In Support of the Equality March

Since I couldn't get to DC this weekend, I made a Facebook video instead. This is its transcription:



Hey everyone,

This video is my vote in support of the equality march that took place in DC yesterday. I wasn't able to get there, but I went online and watched videos of some of the speakers, and the negative reactions that I saw to those videos give me cause for concern.

The United States is a republic, which means that the authority of the government comes from the consent of the governed. This is different from an oppressive dictatorship, where authority comes from basic force, or a religious monarchy, where authority comes from the belief that the monarch is a representative of God. In America, citizens decide whom to elect based on who they think will further the causes they believe in. The only effect that a religion can have on this system is that it can define some of those causes for some of those citizens. One religion cannot have a direct effect on our government, because government represents the people, and our people do not all follow the same religion.

Now, it is true that our Founding Fathers believed in God. In the earliest days of our nation, our colonies were used mainly as a haven for particular kinds of Christians. But since then, our country has grown and changed, and now we have people of every faith, people of no faith, and people who aren't sure. So it bothers me when people say things like "This country was founded on Christian values and therefore Christian values ought to form the fundament of its laws."

Because that's not how it works. In America, we settle legal disputes by arguing based on our written laws. If the laws are confusing or contradictory, we appeal to more general laws, and so on, until the Supreme Court decides how our Constitution applies to the situation. And nowhere in our Constitution does the name of any religion appear. The Constitution doesn't say "Congress shall act according to the interests of the Christian population". In fact, the word "religion" only appears once, in the following context:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

There are two clauses there. The second one guarantees that the government will not prevent you from exercising your religion, but the first one guarantees that religion will never be addressed in legislation. Which means that Christians, Jews, Muslism, Buddhists, Wiccans, and all other believers are obligated to find non-religious arguments for their beliefs if they expect them to be manifested in American law.

Now if you want to vote against gay marriage because you believe that homosexuality is a sin, then you can. California proved that such referenda as Proposition 8 are going to occur. Unfortunately for you, California law is subservient to the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which explains that "no state will deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Anti-gay legislation is unconstitutional, just like legislation limiting rights of women, of people of color, and of any other group that Americans have discriminated against in the past. And just as in the past, discriminatory legislation will be struck down by the Supreme Court.

So every time you vote to deny rights to the queer community, you blatantly contradict the Constitution, which by virtue of our citizenship is the only document that governs all of us. The only way a majority vote is going to succeed in discrimination is if that vote amends the Constitution itself.

If you are an American, you live in a free country. That means people who disagree coexist. That means people you don't like are not going to shut up. If you can find a country that hates gay marriage as much as you do and enforces it with Constitution-level legislation, then move there. Otherwise you will bear witness to the change that has been coming since the Fourteenth Amendment, and the only solution for you is tolerance.

Congratulations to everyone who marched yesterday; I love you, and I hope you don't have to wait much longer.

Mathematician disenchanted

Listening: Justin Timberlake, "Cry Me a River"

I was emailed a rude awakening today.

Back in April, my BC Calc class was learning about Taylor series, and I decided to figure out whether there was a non-recursive formula for the nth derivative of a function. I spent two months (really, four weeks, because I put it down for a while) working on it, and by June I had the answer and an eight-page proof for it. I submitted it as my final project for the course, and made a presentation of it to my class. It was really impressive, by all accounts.

Fast-forward to August 11, when I had a meeting at Pace University in the city to show my work to a high-ranking professor. She was incredibly friendly, besides displaying a fluency in mathematical thought and discourse that I was beginning to believe didn't exist. She worked out two simple but diverse examples of my formula, expressed her surprise that it held for such different kinds of functions (polynomial and trigonometric, if you're keeping score at home), and said that she'd forward it to a friend of hers at UNC Chapel Hill. Most importantly, she said she'd never seen it before, which meant I might have an opportunity to publish it, breeze into college, and live happily ever after.

Except that she just emailed me back to say that the UNC professor had already known of the formula. It was impressive that I'd come up with it independently, but it was definitely not original.

And here I was strutting around in the meantime like I were a prodigious Mathematician, imagining myself opening a Priority Mail envelope to find a copy of the Whatever-Organization Journal of Mathematics with my name in the table of contents, acceptance letters, bragging rights, recognition, satisfaction.

She's still writing a letter for colleges describing the meeting and vouching that I did come up with everything independently, but I really had had the highest hopes. And now I'm a lowly peasant-child again.

Shit!