Complete freedom is a dream that few people ever really achieve

"A republic ... if you can keep it."
-- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1787

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose ..."
-- KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, c. 1970

Exactly what is this thing we call freedom?

There are a lot of things it isn't. It isn't the ability to have everything in the world the way you want it, and it isn't the right to own everything you want when you want it.

It certainly isn't only about the relationship between you and the government. There are other relationships in your life which are a lot more intrusive.

Same-sex marriage foes should know real love is never a bad thing

If you look at the decision this week by the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage, there are two very different ways to approach it.

If the decision pleased you, your attitude is probably that it was about time to give all American couples the same legal rights.

If it displeased you, it was probably for religious reasons. You probably think it's another big step down the road toward moral collapse.

The world is changing. Just 15 years ago, California voters supported a ballot initiative declaring that marriage was only between a man and a woman.

The majority of voters agreed that this was the way things always had been. Hence they should always remain that way. The problem of course is that in a democracy, there are no rules that cannot be changed if enough people want to change them.

Majorities can't change everything. In fact, some types of change are made more difficult to accomplish precisely because we can't let majorities tyrannize minorities that they don't like.

A majority of voters can't pass laws making it illegal to be black, or Jewish, or handicapped. And as we are beginning to see, laws against people who are gay or lesbian take on a much nastier tone if we consider homosexuality genetic rather than simply a choice.

In the end, that's what it all comes down to -- is homosexuality a choice or is it genetic?

Either way, it's difficult to say two consenting adults shouldn't be allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes. As long as they leave children, farm animals and foods with heavy sauces out of it.

Love -- real love -- is never a bad thing.

Actually, what turned the tide as far as I can figure is that more and more moderate, tolerant people began to realize they had friends or relatives who were gay, lesbian or bisexual. President Reagan disgracefully ignored the growing AIDS crisis for the first six years of his administration, but once he realized someone he knew and liked -- actor Rock Hudson -- had AIDS, he opened his mind to what was happening.

I knew two people who died of AIDS. One was the younger brother of a close female friend and the other was an actor I appeared with in a play in 1973. I have a friend my own age from high school who has been living with the disease for more than 30 years.

People who oppose same-sex marriage and at the same time are afraid of AIDS really ought to consider the fact that the more people who can marry, the less promiscuity there will be and the less chance there will be to spread disease.

Most people don't get married just for fun, either. People straight and gay alike marry because they want to make a commitment to another person. Whether that's for love, financial security or any other reason, marriage adds stability to a relationship.

More than almost any issue except maybe abortion, same-sex marriage makes right wing politicians a little crazy and more than a little stupid. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum said legalizing gay sex would lead to sex between men and dogs, an incredibly grotesque statement that probably contributed to his landslide defeat for re-election.

And with the Court legalizing same-sex marriage, politicians and preachers on the far right are acting as if the Apocalypse was rounding Mars and heading at top speed for Earth and the end of days.

It's sad, I suppose, that for millions of conservative Americans, the world will never again be the way they want it to be. But it isn't as if gay men and lesbians are grabbing people and forcing them to attend their weddings. Our country has usually been at its best when we take a live-and-let-live attitude toward our fellow countrymen and women.

Just because same-sex marriage is legal doesn't make it mandatory.

And hey, bigots. If it turns out you're right after all, you'll have the last laugh in the end.

It was just 46 years ago, but a different people and a different nation

Was there ever a year to compare to 1969?

It was the first time there really was a man -- actually two of them -- on the Moon, and the year 400,000 kids spent a weekend in the rain and mud at Woodstock and 10 million kids later claimed they were there.

It was a phenomenal year for music. The Beatles were bowing out, although we didn't know it till 1970, but when "Abbey Road" came out, all of a sudden we were obsessed by the thought that maybe Paul McCartney was really dead.

The Who came out with "Tommy," and all of a sudden it seemed like our music had matured enough to take on the form of a "rock opera."

If that wasn't enough, songs from the musical "Hair" were all over the radio that year, and yes, the nudity may have been controversial but there was an awful lot of great music in that off-Broadway show. I caught a really good break that summer when I went to New York and got a ticket, only to be pleasantly surprised that on the night I was there, the original three stars had returned for one performance.

Would the world be better off without so much religion?

"Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too..."
-- JOHN LENNON, 1971

I was 21 when I first heard John Lennon's most famous song.

Whether it was my own naivete or simply an inability at that age to differentiate between a belief in God and a belief in religion, I didn't much care for the song.

No countries?

No heaven or hell?

It all seemed sort of silly to me, but the song and its meaning have been growing on me for the last 44 years.

In 1971, religion still sort of made sense. Radical Islam hadn't reared its ugly head outside some parts of the Middle East, the most radical Jews weren't running things in Israel and televangelists like Jim and Tammy, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were mostly still operating on the local level.

Most people's TV binges aren't my shows

I had no idea just how out of touch I am with modern popular culture until I had to wait for some prescriptions to be filled.

I picked up a special edition of Entertainment Weekly, The Binge Guide.

Star Trek

The magazine listed 32 different series, and I was a little surprised to realize that more than half of them were either shows I never watched or ones that I had seen no more than one or two episodes.

I've never seen Arrested Development, Battlestar Galactica, Community, Daria, Deadwood, Dexter, Doctor Who, Felicity, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, Futurama, Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life, Parks and Recreation, Party Down, Sherlock and The Wire.

