The phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize. Hoping it wasn’t the hospital calling me for a patient emergency, I answered to someone asking me if I was Mr. Fares and if I didn’t mind answering a few questions about our upcoming presidential elections.

– Me: Okay, I’ll answer your questions

– Operator: What’s your name?

– Me: Elie.

– Operator: How old are you?

– Me: 24.

– Operator: Where do you vote?

– Me: Batroun.

– Operator: What’s your sect?

– Me: I don’t practice.

– Operator: That’s besides the question, what do you have written on your ID?

– Me: IDs don’t have sects.

– Operator: On your “Ikhraj Eid?”

– Me: I’ve had it removed.

– Operator: We can play this game for a while. Your name is Elie. I’m assuming you were born Maronite?

– Me: Yeah…

– Operator: Do you want a strong or consensual president?

– Me: Hmm, strong?

– Operator: Out of these four names, then, who do you want as your next president: Samir Geagea, Michel Aoun, Amin Gemayel and Sleiman Frangieh?

– Me: Those are your picks for strong president?

– Operator: Yes, you have to choose one.

– Me: How about none? Each one is worse than the next. Can I get that option?

– Operator: Certainly, I’ll just move you to the consensual candidate category. Which of these do you prefer? *blabs a series of names each more irrelevant than the next.*

– Me: Either Demianos Qattar or Ziad Baroud.

– Operator: Ok, I’ll list you next to Demianos Qattar. Why didn’t you go with the other four?

– Me: Because they’re not exactly “build-me-a-hopeful-future” material?

– Operator: Alright. Do you belong to any political party?

– Me: I did.

– Operator: Which one?

– Me: The Lebanese Forces.

– Operator: And what’s your level of education? Are you illiterate, a brevet holder, high school degree holder, university degree holder or postgraduate studies degree holder?

– Me: I’m a medical student.

– Operator: Oh doctor! Sorry for taking your time. I don’t have any more questions. Sorry for bothering you.

– Me: It’s okay.

*Hangs up.*

I don’t know where my answers will end up or if the woman on the other end of the line thinks of me as some pompous political hipster who doesn’t want to be labeled, but I seriously don’t get the point of polling companies in a country as politically dysfunctional as Lebanon. Couldn’t the money invested in polls be spent elsewhere?

In decent countries where actual electoral campaigns are waged, polls are employed to ascertain the effect that some items have on voters, to assess the chances of certain candidates compared to others and to test the efficacy of a campaign. Which of those do we have here?

We haven’t been to any major polling in about 5 years. We can’t vote for a president to begin with. We have no choice over who ends up as prime minister. And we are given the illusion that our opinion matters.

When their round of calls end, the company at hand will end up with a nice study about how each Lebanese sect breaks down in support for Lebanese presidential candidates. Those who get a bigger portion, or in other words those who paid for the poll to be done, will flaunt these results left and right.

Hey! Look! The people chose me! I’m the rightful heir of the Baabda throne!

But the people can’t choose. The people were not even allowed last year to choose which MPs get to choose this year’s president. And those polls force you to fit in every preset category of Lebanese citizenship to have a valid opinion. There’s no category for people who refuse to declare their sect. There’s no category for people who want a strong president outside of the Fantastic Maronite Four. Even our polls, simple and silly and irrelevant as they may be, are a redundancy of our political status quo.

I wish I had hung up.

OMG. Can you believe Samir Geagea’s running for president?

The horror. The disgrace. The shame. Let us go turn in our passports (worthless as they are) right here, right now.

Samir Geagea’s nomination for president was met with an onslaught of histrionics that the Lebanese political scene hadn’t seen in a very long time.

We had photoshopped Israeli posters.

People acting like Civil War know-it-alls when they, in fact, know nothing at all. Granted, this happens all the time but it always finds its way to surface whenever Geagea does something. As a future medical doctor, I shall dub it Geageatis.

Twitter hashtags with every combination imaginable to attack Geagea’s judicial records.

Newspaper editors freaking out like pregnant teenager girls who hail from the Bible Belt.

And so and so forth.

You know what’s in common between all of the aforementioned reactions? They reflect the well-rooted hypocrisy of people who have perfected double standards. And isn’t that what Lebanon is all about?

Samir Geagea is a war criminal. Samir Geagea has a tarnished history. Samir Geagea went to jail. Samir Geagea is sectarian. Samir Geagea is this and that.

But the fact of the matter is that those same people digging up Geagea’s past also turn the blindest of eyes to the past of their favorite politician and warlord and person who hasn’t even gotten a brevet degree yet but is practicing politics anyway.

They are the same people who chant their politician’s name off rooftops whenever he has an aired speech. They are the people who empty riffles to celebrate such speeches, regardless of the passerby who might get hit by their stray bullet.

They are the same people who defend war criminals whenever those war criminals serve their purpose. They are the people who have been defending Bashar el Assad for the past three years as he worked his way through a six digit body count.

They are also the same people who would put forth anything championed by Lebanese parties like Hezbollah who, lately, have only been dabbling in the war mindset that we supposedly don’t want for our country through people like Geagea. Or is war in the eye in the beholder?

They are the same people who proclaim secularism as a headline to sound cool and modern but fall back to their old sectarian habits whenever push comes to shove.

Can you envision a Lebanese future where someone like Samir Geagea is president? Can you even fathom how dissociative that is from the reality of today’s Lebanon? You know, the Lebanon where Tripoli was in a state of war up until last week but no one cared; the Lebanon where everyone is getting armed again; the Lebanon where a government took a year to be formed and is basically stillborn even now; the Lebanon where there’s no economy, no hope and no prospects for a future; the Lebanon that is still talking about Samir Geagea and the other warlords he played with way back when even today.

