too, of course.  MSNBC posted the cost of winning seats in Congress and the Senate for 2012, and the numbers are staggering - $1.6 million for a House seat, over $10 million for a Senate seat.  That exponential inflation continues to the White House, where winning will cost over $1 billion.

Is it any wonder, in light of those kinds of numbers, that even staunch critics of big money in campaigns like Elizabeth Warren put together massive campaign coffers from big donors? 

Advertising is big money... really big money, now that Citizens United lets people give unbounded mountains of cash to PACs, and the media companies are cashing in.  Just the cost of Super Bowl spots alone rose 27% between 2008 and 2012, and its estimated to have grown another 30% between 2012 and 2015. 

(Compare that to inflation, which runs somewhere between 3 and 4% per year.)

Now, all of this is fine if the messages are good and the products supported are good.  That is, if companies were spending billions pushing the benefits of whole grains, water, and vegetables instead of processed flour and sugar, we'd be fine. Even if the biggest companies in the world were growing ever more massive, if they were paying decent, livable wages and promoting sustainability in our environment, it wouldn't be that big of a deal if they drowned out the voices of smaller companies.  There's a certain part of us that wants to see the little local businesses succeed, but that success is unnecessary if the big companies are being good to us, reinvesting in their local communities and helping people climb out of poverty.

Of course, that's not what happens.  Instead, as a business gets bigger and bigger, it gets more outside investment, and that outside investment demands stronger profit margins, which drives lower wages and limited investment in the local area.  This is where, I think, Porter's argument breaks down - he argues that companies can be the innovators in social engineering, can help us have better society... but they can and will only do so if it's going to increase the bottom line, and that's very rare.

The problem is that companies profit from doing things in the cheapest way possible, and leaving government to clean up the mess.

So, where does that leave us?  My hope is that this blog will have advertisements for good products things - maybe if I use buzzwords like sustainability, green energy, ethically-sourced goods, and so on, you'll get better products offered to you.  I hope in all of your engagement with advertising, you'll ask "what kind of impact is this company having on the world," and you'll learn to think of advertisements for junk food as junk instead of food, for instance. 

And I hope you'll click the links and share this blog... because I need money, and so do you.  Liking and sharing good products and services is our one way of fighting back against the money thrown around by massive corporate interests.

It's an Institute You Apparently Can Disparage

The last time I brought up the gay marriage issue, I talked about how I changed my opinion and started thinking that it was OK.  After seeing several people asking how people could support the Indiana and Arkansas religious liberty laws, I thought it might be appropriate to go back a step further...

Because at one point in time, I thought of homosexuality not only as an abomination, but also as something that needed to be stopped in our country.  When it came to the issue of gay marriage, it was a no brainer.

It's easy for all of us, I think, to understand how some Christians might read "God hates gay sex" into the Bible.  We've all seen the passages:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness . . . For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . . They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator . . .  Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.  In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Romans 1:18-27.  I obviously skipped a few verses)

Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable. (Leviticus 18:22)

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads. (Leviticus 20:13)

We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. (1 Timothy 1:9-11)

In fact, it seems to me that it's easier, based purely on an English reading of these passages and without any deeper understanding of the natures of sin or of God, to believe that homosexuality is a sin than to believe that it's not. 

But that's only one aspect of this national argument we're having.  Convincing someone that homosexuality is not a sin requires both a softening of their heart and a personal connection to the issue, such as having a child or close friend who comes out.  Simply arguing about the rhetoric of the Bible won't help, and may actually cause the person to double-down on their anti-gay stance.

But there's a second argument that is coming to the surface more and more - the idea that someone's belief that homosexuality is a sin should or should not inform their belief regarding national policy.  The freedom-of-religion brigade argues that some acts of service might violate their religious beliefs if they're forced to serve homosexuals, and that seems hateful.  Disregarding it as simple hate, however, might be a straw man argument.

You see, for some Christians, there's a second part of the Bible that informs their need to push religion on public policy.

Look back at the Old Testament, especially to the passages in Kings and Chronicles regarding the kings of Israel and Judah.  The writers of these books give brief snippets into the reigns of  these kings, and to the lives the people led during their reigns.  My personal favorite is Josiah, who is the last king of Judah who the writer of Kings counts as "good."  Because of his faithfulness and his attempts to return the people to God, the prophet Huldah gives him a message from God:

I am going to bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken me and burned incense to other gods and aroused my anger by all the idols their hands have made, my anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched. (2 Kings 22:16-17)

Surely it is not, in fact, all of the people who behave this way - else how would Josiah have even heard of God?  But it is a significant portion of the population, such that even a popular king who leads a popular religious revolution and tears down the religious icons of the various other faiths the people practiced, could not save the kingdom. 

This push for holiness - that is, setting aside the entire nation for God - theoretically started long before.  In Deuteronomy (which, it must be noted, some scholars think Josiah actually had a hand in writing), the narrator tells the people to avoid intermingling with the people they're invading:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally.   Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.  Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7:1-6)

This is all part of that "holiness" thing I talked about earlier, the complete setting aside of the country for God, purifying the entire thing and keeping all sin out of it.  Now, admittedly America has a lot more problems with sin than could ever be attributed to a truly holy nation, regardless of whether homosexuality itself is one; however, it seems that this desire to prevent gay marriage is part and parcel of this desire for a holy nation - that is, the belief that God blesses or punishes the entire nation for the sins it promotes or protests.

Such a belief is predicated on a belief that America is the theological successor to ancient Israel and Judah.  In fact, there is a philosophy, called alternately Anglo-Israelism or British Israelism, that believes that Europe and, by migration, the United States, are physically the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.  When Israel and Judah were conquered by Assyria and Babylon, the tribes of Israel were dispersed.  Followers of this philosophy believe that they went north, into Europe, and settled there.  This is, of course, justification for seeing European Protestant Christians and their American descendants as being the literal chosen people of Israel, and inheriting the blessings of God for those descendants.

This doesn't necessarily play out in such words today, but its ideological child is alive and well - that is, a belief that when Christ came into the world, those who followed Him received the New Covenant, which identified Christians instead of Jews as the true chosen people of God.  God might still have the Old Covenant with the Jews (which is why Israel must be protected), but the New Covenant is superior. 

Other kingdoms of Earth are led by kings and princes, but the United States was, in the ideology of so many on the Right, founded by Christians as a place where all Christians could be free to practice their religion.  There's a tiny bit of historical backing for this - the fact that many of the people who settled here were puritans fleeing persecution in Europe - but it disregards the actual beliefs of the founders of the country and the many more people who came here for the promise of cheap land and economic opportunities that could only be found without the spectre of nobility.

I digress.  The point of this blog post isn't to argue that the country is Christian or not, but rather to simply point out the starting point for the disparity in our arguments.  Those on the Christian Right literally believe that the U.S. is a Christian nation, and that God will punish us if we stray from that holy, ordained path.  They believe that if the U.S. falls from Grace, the Anti-Christ will come into the world - that we are the last stronghold of faith against a world of sin. 

Fortunately, this brand of Christianity seems to be slowly dying out, largely because of this gay marriage issue.  The simple need for people to love and be loved seems to be strong enough to force people, especially younger people, to reevaluate the teachings of their youth.  It's slowly opening our eyes to see that such national and religious exclusivity prevents Christians from expressing the love that God wants and commands for us to express.