I have seen fewer than three episodes of 30 Rock, fewer than 10 of Friends and The X-Files (two separate shows, not New York Jews and UFOs together) and only a dozen episodes of Twin Peaks.

I saw only the first episode of Breaking Bad and never watched any others.

Twilight Zone

Most of those left are shows I either have seen or intend to see every episode. I have finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Sopranos, Star Trek, Veronica Mars and The West Wing. Eventually I will see all of the Twilight Zone, True Blood, Walking Dead and the Wonder Years.

The one remaining show is sort of an anomaly -- 40-something years of Saturday Night Live.

There are shows that didn't make the list that have mattered a lot to me. I've seen all 217 episodes of "Smallville," all five seasons of "Angel," all nine seasons of "24," all of "Moonlighting" and "Quantum Leap."

That's our Bush

I've seen all of "Mad Men" except the last season and I'm working my way through "LA Law." And I saw all eight episodes of Comedy Central's wonderful, cancelled-too-soon spoof, "That's My Bush."

It's pretty rare that the shows I really like are the big popular hits. The ones I really like get cancelled. Steven Bochco's "Bay City Blues," just about the only show ever about minor-league baseball, was cancelled after eight episodes were made and only four of them were broadcast.

I really liked Tru Calling, where Eliza Dushku not only saw dead people but heard them begging to be saved, but it only survived one full season and six episodes of a second.

I've always been something of an outsider when it comes to extremely popular stuff. I never read any of Tolkien's books or saw any of the six movies made about them. I didn't watch Mission: Impossible or The Man from UNCLE, two of the most popular shows while I was in high school.

Some shows I eventually came to on my own, but in general, the best way to keep me away from a show is to tell me how wonderful it is. That's probably the main reason I'll never watch Breaking Bad.

Hell, it's only a TV show.

How baseball can deal with home run records from the steroid era

The return of Alex Rodriguez to active duty with the Yankees this year reminds us yet again of baseball's steroid fiasco. Rodriguez is doing well enough this year that he has passed Willie Mays for fourth place on the all-time home run list.

It won't happen this year, but he has a reasonable chance to pass Babe Ruth for third place, although the top two spots still seem like a reach.

I think it would be accurate to say only a small minority of real baseball fans want to see that happen. Rodriguez has 665 career home runs as of today. It's bad enough that he passed Mays, but it would be much worse if he reaches 700 homers.

It would be very difficult to overstate how badly baseball screwed up when it came to steroids. Going all the way back to the late '80s, and then with the whole "Chicks dig the long ball" ad campaign, the people responsible for the stewardship of the game might just as well have been trying to destroy it.

Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927, and Roger Maris hit 61 34 years later.

That ought to say a lot about how difficult it was.




But starting in 1998, with baseball recovering from a disastrous work stoppage that actually saw the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, there were plenty of longballs for the chick to dig. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa staged a battle for the record in 1998 that saw McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sosa hit 66.

Remember the what? Lots of dates mean lots of different things

This Saturday, we're going to hear what a momentous anniversary it is of such an important event. If any newspapers or electronic media outlets fail to mention it, they will doubtless catch hold hell from people.

"How could you fail to mention the 71st anniversary of D-Day?

"Some dates should never be forgotten."

Well, we forgot February 15th.

In fact, we pretty much forgot that one before I was born, but on the Ides of February in 1898 the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor and provided an excuse for us to go to war with Spain.

I've heard "Remember the Maine" before, but never with a date attached to it. That particular February day in 1970 has always had a special significance to me because ....

Well, shucks.

Jumping for joy? Nah, 1966

I guess the most delicate way to say it is that was the day I first experienced one of the great pleasures of adulthood.

Before you find yourself thinking what an incredibly guy thing it is to remember the exact date of that particular event, I have to say the reason I remember the date is that it was well after midnight after a really great Valentine's Day party.

And unlike D-Day or the Maine, no one died.

There were a few times I sent the young lady involved e-mails. After all, the date had the same significance for her than it did for me. She's a judge now in a state far from Georgia and I have seen her exactly once since 1970. It was the 2000 Democratic Convention at Staples Center in Los Angeles. I was there as a newspaper columnist and she was a delegate.

Joyful? Yes, me in 1970

But as a country, there are so many dates we try to remember and others we would prefer to forget. We still make a big deal out of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, but I rarely hear anyone making a big deal out of April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King was murdered.

The fact is, we tend mostly to remember events that happened during our own lives. There's no one alive who actually remembers the Maine, and ever-shrinking numbers every day who remember Pearl Harbor or D-Day. In fact, far fewer than half of Americans now alive remember any of the eventful happenings of the '60s.

Even Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 only has meaning to a minority.

Probably the oldest major event that more than half of the country actually experienced was the Challenger disaster in 1988, and then there was Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995. The great irony of that one is that if my first marriage hadn't failed, that day would have been my 20th anniversary.

Then of course there's Sept. 11. But long before the Twin Towers and My Pet Goat, Sept. 11 was the birthday of two of the greatest football coaches ever -- Bear Bryant and Tom Landry. In addition, Brian DePalma, Virginia Madsen and Kristy McNichol were born that day.

In a world of 7 billion people, dates mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

But I'll still remember February 15th fondly.

Oh, one weird note there.

It's also my mother's birthday.