Of all the issues in the public forum right now, I’m hard put to think of one less important than the issue of whether or not we should call Pluto a planet.

Still, it’s a more relaxing topic to contemplate than whether illegal aliens will be able to get sex-change operations on the public fisc under Obamacare, whether our president is actually the offspring of Azerbaijani goat-herds, or whether this week’s race-controversy Emmanuel Goldstein should be boiled in oil before being flayed alive, or after. So here we go.

The story so far. Millions of Americans grew up learning that there are nine planets in the Solar System, and remembering them via handy mnemonics like “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas,” or “Most Volcanoes Erupt Mulberry Jam Sandwiches Under Normal Pressure.” Then, in August 2006, the International Astronomical Union, at a stormy meeting in Prague, demoted Pluto to the status of “dwarf planet.” (Showing, by the way, shocking insensitivity to the feelings of the achondroplasiac community.) The deciding factor was the opinion, held by a majority of delegates, that merely being massive enough to form a sphere under your own gravity is not enough. (If it were, we’d count the Moon as a planet.) You have to “dominate your neighborhood” — clearing most other stuff out of your orbital path. You could call it the Leroy Brown criterion.

Most people bowed to the wisdom of the IAU, and mnemonicists made the appropriate adjustments (“… Served Us Nachos”). Conservatives and traditionalists, however, began a rearguard action that still continues. The people of Illinois, home state of Pluto’s discoverer (though also of Leroy Brown) were particularly steadfast. The Illinois legislature actually passed a resolution earlier this year:

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois’ night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared “Pluto Day” in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.

Well, the saga continues.

Next week the IAU’s general assembly will convene for the first time since Pluto was axed from the list of planets … If Pluto is reinstated, it will probably be thanks to discovery rather than debate. Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, believes that revelations within and beyond our solar system over the coming years will make the IAU’s controversial definition of a planet untenable … “We are in the midst of a conceptual revolution,” he says. “We are shaking off the last vestiges of the mythological view of planets as special objects in the sky — and the idea that there has to be a small number of them because they’re special.”

Just beneath the surface of those words you can spot the egalitarian sensibilites of our age. Nothing is special! Everything is equal to everything else!

Pluto’s a planet, the Moon’s a planet, my compost heap’s a planet, we’re all planets! Down with this elitist “nine planets” mythology!