Imperial Decree #6

It is the order of His Majesty O’Neal I that:

1.  Abortion be hereby declared "not real".  Any mention thereof is to be considered a product of the listener's imagination and no cause for alarm or disruption of comfortable lifestyles or religious habits. 

2.  Any inherent  moral obligations to mitigate, or otherwise acknowledge the suffering of others, or to understand and empathize with differing beliefs is likewise removed.

Imperial Opinion:

A good emperor gives the people what they want.  With this particular issue, it appears that the desire of the people is to not take action.  It is the desire of the people to not do hard, unpleasant work, and to not work together with those of different backgrounds or beliefs in order to actually resolve the underlying issues surrounding abortion.  So be it.  If the people want to pretend that the problem has been solved, they may now consider their wish granted.  However, in the absence of the hard, collective, cooperative action needed to make it so, their desires are just that: a wish.      

Imperial Decree #5

It is the order of His Majesty O’Neal I that:

1. The 112th United States Congress be immediately dissolved.

2. All members thereof be stripped of all retirement and health benefits.

3. Each State shall select at random; one person from the State Bar, and one person from the State University system, to serve on a special reform council.

4. The Reform Council shall be empowered to draft new rules under which future elections and legislative bodies will be governed.


Imperial Opinion:
There is no wisdom I can provide on this issue that is not already apparent. The actions of congress speak for themselves, and the conversation is of incompetence and corruption. Declaring pizza a vegetable, attempting to pass legislation unread and uncomprehended, actively working against the wishes of the people. These and other actions have been met with nothing but dissatisfaction and disapproval by the citizenry. However, instead of taking heed to the people’s wishes, congress has continued, headlong, with transforming itself into nothing more than a platform for corporate rent seeking.

Therefore, let the legislature be dissolved, let the rules be amended to curtail corruption in the future, and let a new congress be formed.

Imperial Decree #4

It is the order of His Majesty O’Neal I that:

1. NASA begin begin terraforming Mars by the year 2050.


Imperial Opinion:
It will take a long time to make an Earth of Mars, and it will require technologies that have not yet been dreamed of. But even if it the process takes a thousand years, throughout all of that time it will serve as a beacon of light against the darkness of our future; inspiring us to face the problems upon our own world and providing us with new tools to surmount them.

Of problems in this world, there are many. War, economic depression, and the threat of devastating climate change loom on the horizon. The situation is likely to get even worse in the coming decades. But in the coming decades, we will also land on the moon, establish a base there, and from that base set foot on Mars. And when we do those things, it will be known by all that they are steps taken towards a new world for our children.

Imperial Decree #3

It is the order of His Majesty O’Neal I that:

1. All states issue Civil Union Licenses in lieu of Marriage Licenses. Any two consenting persons not related by blood shall be eligible for said license.

2. All existing Marriage Licenses be henceforth considered Civil Union Licenses.

3. All terms and limitations currently imposed by the states on Marriage Licenses shall apply to Civil Union Licenses with the exception of those which place restrictions on the ethnicity or gender of the couple.


Imperial Opinion:
Any two people, be they man and woman, man and man, or woman and woman, may form themselves into a couple. All such couples are subject to the same fortunes of chance or providence, and so are equal in the eyes of nature. They must, therefore, be made equal in the eyes of the law. The government’s use of the term “Marriage License” pointlessly elevates religious couples above non-religious couples. Furthermore, the government’s issue of such licenses to male/female couples only is a tyrannical interference in the affairs of numerous churches whose theology allows for the marriage of couples of any gender.

I’ll hear no more talk of “the Sanctity of Marriage.” The sanctity of any couple’s relationship is solely the product of their life together. If that life is ultimately judged by a higher power, then the semantics of what it was called, or the presence or absence of a government license for it shall not, I deem, bear heavily into consideration.

Imperial Decree #2

It is the order of His Majesty O’Neal I that:

1. The Transportation Safety Administration be dismantled, and disbanded following the end of the fiscal year.
   
2. The Department of Homeland Security shall cooperate with the Department of Transportation to produce common and reasonable security procedures for the nation’s airports.
   
3. The enforcement of these procedures, either by police force or by private agency, shall be the responsibility of the municipal government in which the airport is located.
   

Imperial Opinion:
Approximately eighty million commercial flights have taken place in the past nine years. Of those, less than five were the targets of terrorist attacks, all of which penetrated TSA security only to be thwarted by the vigilance of passengers and aircrews. Given that, I fail to see any tangible benefit that the Transportation Safety Administration has provided, and I fail to see any justification, or even mitigation of the inconvenience, expense, and indignity that it has caused. Furthermore, such an agency undermines the values of freedom on which this country was founded, for which its patriots died, and by which its citizens live. To pursue and cherish freedom, one must accept danger. In the past, this danger has taken the form of vast, hostile empires whose standing armies controlled whole quarters of the world, or alliances whose nuclear arsenals could obliterate the world entirely. These and other perils were not only accepted, but surmounted. It cannot, then, be the policy of either the government or the people to devote such paranoid obsession to as meek and meager a threat as terrorism.