Yes, in such a Lebanon, someone like Samir Geagea and every single other politician being proclaimed as the next president wouldn’t make the natural selection for the presidency.

No, I don’t think Samir Geagea is the best possible candidate to become the next Lebanese president.

No, I don’t think him getting nominated for that position, however trivial such a thing actually is in Lebanese politics, was the right move.

I don’t even get why everyone is entering our own version of Game of Thrones for the Baabda Chair when they all agree that it’s borderline worthless. Perhaps it’s comfortable for gluteal muscles?

I don’t have a say in who becomes president anyway and neither does anyone else including those who have been throwing bitch fits over the past few days, but I have to say it has been quite entertaining to see the borderline mania that has overtaken those people. Who knew Lebanese politics can elicit this much excitement still?

The reasons I don’t think Geagea should be president is simply because he is part of the current perpetuation of a status quo that I cannot I agree with. It’s because him as president will perpetuate this status quo for six years to come and I don’t think our country can handle such a thing anymore. It’s because I think it’s high time other people take up a position of power to challenge the current system, be it within their own sects or within the broader framework of Lebanese politics.

The same reasons why I don’t think Geagea should be president also follow to Aoun, Frangieh and Gemayel, which are being called around as the Maronite Four. Perhaps you should use your future as an argument instead of digging up pasts no one wants uncovered and instead of bashing the part of the civil war class you don’t agree with while secretly swooning over the part you do agree with.

I’ll give you this, though, the craziness is comical.

71 Lebanese MPs signed the petition by KAFA to include amendments to the proposed Domestic Abuse bill in the actual law that would pass in parliament.

2 minutes was all it took for the law to pass.

0 is the number of MPs who argued for the amendments. 0 is also the number of amendments that made it to the actual bill.

Is the law in its current form bad? Yes it is even if it’s a step forward somehow. It’s greatly lacking in so many ways, of which is the fact that Lebanese Parliament has (unknowingly?) legalized marital rape by failing to omit the term “spousal privileges” from the draft that has become official today.

Under the new law which parliament passed today, marital rights for intercourse were enshrined for the first time in text in civil law. What a victory for civility in 2014.

The law also has other shortcomings, which you can check out in this Arabic document.

I wonder, has any of the MPs that approved this law actually read it or did they just go with the decision of their political bloc? Did the female MPs that voted for this law also give it a second look beyond the fancy title that is not even exclusive to their gender? Is two minutes all the time our MPs believed is enough for such a vital law to be discussed?

There’s a line where MPs who cared should have drawn a limit. That line is when the lives and sanctity of people is as stake.

Yet again, should we really be surprised?

The shortcomings of the law are nothing more and nothing less than a simple manifestation of the status quo in Lebanese law: one that is enshrined in religious text that dictate everything about our daily lives, legally. The bill in question has been maimed into a stillborn proposition by MPs who were too afraid for their religiosity that they can’t view any cause as worthy outside of that frame.

It will always be the case until we view our worth as Lebanese citizens as something that transcends the sect we were born in, where us being governed is not contingent upon the laws that are bestowed upon us due to our birth being in this town or in that region.

Perhaps we were too hopeful that parliament would pass a decent law for us to be proud of. But the joke’s on us for being foolishly optimistic. It is, after all, April Fools.

As a taxi drove me back home yesterday night, it reached a point in Downtown Beirut where the road was blocked. In typical Lebanese cab-driver fashion, he proceeded to curse at whatever was causing him to go through a detour in order to deposit yours truly who was, obviously, underpaying him for his services.

The road that was blocked is one of the many that could lead up to parliament. Because why wouldn’t our government invest in resources and man power and cause insurmountable traffic so men in tuxedos whose term has expired it’s been almost a year now could convene and do what they’ve been doing for five years: nothing?

Except our parliament is, for the first time in who knows when, actually discussing something worthwhile in a few hours from now, something that could potentially change the lives of many people around this country who have previously not had a voice in our beloved patriarchal society.

#NoLawNoVote is a campaign I am definitely participating in. It doesn’t matter if you can’t make it to downtown Beirut tomorrow in the early hours of the morning to stand there and shout your heart out at those deaf ears that often choose not to listen. It doesn’t even matter that those parliament members gathering tomorrow have yet to even remotely consider an electoral law for us to vote on. What matters is that the outcome of tomorrow’s session should be a very important factor in determining whatever happens to those MPs whenever it actually happens.

I am currently represented in parliament by Boutros Harb, who is also minister of telecommunications, and Antoine Zahra. And I hereby declare to whoever’s reading that if they do not approve the domestic abuse law, which will be up for a vote tomorrow, that the ballot they’ll get come election day is one that does not contain either of their names.

This is not about politics. It’s not about parties, religion, electoral gambling and other narrow-minded calculations that some might want you to fall for. This is about your mother and sister and aunt and future daughter who might get stuck in this country, unable to escape its prawns. This is to every single Lebanese women who was hit by her spouse. This is to every single Lebanese women who is not here today to tell her story.

Lebanon needs accountability. We’ve had very few opportunities for us to hold those we’ve entrusted to govern our country accountable to anything they’ve caused. We nag about the state they’ve led us to and vote for them all over again. Tomorrow is possibly one of the very few chances we’re getting to show those in charge that we can actually stick to what we believe in and reprimand them for their horrible voting-track record.

Your political party of choice saving face is not as important as your mother’s actual face. #NoLawNoVote is how it should always be.

Check out the event for tomorrow’s protest as well as some pictures from Kafa’s Facebook page: